When you reach your late twenties, you will often hear the phrase, ‘Your parents also just did the best they could.’ 

At first, it might not make sense because you will wonder if the way you were raised was the best they could give. 

This means that, in most cases, you need to look past what they did and give them grace. 

With that, I believe the hardest part of growing up and being an adult is realising how much forgiveness it actually requires. I am not talking about the forgiving that requires you to forgive your friend for wearing your shirt without asking, no. I am referring to having difficult conversations so you can be in a space to forgive. 

This is not to say that you should let people walk all over you, no. 

It simply means that there will be instances where you need to remember whoever they are, they are just as human as you. And one of those people is your mother. 

It is quite easy to talk about patriarchy as this big, faceless system that shaped our lives for the worse, and it did. But the conversation becomes uncomfortable when we have to admit that our mothers were also trapped inside that system. 

People are quick to say, “But I did not choose who she married,” as if she had much of a choice herself. In many cases, most of our mothers married into arranged marriages, and they never had a say about it. In most cases, she never had time for herself after that. 

The luxury that we now have to be able to choose what to do with our lives, our mothers did not know about. They knew one reality: either be a full-time housewife, ploughing the fields, or bear children and tend to the family’s needs, forgetting her own. 

As you grow, you realise that your mother never had time to herself. You realise that because tradition taught her that respect meant silence and silence meant endurance, she had to put a lot of her dreams aside and play the role of your mother. 

Do you even know whether your mother has a favourite colour? Have you noticed how she is not really someone who likes certain things because she never had the chance to experience them? This is because, in many Namibian households, questioning was discouraged, especially for women. You did as you were told, you stayed, and you carried on. 

As you grow older, no one really prepares you for the moment when you realise that your mother may not have known how to love you in the ways you now understand. She loved survival mode most of the time. 

A lot of times, she loved it from duty and what she was taught, not from what she was allowed to feel. 

Before she became someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s backbone, she was just a girl who also needed softness, reassurance, and space to be human. 

So, when you take a look at her again the next time, look at her as just a little girl who is also experiencing life fully for the first time. 

Please know that this is not a call to forgive abusive mothers or to excuse harm in the name of culture or tradition. 

Abuse is abuse, and understanding context does not erase pain. Some relationships need distance to survive, and some wounds require more than grace. But for the mothers who tried, even when they got it wrong, perhaps compassion is not a betrayal of your extension of grace. 

As Namibian millennial women, we are unlearning in ways our mothers never had the chance to. We talk about boundaries, therapy, rest, and emotional safety. We are choosing differently, and that matters. But while we do this work, applause would go a long way. Not blind praise, just acknowledgement. 

A simple recognition that they gave us what they could with what they had, and perhaps while we are unlearning and learning new things to help us navigate life, hold your mother’s hand while doing so. She’s just a girl koliks. 

*Frieda Mukufa’s lifestyle section in the New Era concentrates on women-related issues and parenting. She specialises in editing research proposals, proofreading and content creation. – etuholefrieda@ gmail.com