Some things comes with age

As a kid, I remember I and my siblings used to laugh whenever we watched any of those nollywood movies where the parent of a lady would take one look at her and then tell her that she's pregnant, either due to the fact that they caught her vomiting or acting weird..in some of this scenes, the mother would walk towards the daughter and then look straight into her eyes, like she could see the pregnancy in it before shouting and asking her daughter to tell her who the father of the baby was.

That stuff used to be funny to us back then because we felt it was all fake. I remember that I used to think it was movie magic, that there's no way you can look at someone who's only some few weeks pregnant and know instantly just because their eyeballs are white.

But I witnessed something some few days ago that has kinda made me have second thoughts about that whole thing and now I feel like maybe, there are certain signs these elderly people can see that I just don't know about yet.

Few days ago, myself and some of my neighbours had gone to our community's vigilante group to report our hostel president. Amongst us was also my hostel vice president who is a lady. She had gone with us but didn't say a word because for a while now she had been feeling ill and has just been on a low key.

So no one really expected her to say or contribute much, but then the vigilante chairman who also happens to be an elderly man had stopped to tease her because she was the only female present there, when he noticed how softly she was answering him, so he had asked her if she was ill and she had said yes. Then he watched her for another three seconds before asking her if she was sure she wasn't pregnant.

We all had laughed at this question because we felt it was a joke. But fast forward to today, few days after the whole vigilante thing happened and I just heard that she was indeed pregnant.

Apparently she had wanted to keep it a secret until her stomach was visible but had changed her mind and decided to tell us. And that was when everyone was like "So the chairman was right." which kinda blew my mind because prior to that time, he didn't know who she was, so it wasn't like he knew her in the past and noticed some changes in her body.

He just saw her for the first time and automatically saw the signs there, the same one those mothers probably see in the movies and just knew that she was knocked up. And what was even more crazy was the fact that we who knew what she looked like before didn't even notice any changes in her body.

You see, it's things like this that I feel you only learn when you get to a certain age... This is probably why the saying "What your parent see sitting down, you could climb the tallest tree and still not see it" will always be true.

_{photo by Danie Franco}