Dear Mama: There's More to Your Daughter Than Meets the Male Gaze
A letter from daughter to mother reflecting on the care and intention behind maternal guidance, while questioning the limiting framework that reduces a woman's value to her utility as a wife. The writer traces how the maxim 'Men want assets not liabilities' echoes through family, church, media, and popular culture—and gently pushes back against its narrowness.
Dear Mama
Behind the facade of our daily tiffs, beneath the moments we do not see eye to eye, and though I pretend sometimes not to get your points, I have come to recognize your noble intentions: to raise good daughters of stellar character. And in this I shall liken you to a gardener tending her plants with fevered care, turning the rich loam, plucking out weeds and watering the soil.
You toil away with furrowed brows, with an attention that does not waver in rain and in shine. A dutiful gardener glories in the flourishing of her plants; she stands aside with pride and observes the lush greenery and says to herself, look what my hands have made; my labour of love was not in vain.
This also holds true for every woman who has donned the garb of motherhood; just as a gardener, she is judged harshly or kindly by how well the fruits of her womb fare in a world so contrary. But you need not fear, for even when we leave your presence, your words keep tending us. It is your voice we hear behind our ears urging us to pull ourselves up when the weight of the world has toppled our weary frame. It is your words that steer our feet away from that which would mar eventually, though it entices for a moment.
Yesterday I overheard my neighbour rebuke her teenage daughter after she, the daughter, had broken the nth tumbler in a week. What would I do with you? She said. Is this how you will break all the things in your husband’s house? Though I chuckled at the familiarity of those words, it stirred a debate in my mind. My neighbour’s rebuke sounded like your favourite maxim: Men want assets not liabilities.
You said this to me by way of correction when I showed slackness in my ways or moments when I wanted to eschew work and get things done through a shorter route. Men want assets not liabilities, you’d say tugging at your earlobe. You are not the only one I hear this from. I hear it from the preachers’ pulpit at the delivery of an impassioned sermon, I hear it from the motivational speakers’ podium when an audience is urged to up its ante, I hear it from kitchen gossips of aunties, I hear it when I am at play with my friends. It is also there in the movies, when the wealthy prince picks the industrious banana hawker over the slay queen with acrylic nails, and.....
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-Written by: Ucheoma Onwutuebe
In 2019 Cameroon and across West Africa, conversations about women's roles, education, and marriage were intensifying as economic pressures and shifting family structures collided with traditional expectations. Mothers continued to transmit survival wisdom shaped by their own circumstances, while younger women increasingly encountered competing narratives—from social media, urban life, and global connectivity—about who they were meant to become.
The piece speaks to a tension that defined and still defines girlhood in many African contexts: the simultaneous love and constraint embedded in maternal instruction. It validates the gardener's labor while refusing the assumption that a woman's flourishing should be measured only by her marital prospects. Nine years later, the questions it raises about whose gaze defines worth remain unresolved and urgent.