Let’s get back to Kenya.
In my mom’s case, there were massive political, cultural, and family pressures all around her, so she kept her mouth shut and her head down rather than rail against cultural norms. She added a dot-dot-dot by finding a way to keep going. She didn’t shave her head and start smoking by the train tracks. No, while her three older brothers received the bulk of the family’s praise, attention, and money for education, she joined her sisters sweeping floors, working the stove, and scrubbing the work clothes clean.
To keep her mind challenged, she sat on her front porch and memorized the license plates of cars driving by. She was craving a mental challenge. So she found a safe space where she could satisfy it silently.
Why license plates? “There was nothing else to memorize,” she told me later. “It was a game for myself. Just to see if I could do it.” She’d see a familiar car and guess the numbers from a distance, quietly congratulating herself when she got one right. At night, in the corner of the clattery kitchen, she’d study math under dim lights and curious gazes. None of her sisters worked so hard on schoolwork. Who needed to study so much just to cook curried lentils and serve chai?
Given she had seven older siblings all growing up and out of the house, the majority of her education was self-taught. Her parents didn’t have time for picture books before bed or late nights patching together a volcano for the school science fair. That would have been laughable. No, it was pile of textbooks, pile of paper, pile of pencils. Fend for yourself. Rinse and repeat.
All of her studying came to a head in 1963 when she took the government’s standard National Exam with every other thirteen-year-old in the country.
And what happened?
She got the highest mark.
In the country!
Suddenly a fat scholarship dropped into her lap and she was whisked away from her family home to a preppy English boarding school in the countryside with all the white British kids of the colonialists. She was the youngest of eight kids and the first one to leave home for boarding school. Nevermind on a scholarship.
She added a dot-dot-dot to her story throughout her upbringing. Memorizing license plates. Extra homework. Always after cooking and cleaning.
And then?
She got past the period. Her story continued…
But there are always more periods up ahead.
There always are.
“I couldn’t believe it,” my mom told me. “The school was a heaven on Earth. The grounds were so beautiful. We knew there were schools just for white people. For the rulers. But when I got there, everybody was so rich, coming in the best cars with chauffeurs. I was overwhelmed. I was scared. I never imagined I would be allowed to go in. I didn’t feel like I was equal to the other students. I just wanted to go home.”
How many times have you gotten past a period and then just wanted to go home?
“I never imagined I would be allowed to go in. I didn’t feel like I was equal to the other students.”
How many times have you felt this way? I feel this way all the time. Finally get the promotion? Now it’s new job, new boss, new way of doing things—and here comes that feeling of wanting to run for the hills. Sick family member gets better? Now you really have to confront the future you said you didn’t have time for. Visa gets approved? Great! Now how do you really feel about leaving your culture and aging parents behind to start all over again?
When we get past the period, the struggle starts all over again. You may dream of tapping out, stopping before you start, sticking a big period on the end of the new sentence so you don’t have to keep moving, fighting, working, trying. But it’s back to doing the same thing we’re talking about here.
What if you add a dot-dot-dot and keep your options open instead?
There is power in moving slowly through the motions.
There is power in letting the story continue.