Why my mother told me not to sit on a grinding stone or mortar

Growing up for me was an exciting one. And there are many things I believed then and never questioned. For example, I believed that the sun and the moon were always following me everywhere I went. Taking a trip down the memory lane, I realize I was completely deceived, and as I write this, I feel deeply nostalgic about some of the myths that permeated my childhood.

Myth is a widely held but false belief or idea. As bogus as it is, I think it may have a moral code. For example, while growing up, I was told not to sit down on a mortar and or grinding stone. If I did, my mother warned, my buttocks would be firmly, and forever, glued to the mortar or grinding stone. Because of this, I, and I knew this is same for every other child then, shied away from sitting on them. When I became an adult, I knew how wrong or perhaps unhygienic it was sitting on what was used to prepare the food we ate.

That is the nature of myth; it can help regulate human actions. There are myths in every culture, and some are constructed or manufactured to guide human actions.

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However, looking back on some other myths today, they sound absolutely ridiculous. For example, if you were like me, you’d also believe the Nigeria-India match where the latter beat the former 99 goals to one. Well, in this match, India was said to have won Nigeria 99 goals to 1 due to their “supernatural” powers; something Nigerians would call “juju” or “jazz”.

For me, I also believed then that if someone crosses me while I’m lying on the floor, I won’t grow tall. Or that Undertaker and Kane were brothers. As I write about these myths today, I cannot stop myself from grinning and wondering how beautiful it was then to be basking in this childhood innocence.

I was also scared of whistling at night. You know when you whistle at night, a snake will appear. This myth seems to tell us that since night is quiet, humans need to respect the sacredness it brings. Therefore, whistling at night deviates from the norm and is uncultural.

Recently, I found out that wresting is a scripted game; I’d always thought it was real and I used to sympathize with them because of the “body aches” they’ll get after the fights. In a way, this realization made me believe that the media is a make-believe world, and not entirely a portrayal of actual happenings in real life.

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Growing up, when I lost my tooth then, I hid it from lizards because I believed when they saw it, my tooth wouldn’t grow. Or that a seed of an orange will germinate in my body if I mistakenly swallow it. From these myths, I can draw some significance from them. While the first myth here informs me about keeping my losses to myself, the second one preaches some sort of carefulness when we eat.

There are also some people who believed then that when it rains, it means the angels are peeing on us, or that there is a woman carrying a baby in the moon. For other myths like these, it is hard to find why people constructed them, or whether they even have some significance in the first place.

Whether some other myths carry some significance or not, we are where we are today because they exist. They are defining moments of our childhood, sometimes they guide our human actions, and most times they are what keep us mesmerized by the natural events around us.