By: Chioma Madonna Ndukwu
The Way We Live: Oma Wanted a Quiet Saturday. Then Came the Knock
“Oma, are you sleeping?”
“Oma, are you inside?”
“Yes, I’m inside,” I answered, hoping that would be enough.
It was not.
The door opened and she looked at me.
“Good. Please, I want you to help me with something.”
I sat up and laughed. “My sister, is this why you asked if I was sleeping?”
She laughed too. “It will not take long.”
“That is what everybody says before giving me work.”
“What work? I only want you to help me with one small thing.”
I looked at her.
“One small thing usually has relatives.”
She burst out laughing, and just like that, my quiet Saturday had begun to look like every other day of the week.
I had wanted the morning to myself. I wanted to remain in bed a little longer, check my phone, drink my tea slowly and enjoy the feeling of having nowhere I urgently needed to be.
But that is one of the funny things about resting in Nigeria: sometimes the moment people discover that you are at home, they assume you are available.
“Aunty, please help me check this message.”
“Sister, are you going to the market?”
“Oma, please send this money for me.”
“Mummy, where is my shirt?”
The requests are usually innocent. That is what makes them difficult to refuse. Nobody is asking you to save the world. Someone only wants a favour, an errand, a quick phone call or a little help.
But after the fifth “small thing”, you begin to wonder whether Saturday actually belongs to you.
“So, when do you people think I should rest?” I asked someone recently.
She laughed. “Rest? You are still young.”
I looked at her. “So tiredness is now an age issue?”
She laughed again. “My dear, everybody is tired.”
That answer stayed with me because it sounded so familiar.
We have become accustomed to tiredness. We talk about it casually, joke about it and sometimes even celebrate it.
Someone who works from morning until night is called hardworking. Someone who hardly sleeps is praised for being dedicated.
A woman who carries work, children, housework and family responsibilities is admired for being strong.
But what happens when strength becomes the reason nobody allows you to stop?
I began thinking about how differently societies have tried to handle the question of work and rest.
“Do people outside Nigeria also work like this?” I once asked a friend who had spent some time in Europe.
“Of course they work,” she replied. “But they also protect their personal time.”
“What do you mean?”
“In some places, when working hours are over, people actually leave work.”
I laughed. “Leave work? Just like that?”
“Yes. They go home.”
“And nobody calls them lazy?”
“Not necessarily.”
That conversation made me curious because our relationship with work can be complicated. In France, workers have strong legal protections around working time and annual leave.
In Nordic countries, work-life balance is often taken seriously, while Japan has had to confront the consequences of a culture associated with excessive working and has introduced measures to address overwork.
I am not suggesting that people in those countries have discovered a perfect life. They have their own pressures, their own bills and their own struggles.
But there is something worth learning from the wider conversation: rest is increasingly seen as part of a healthy life rather than a reward for people who have somehow managed to finish every responsibility.
“Why do we feel guilty when we rest?” I asked a woman one afternoon.
She shrugged. “Because people will think you are lazy.”
“Which people?”
“My neighbours.”
I laughed. “So you are going to remain tired because of your neighbours?”
She laughed too, but she did not answer.
That is where our everyday lives become interesting. Sometimes the pressure is not coming directly from another person. It is coming from what we imagine other people are thinking about us.
We worry about being called lazy. We worry that customers will leave if we close our businesses for a day.
We worry that relatives will say we have changed because we no longer answer every call. We worry that if we are not constantly doing something, someone will decide that we are not serious enough.
Anne Lamott once wrote, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
The line sounds humorous, but it carries a serious truth. We understand that phones need charging and machines need maintenance, yet human beings often wait until their bodies force them to stop.
“Have you ever taken a whole Saturday just to rest?” I asked a friend.
She laughed. “Rest? What will I tell my children?”
“Tell them mummy is resting.”
“They will ask me to cook first.”
“And after cooking?”
“They will ask me to wash the plates.”
“And after washing the plates?”
She smiled. “Then somebody will remember another thing.”
We both laughed because we knew exactly how that story ends.
The problem is not that Nigerians are unwilling to work. Many people work as hard as they do because they have no choice.
School fees must be paid, rent must be settled, food must be bought and family members may depend on them.
For a trader, staying home can mean losing a day’s income. For a small business owner, closing the shop can feel like turning away money.
That is why telling everybody to “just rest” can sound disconnected from reality.
“But what if resting makes me lose money?” a trader once asked me.
“What if not resting eventually costs you more?” I replied.
She looked at me for a moment.
“That one is true,” she said. “But who will pay my bills?”
That is the difficult part. Rest is necessary, but survival is also necessary. The answer cannot be pretending that everybody has the same freedom to switch off.
Perhaps what we can begin with is something smaller: learning that not every request is urgent, learning to ask for help, learning to say no sometimes and learning that one quiet Saturday does not make us irresponsible.
Bertrand Russell made a similar argument in In Praise of Idleness, where he questioned the idea that human beings should measure the value of life almost entirely through work.
That thought becomes even more important when we remember that our lives are more than our productivity.
A few minutes after I finally returned to my room that Saturday, there was another knock.
I stared at the door.
“Oma?”
I refused to answer.
“Oma, I know you are inside.”
I started laughing.
“How do you know?”
“I can hear you laughing.”
I opened the door.
“What now?”
“Please, just one more thing.”
I folded my arms.
“Is there a salary attached to this Saturday work?”
She laughed.
“No.”
“Then please come back on Monday.”
She laughed so loudly that I started laughing too.
Eventually, she left me alone, and I returned to my bed.
For the first time that morning, I realised that nothing had collapsed because I had decided to rest. The work was still there.
The messages were still waiting. The errands could be handled later. Maybe that is what we sometimes forget.
There will always be another request, another deadline, another customer and another person who believes their problem should be solved immediately.
If we make every demand more important than our own need to recover, we may spend our lives being available to everybody while gradually becoming unavailable to ourselves.
Saturday does not have to become another Monday simply because we are at home.
Sometimes, when the knock comes, we can answer.
And sometimes, we can smile through the door and say, “Please, I am resting. Can it wait?”
That is not laziness.
That is knowing that the person carrying all those responsibilities is also a responsibility worth protecting.
Personal Thoughts
I am learning that rest does not always require a holiday, a hotel or an expensive trip. Sometimes, it simply requires the courage to stop answering every demand immediately.
You do not have to collapse before you earn the right to rest.
One Thing Worth Remembering
Being available to everyone all the time is not the same thing as being responsible.
Let’s Talk
What usually happens when you finally decide to rest on a Saturday? Who is most likely to knock?
Editor’s Note:
THE WAY WE LIVE looks at the ordinary moments around us and the truths hidden inside them.
