Listen to this one (3:55). Same story, my voice.
Every story starts somewhere.
Mine starts in Kenya, in a home that smelled like stability. Not the flashy kind. The quiet, reliable kind. The kind where school fees were never a crisis, where there was always food on the table, where “we’re going on holiday” was an annual fact, not a fantasy.
My father is a civil engineer. My mother was a teacher. Between them, they built something that I did not have the vocabulary to appreciate as a child but have spent my adult life being grateful for: a foundation.
A real one.
I am the second born of five. Four girls and a boy, which, if you know anything about Kenyan households, tells you everything about the particular chaos and loyalty that shaped me. Five personalities under one roof. Five opinions at the dinner table. Five people who know exactly how to make each other laugh and exactly how to get under each other’s skin.
I would not trade it for anything.
Being the second born is its own education. You are not the trailblazer and you are not the baby. You are the quiet observer. The one who watches how the firstborn moves through the world, takes notes, and then quietly charts your own path. Second borns, in my experience, tend to develop an inner life early. We learn to read rooms. We learn to think before we speak.
Or at least, we learn to look like we are thinking before we speak.
My name is Muthoni.
It comes from my mother’s mother, given to me per Kikuyu naming tradition, the kind where a name is not just a label but a thread connecting you to someone who came before. I never take that lightly. Every time someone calls my name, somewhere in the fabric of things, a grandmother is being remembered.
There is something quietly profound about carrying someone else’s name into rooms they never entered.
My childhood was, by any honest measure, a good one.
Good school. Good neighbourhood. A father who builds things for a living and a mother who spent her days teaching other people’s children, which meant she had very little patience for nonsense from her own. We were loved. We were corrected. We were taken on vacations. We were expected to do well.
My mother was a teacher. I say that casually, as if it is a neutral fact. It is not. She taught me in Standard 6 and Standard 7. Two years. Back to back. There is a particular kind of character that is forged when your mother is also your class teacher. You cannot be unprepared. You absolutely cannot claim you forgot to pass on the school communication, because she wrote it. And if I was ever late to her class in the morning (which I will neither confirm nor deny), I maintain that the woman who decided when the household woke up bears at least partial responsibility. This has never been formally acknowledged. I remain hopeful.
I did not know then that a stable childhood is not a given. That the groundedness I carried into the world, the quiet confidence that things could work out, that effort was worth it, that there were people in your corner, was a gift, not a default.
I know it now.
That is where I come from.
A civil engineer, a teacher, five children, and a name that belonged to someone else before it became mine.
Not a bad place to start.
Come back tomorrow for Day 48: what I was like as a kid. (Hint: quieter than you would expect, and more observant than was probably comfortable for the people around me.)
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Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
