Joys of motherhood!

very unassuming and tinged with the aura of an ordinary colonial farm set up.
It is possible to be born, bred and grow old here, without setting foot in Harare, Mutare or any other urban area, for, geography and history will have condemned you to an abyss of seclusion. It is here that a woman, now 65, secretly gave birth to five sets of twins and never got any media attention, yet many women have got a lot of attention for giving birth to one or two sets of twins.
Because of the remoteness of the area, she has no photographs of her taken with the children when they were young , all she has as proof are birth certificates.
Such is the work of geography against technology. Out of her 11 children, only one child was born alone in a feat Angelina Jolie and Julia Roberts, both of whom have given birth to boy-girl sets of twins, would grin with envy. Is it not amazing that with the minimal medical care that goes with life in a compound Mrs Mary Tekesa, dropped the 11 kids over 20 years. She only stopped when her husband, Kennedy Tekesa, a sawmill worker at Tilbury Estate, died in 1993.
She is still in the compound.
What is the trick?
“There is no trick. It’s God-given. My husband and myself loved each other and I only stopped giving birth when he died. If he was still living who knows, maybe, the story would be different?” she quips.
She is strong, amazing and bubbling.
“It was love at first sight and we quickly went into gear. Akati gero raita ini ndikatiwo murume aita!” she laughs again before continuing; “I moved in and hey, nine months later I gave birth to my first set of twins. That was in 1971, Bunny and Ben. They are the only identical of the sets of twins.”
The second was a girl, Lucia born in 1973 and is now late. She left behind two children.
Lucia was followed by another set of boys in 1977, Fungai and his brother who died immediately after birth. Fungai is still alive.
In 1983 Mrs Tekesa gave birth to yet another set of girls Chipo and Tambudzai. Three years later in 1986, she was at it again, and gave birth to boys, Elisha and Misheck, but Misheck died later while doing grade two. Elisha is now working as a carpenter in Chimanimani Village.
Her last set of twins was born in 1992, Tarisai a girl and Tinashe a boy, but her husband died a year later in 1993. The twins are still to find formal employment.
“My husband was unusually gifted, he was himself also a gift from God. Each time we had twins, we would supplement with milk, from his low wages.
“At night, we would share children. He would sleep with one of the twins and we would later exchange so that they could suckle equally.
“Unlike other men, he would wake up soiled by the child and would not care much about it. You know what it is with children and urine but it was not an issue with him,” she says.
All her surviving boys are working as carpenters in timber mills in and around Chimanimani while Chipo is a trained teacher while Tambudzai is married in neighbouring Mozambique.
Tambudzai is the only one who gave birth to twins, but only one set.
After the death of her husband, Mrs Tekesa decided to get a job and ease pressure from her children and got employed as a general hand at Tilbury Estate.
“Twins can really be a burden. You need a husband who can stand by you all the time. I have no regrets, except that he died earlier than would have made me a bit comfortable.
“All the same I played my part and my children try their best to keep me going but I also have to work for myself. I am still fit and strong and can work for myself.
“Of all my children only Tambudzai gave birth to twins, but it was just one set. In the history of my family, only my aunt gave birth to twins. I don’t know where I got this from,” she says.
She added: “I know all the birthdays of my children from my head. I vividly remember how each of them grew up and which one was the most troublesome.
“I now have 15 grandchildren and I am very happy.”
But all her hard work could bring an unexpected reward, with a study concluding that women who have twins outlive other mothers. According to a recently published health journal, women who naturally bear twins in fact live longer and are actually more fertile, a study has revealed
Women who bear twins naturally tend to be hardier and more fertile, a study has revealed. Dr Shannen Robson of the United States of America said: ‘The prevailing view is that the burden of childbearing on women is heavier when bearing twins.
“But we found the opposite: women who naturally bear twins in fact live longer and are actually more fertile.”
However, the analysis, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, did not factor in the increased risk of death in childbirth faced by women who have more than one baby at a time.
Scrutiny of the women’s lives showed a clear link between twin births and longevity, with mothers of twins being up to 7.6 per cent less likely to die during any given year.
Mothers of twins also had shorter gaps between pregnancies, suggesting their bodies were in good physical shape. They also had children over a longer period of time, continued giving birth at an older age and had more children overall. Debbie Ross, membership manager at the Twins and Multiple Births Association in America and the mother of 13-year-old twins, said that twins bring twice as much fun as they grow up.
“There are other benefits. If you only have twins or triplets, if they go on a school trip, all your children will have gone, so you won’t have to do the school run for the others.”
Of course she might never near the Guinness Book of records in terms of the number of children born, because that record is held Mrs Feodor Vassilyev from Shuya, Russia who set the record for most children birthed by a single woman, with a whopping 69.
She gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quadruplets between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 births and 67 of the 69 children born are said to have survived infancy.