Showing posts with label True Confession. Show all posts
#WhyIStayed – My Mom Stayed, and For This I’m Grateful
I
was in primary school. Maybe primary three or so. My parents were arguing
really loudly, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. They argued a lot, it was the
way their marriage was. My mom was having her breakfast. We had had ours, and
was waiting for her to be done so she could take us to school. Then she
screamed. It was a terrible sound. Things happened very quickly afterwards. I think
we the children were screaming too. I can vaguely recall neighbours running
into our house. I know my dad left, either before the neighbours came in or thereafter
I can’t say for sure now, but I know he hadn’t gone with them to the hospital. When
mom cried that he had reached out to strike her and in her attempt to block the
blow, her chair had skidded and she fell fracturing her ankle, neither dad nor
us could collaborate or refute that account. You see, dad had locked us out of
the sitting room when he stormed in to shout at her. At any rate, between the
time mom went to the emergency room and when she returned home, that story
changed. It became the same old, ‘I slipped’. I didn’t get the memo on time.
While mom was at the hospital, some other neighbour had asked me why I wasn’t
in school. I answered that my father had beat my mother, so she couldn’t take
me. That neighbour had said nothing. No comfort words. She just quickly
terminated her inquiry and was gone quicker than you could bat an eye.
That’s
the only incident of domestic abuse I recall in our home, although years later
mom insisted there were several others. I didn’t see it. I’d always thought, as
bad as daddy was, at least he didn’t hit her except for that one time. I did
recognise the other types of abuses. The way he didn’t want her working. The
way he accused her of sleeping with every Tom, Dick and Harry. The way he
wanted to handpick her friends and rejected almost every one she made for
herself. The way he accused her of competitiveness – I remember when she
registered for her masters programme and he went on and on about how she did it
because he had a masters degree. The way he stopped eating the food she cooked
whenever they had an disagreement. There was so many other things. So many
things that made the younger me think, “if this is what marriage is, I’d
happily stay single.” Dad believed nobody would want to marry me, at any rate. He said I was
too opinionated. Too stubborn. I didn’t know how to give in to authority (i.e.
men). He saw the interest I had in sex and in boys, and he told me I would be an ashawo just like my
mother – that I would be thrown out of my marriage soon enough, should I
hoodwink some poor sod into marrying me that is. I cannot say for certain how
physically abusive he was to my mother, but he was emotionally so – and he was
emotionally abusive to me.
But
I love him. He is my father. I could even say my mother loves him too, although the predominate
emotion she feels at present is intense hate. She has remarried, but I swear
she’s impatiently waiting for God to punish him for all the wrong he did her. But
she did stay married to him for over 30 years. She said she stayed because of
us the children. My younger self used to think it was bullshit. Leave oh jare, I
would say to her. Why put up with this?
To
be honest, I’m happy she didn’t. We barely ate with her around as it was.
Waiting for the little money she made from selling any merchandise she would
get her hands on while the Imo State Government owed her several months salary.
And all that while, we supposedly had a rich father. A father who lived more in
Europe than he did in Nigeria. He drove around in his many high-end cars, while
we only had my mom to pick up or drop us off at school in the tokunbo car her
brothers bought for her because my father didn’t care if she trekked to work or
not. Or when the car was on its frequent spa treatment at the mechanics, or
daddy had locked the gate and wouldn’t let her drive out, then we walked. A father
who charters nearly everything he ate when he is in Nigeria from each overseas trip.
He would keep them all locked up in his bedroom, till they went bad and he would have us
eat them rather than throw them away. Mom would buy the meat with her own money and
she couldn’t even eat it, because she only had enough for him. The only way we
ate meat was if daddy was kind enough to leave bits of it in his plate, which
we eagerly waited for him to call us to take away when he was done eating.
If
mom had gone, we would have starved to death. He might have withdrawn us from the
private school we went. The school it was always such a war to get him to keep paying
for, about one fight mom was willing to take him on no matter what bad it
got for her. Without mom breathing down his neck, what would have compelled him to continue? He certainly would have
cut us off from our mother. I mean even as grown up as we are now, he still
wants us to have nothing with do with her. He says, how could we continue to
relate with her when he’s shown us how bad she is (he certainly cannot
understand why today it’s him we avoid but not her. Oh, my mother is a piece of
work, but at least we know she truly cares for us). Imagine if we were kids and
totally dependent on him. Of course, he would have remarried. He did, in fact.
He has had two wives since my mom. I probably would have had to marry really
early like my elder sister, just to get away from the toxic home environment.
Would
I have stayed if I was my mother? If I had six children – six living,
one dead one and at least three miscarriages – like she did I don’t doubt I
would. If I had no money, and couldn’t raise all six children by myself, I
could. If there is no functional alimony system, and my spouse can’t be forced
to pay child support, I wouldn’t even think twice about it. If I would have to
face the indignity of living in a society that shames me for having the
courage to leave and deem my daughters defective and ‘unmarriageble’ because
‘their mother couldn’t stay in marriage’, I would most definitely consider staying.
Hence, I try not to shame women who stay with abusive husbands. Perhaps for
them, it genuinely is a seasonal thing. This isn’t how their spouse is on a
normal day. It’s just that it’s January and he doesn’t have money again after all the Christmas spending. Or, he only gets like this when he drinks. Or he has been putting in so much at work but not getting the recognition he deserves, that’s
why he is lashing out at the only person he can. He is really a very loving
husband and father, otherwise. I could understand all those. After all, I do firmly believe
my siblings and I are better for it because my mom stayed. But maybe I can say
so because my dad didn’t kill mom the way his cousin killed his wife. Because by
the time he finally threw her out and locked all her things in, we were a
little older. We could stand up for her, albeit with consequences – I spent a
day in a police cell, my little brothers were beaten up by professionals, and
for two years he wouldn’t have anything to do with youngest ones who my mother
muscled out from him.
But
I couldn’t live that life. Not the person I became as a result of being my mother’s
daughter, of seeing the way she had to live. A person who associates pregnancy
with control. A way men keep women tied down, subdued, imprisoned. I wouldn’t
stay for anything in the world. It is one of the reasons I only have one child.
So I can put him in my pocket and be gone.
P.S: I would greatly appreciate if nobody preached to me about forgiving my father. I have no animosity towards him. I'm just documenting the events as they took place in my life.
Ciao
They Said They Raped Me
Don’t worry, I am not going to talk about
Basketmouth and diarrhea of the mouth he suffered this past few days. A lot has
been said about it, said far more eloquently than I can and by way better
writers. I do want to add something to the discourse about rape and how it is
treated in Nigeria. I am going to do that by telling a story I have never told before even
though it's been nearly twenty years, at least not in a public medium like a blog.
When I first entered the Uni, I was so
excited to be released into the wild. I was never really your typical
"properly behaved" girl, so I don’t quite think anyone expected me to
be your average Sister Holiness. I was adventurous, but had been held back by
my strict background. Mind you, I was not a partying kind of girl, never have been. I didn’t
go out much in the day, much less at night. I didn’t do very well with alcohol,
got too tipsy too quickly, so I generally didn't bother with it. I never smoked:
partly because I am asthmatic and partly because I found kissing a dude right
after he'd smoked rather nasty. I didn’t wear skimpy clothes. I had seen
myself as a fat person, and always longed for a much slender body. So
calling attention to my body with clothes wasn't my thing. Well,
except my legs but even at that it was a rare day that I wore anything short. So, on
the level of ‘bad-girl-ness’ parameter I had been raised in, I was
pretty tame. The only thing was that boys interested me a lot. Before then, they had
been this big mystery I had been kept far from, so yeah I wanted to try them as
much as I could once I got the chance. Unfortunately, not a lot of them interested
me when I really got down to it. Those who did, did not interest me for long.
And of course, there is always those who interested me who did not find me as
interesting. Anyway, I quickly learnt that taking on too much of boys within a
short space of time did not sit right with me. It was tiring, it was emotional,
it was boring, it was way too much hassle and not a lot of fun I had imagined
it would be. So I kind of purged myself of it all.
Then came my final year, four years later, I
discovered that there had been a rumour about me from that early uni days when
I was on a rollercoaster. Someone said I had been raped. I suppose constantly seeing
a girl with boys and then suddenly she is keeping to herself is too bizarre, it
just had to equate to a girl who had been raped. Apparently, a group of boys had
said they raped me. They said where they did it, they said when they did it,
and this complete fabrication made the rounds. I was stunned when I heard it. I
could not fathom how screwed up a person has to be that he derives pleasure in saying
he raped a girl. He did not just claim that to have had consensual sex. That
would have been stupid, but by jove understandable. He raped. He and his
friends raped. WHO LIES ABOUT RAPING SOMEBODY???????!!!!!!!! Who does that?
What sort of fucked up world do Nigerian boys live in that it would ever be
okay to boast about raping somebody?
I did confront one of the boys - the main guy
it was supposedly done in his room when I supposedly visited him. He claimed he
never said rape. Actually, he said he never said anything. So, where had the
story come from? He doesn't know, but he isn't the person who spread it, he
insisted. What was I going to do? It had been four years. How do I trail the
story? Besides, I was very scared of what else had been said - what other
falsehood had been spun. And yes, to an extent, I wondered if it was my
punishment for dallying with boys in the first place. My punishment for not
doing the good girl thing - attached myself to one boyfriend for the rest of my
years in university, or maybe do even better than that - keep chaste all
through it, going from class to library to fellowship meetings. Moreover, I was
grateful it had merely been a rumour. Yes I was, and immensely so. Because it
could have actually happened, and you and I know that a majority of our people
would have said that I had been asking for it. Still, I cried and my
self-esteem took a huge beating.
I cannot therefore find the homour in rape
jokes. Who knows, maybe the rape rumour had started with a joke. Someone joked,
someone laughed, and by the next day it had taken a new form - it had become a
confession. Imagine my seventeen years old self hearing that, first time away
from home, fragile and vulnerable. Imagine if I had heard that rumour then. So,
no, there is no room for rape jokes in my book. I don’t frigging give a shit
about the context. Because all it does is desensitize people about the gravity
of the damage rape does to people’s lives. It trivializes to an extent that
someone can be sick enough in the head to actually lie about doing it. To what
purpose, I wonder. So yes, everything about rape upsets the shit out of me.
Ciao
Tag :
Rape,
True Confession,