In her response to a previous article, a lady told me her story
Read her…
Up till this my adult age, I still don’t understand what was happening to our mother!
Our father had a job in the city, but he visited home every month and stayed from Friday to Sunday.
He was a very calm man. Our parents had six of us.
Our eldest brother and I lived with our father, while my younger sister and her immediate junior (male) lived with our mother. And the two youngest ones lived with our grandmother.
Our father built a large restaurant in front of the house for our mother, but it became the converging point for policemen from a nearby police station.
She even began to pick lovers among them, openly.
In less than two years, she ran down the shop, and it became not just where she sold drinks, but a brothel in actuality.
My father’s kinsmen put their feet down, and that shop was shut down. They said her wayward lifestyle was embarrassing them. There were even tales about how our mother hunted for men at the police barracks!
It was already common knowledge that she had overnight male visitors in the house, who left very early in the morning.
Our house became a home to all sorts of characters, from unruly children who ran away from home to young ladies who made our house another home.
All you needed to be welcomed into our house was to be handling domestic chores for her.
My younger sister fell pregnant at barely 13 years, and she had just gained admission into secondary school. My second brother (although the quiet type) dropped out of school.
The timely intervention of my grandmother saved our youngest siblings.
Our grandmother (a staunch churchwoman) took them to start living with her. And they turned out well. Our grandmother also took in the only daughter of one of her daughters, who was grappling with alcoholism.
I remember people saying that my cousin was our maid because she was never indulged like the rest of us.
Well, our father was rich. And she didn’t know her own father.
From school, that girl went to our grandmother’s shop in the market to help with sales and then back home in the evening to start making dinner and attending to other house chores. Yet, out of all of us within the same age bracket in the family, she’s the only one who married well.
My younger sister’s pregnancy was terminated, but nothing changed in her lifestyle. In fact, she dropped out of junior secondary school.
Our mother eventually took ill and died; she was barely 50.
She dabbled in other businesses, but she couldn’t sustain any of them.
I suspect that those people “serving her” were robbing her blind. And her mind was never there.
Some years later, our father died, aged 75. He grappled with high blood pressure and diabetes.
I still wonder how two people who were so opposite in values ended up in marriage.
I learned that our dad was actually friends with her father, and that’s how he met and married her.
The age gap between them was significant, but that marriage turned out to be his worst mistake.
I have also found myself wondering if our mother’s issue was a case of nymphomania or another mental health challenge.
I don’t know if any of my siblings were affected by our family’s dysfunction like I am.
Sometimes, I wish I were older and lived at home to be the mother that our mother was not.
When people complain about their strict upbringing, I don’t know how to make them understand they are lucky. Some of us raised ourselves. The worst thing that can happen to a growing child is having nobody to consistently guide them on the right path.
Do you know how it feels when families in the community frown at their children being friends with us because of our mother’s lifestyle?
My younger sister later became ill and died. She died before her 20th birthday.
She was the kindest soul I know; she was so incapable of saying “no” to anybody.’’
From Oby…
Just know that we all have stories to tell.
What I see as the blessing in all of this is that you are actually living to tell the story.
Some are not so lucky because the story consumed them. For example, your younger sister!
If things went the way they did, it means you couldn’t have done something about them and were probably not meant to, except to just learn the lessons therein.
Please, let the regrets go.
Let your story make you strong and not break you. And use the lessons to help shape lives.
