This was a message a lady recently sent to me.
“I was about seven years old the last time I saw my mother, until later in my teenage years.
My mother abandoned her last suckling baby with my father’s mother and ran to the city with her friends.
Some years later, we started hearing that she was in Lagos and married to a very rich man.
Yet, my father, whom she left, was not a failure.
He was a well-known and respected school headmaster in our community.
Maybe my mother ran away because she was carried away by the good life her friends who had returned from the city often talked about. She had always wanted more than my father could provide, according to the adults in the family.
When I finished secondary school, I was determined to travel to the city to spend my holidays with my father’s sister. But secretly, it was my mother I wanted to see. I spent many nights fantasising about how she would be happy to see me and ask me to start living with her.
My father agreed to the holiday trip but insisted that my immediate younger brother came along.
Within two weeks of our stay in Lagos, we started meeting people from our community who knew where my mother lived, because some of them used to come to my aunt with stories about her.
Eventually, one of them agreed to take my brother and me to where my mother was living.
We got there and were left standing outside the gate for what seemed like forever.
There was a dog in the compound, and there was also someone who opened the gate for cars driving in and out. It was after a particular car drove out that my mother came out to see us.
If she was happy to see us, she did not show it. She was not relaxed and seemed in a hurry to dismiss us. Although she took us down the street and filled our hands with sweets and money.
She did not ask us to come back. She did not tell us when she would return. And she did not ask about the baby she had abandoned back home.
That was the last time I saw my mother until I relocated to Lagos some years later, courtesy of marriage.
This time, it was my mother who looked for us.
Her rich husband had been dead for some years. My mother was living in a rented apartment, which she struggled to pay for. I cannot tell what went wrong, but I only know she had fallen on hard times.
Currently, I do not have a relationship with my mother. She does not visit my house, but she is well taken care of. I send her money, shop for her in bulk monthly, and the driver delivers it to her.
I just don’t visit her.
The biggest understanding my mother has shown me is that she is also staying in her lane. She is not pushing for a mother-daughter bond that is not there. Some people like to deceive themselves about these things.
What is the point of pretending that a bond you don’t share with a parent exists, only to end up treating them with resentment when you force closeness? Is it not better to do right by them from a distance?
She lives in a nice bungalow that was built for her.
Guess who built that house for her?
Our last-born, the one she abandoned while he was still being breastfed.
All of us are very comfortable now, but my brother is very rich.
I did not expect the kind of bond they have. He is very sympathetic towards her. But I am my father’s daughter.
Maybe I was too young to notice my father’s pain when my mother left home, because nothing in his disposition changed. He married another woman about two years later, but he did not take us away from his mother, where we stayed until we all left for higher education.
I believe the wisdom in my father’s decision was to shield us from stepmother problems.
My father married a churchwoman who was already middle-aged at the time. She had no child for him.
I am not bitter towards my mother, but it gives me peace to relate with her from a distance. The only thing I have promised God is that I will not deny her a comfortable old age. But nothing more.
This point of “no bitterness but no closeness” took me many years of emotional healing to reach.”
