A mighty long way it has been!
Now, when I act the way I act, don’t sit there at the comfort of your domain and point fingers or say what comes to mind because you don’t know where I have been, or the mud that I have had to wash off me nor the stench that I have had to deliberately get rid of with sweet scents of confidence, persistence, focus, vision and hardwork. These perfumes, got me to this point. You don’t know the bruises I wear on my skin as a road sign to the oncoming generation.
The many lessons we have all had to learn from our life experiences are so that we can have what to teach the newbies trailing that similar path. The lessons aren’t for you to feel hurt, be pained and flinch at the thought of it. You went through them first because you are the only one capable of going through that pain and standing still at all else is said and done.
Who told you that you can’t take it anymore?? You can and you must go through with it so that someone doesn’t miss out on the message they need to get out of their valley, out of their dark days, out of that struggle. If you fail now, you let a whole generation suffer your inability to be resilient and tough.
I will tell you a bit of my struggles, not what I like to say without two streaks of tear stopping by my cheeks to say hello but I would like to tell you so that just maybe you can learn a thing or two and believe that behind that great voice, there had been battles that she fought and still is fighting to stand on top.
Grew up without a father at the start of secondary school and to me, that was the most difficult time of my life because I was forced by circumstance unclear to me at that time to live that way. For some strange reason, Father pack his things and left home after retiring too early from an oil company with the plan that he was going to set up his own business in my hometown.
One year, two, three—-way up till 12years, he never returned home, so we lived that way.
Struggling with Mother who was now the breadwinner had built so much bond that will take only eternity to break. She is everything to me, my world, the number 2 in my life after God. Back then when father was with us, mother wasn’t allowed to work. She became fulltime housewife although she went to midwifery school in Calabar, gave birth to four girls, me being the 2nd child and it took nine years after for me to have a kid sister and two more years after to get another one.
Life was difficult for us all as ladies living without a man and a father to protect us. Mother would work in two clinics under low salaries just to keep the four of us clothed (mostly bend down boutique clothes heheheh), pay school fee even if it came late after being driven from school several times, provide food even if it came without meat, pay PHCN bills (then it was NEPA bills).. The burden was much that she thought of other ways to make legit money and boom came the inventory of Pure water business.
She bought the manual machine that seals one sachet per time with the manual aid of manpower. All night mother and I, a teenager at the time, still in secondary school would sit, sealing fifty or hundred bags together with mother, who would at 5am get up to go distribute it in a wheelbarrow to customers. Most of the customer wouldn’t pay on delivery. Some would wait till they sold all bags before paying and so for all the efforts , back pain that i still experience and sleepless nights with mother, we ended up not being paid until all goods are sold but yet we didn’t deter.
That was when depression became my biggest ally.. I didn’t know when it came and went but i knew that there were big days and there were small days where i couldn’t help my emotions. I cried most of the time till the saltness of my teardrop became sweet to taste every night. I cried because, in the evenings my friends and neighbours would hear the blaring horns of their father’s car, run outside to welcome him while my two kid sisters and I would stand upstairs at our balcony, watching, wishing our Father could just be the one.
We waited on that balcony all evenings for more years than i could count for him to show up only to be greeted by voices of crickets.
Did he ever think about us?? Did he ever feel the hurt he put us all through??? I knew he wanted a male child and Grandma played a part in putting pressure on him but did he ever think we weren’t that capable of becoming strong women tomorrow , strong enough to carry his name like a male child???
All three young girls, looking down at our neighbours with both parents who are still living together as we speak, with our different individual thoughts plaguing the sanity of our young minds, we slowly allowed hatred for Father creep in, we slowly hated or i slowly hated the male figure because in my mind, i questioned the ground on which they became so important over females. It made no sense to me, back then and it still doesn’t make sense now.
….To be continued
