I was raised by my grandmother who deeply loved me. I only found out she was not my biological mother when she passed away when I was around the age of 10 or 11. That was when my mother came for me……CONTINUE FULL READING>>>>>
Living with my mother was a sharp contrast from living with my grandmother. I remember one time when a man walked past our street and greeted me. My mother accused me of knowing him simply because he wore a uniform, similar to one she had seen somewhere before. I insisted I didn’t know the man but she beat me up anyway.
Years later, we moved in with my mother’s boyfriend. He was a good father figure, no funny business. In the short time we lived together, he did far more for me than my biological father ever had. When my mother became pregnant, they eventually broke up, and we moved away. We didn’t stay in touch, even though we had each other’s numbers.
One day, I received a sexually graphic text message from him. It seemed like instructions he was sending to a younger man about intimacy. When the shock of the message wore off, I replied that he must have sent it to the wrong person. I can’t recall exactly what his response was. But I remember telling a friend in the house we were staying in. She too was shocked.
Unfortunately for me, I deleted the message before telling my mother about it. Instead of listening to me, she chose to interrogate me as if I had done something wrong. Then she concluded that I must have been sleeping with her ex-boyfriend. She didn’t believe anything I said in my defence.
Later, when I went to university, she refused to give me money for food for weeks. I was so hungry I ended up selling an old phone for about $3 just to survive. Around that time, a politician somehow got my number (it’s common for freshers’ details to be sold to men at some universities). When he called me, he seemed to know a lot about me.
“I want to see you,” he said, “I am parked outside your residence as I speak.”
I was desperate and hungry, so I went with him and his friend to eat, and eventually to their hotel. Once I was in his room, I told him clearly I wasn’t going to sleep with him. He tried to persuade me, and when I refused, he threatened me, “If I force myself on you, no one will believe you. Don’t forget that you willingly entered my hotel room at night.”
I was scared but I stood my ground until he got tired and drove me back to my residence.
While we sat in his car outside, he kept begging me to return with him. At that very moment, I received an unusually large amount of money from my mother, enough to cover the last week of school and my trip home. It felt like a divine intervention. I got out of his car and went back to my room without giving in to him demands.
It’s been 16 years since then, but my mother still accuses me of being the reason her relationship ended. She has even threatened to tell my brother that I caused the breakup between her and his father.
A few years ago, when she brought it up again, I told her: “My conscience is clean. God and I know the truth, and I am at peace with that.”
For a while, she stopped mentioning it, but then brought it up again in a text three years ago.
One question I’ve always asked myself is that, if she truly suspected something had happened, why was her first reaction to fight me as if I were her rival. As a mother, she should have shown concern and asked if the man she brought into our lives had violated her teenage daughter.
And what if I had fallen prey to that politician in the hotel room, forced into trauma for life, all because my mother was so angry with me that she refused to support me with food money?
I’ve since healed and learned a lot about my family. But sometimes I see how mothers hold their daughters close to their hearts and I wonder why that couldn’t be my reality.
When I talk about our strained relationship, people assume it’s my responsibility to mend things. All I want to say is that if you haven’t experienced trauma at the hands of your mother, the most helpful thing you can do for someone like me is acknowledge that your experience was different. Not all of us were lucky enough to experience true warmth and love from our mothers. It’s hard but we move…….CONTINUE FULL READING>>>>>
