I have never
stopped berating God for plonking me in the middle of humanity as the only
child. You may think it is a blessing, but, when all is said and done, it’s a curse.
I look at my
mother with contempt. Her face is as withered as a flower left to waste, her
face clothed in wisps of white hair she has refused to conceal in those
horrendous weaves women don. To my eyes she represents everything I loath.
“You have other
children, you know,” I tell her.
“A male child
is the beacon of the family,” she says.
“A child is a
child …”
“Your father
would be disappointed with you.”
“Not as much as
I was with him.”
There is no
memory of my father that flashes in my mind. The old geezer dropped dead, literally,
on his way from work the day I was born. But
he had it coming, Mother told me when I was old enough to understand. It was the alcohol. He didn’t even see
me!
“How do you
expect me to go and live in my daughter’s house? The ways of our people don’t
…”
“Suppose I was
not born.”
“But you were.”
“Mom, you’ve got
to go live with one of them: Mueni, Kasyoka, or Mwende …”
“Over my dead
body.”
I steal a
glance at her. She is just another woman beaten down by old age. Her porcelain
face has withered, her skin a frail layer, thanks to stressful migraines. To
her I am a soul lost to the shadows.
“Why should I
be the only one to take care of you? My sisters …”
“Your sisters
have their own homes, husbands. Our culture doesn’t allow us to go live in our
daughter’s husband’s houses. Did you see my mother, your grandmother, coming to
live here? She did not even spent a single night here.”
Flashes of her making
friends with the other ‘inmates’, some toothless and blind, go on in my mind.
“Why do you
think God gave me you only, no any other son?”
Questioning God
is not something I do over breakfast, so I say nothing.
“A son takes
care of his parents in their old age, perpetuates the family. Girls are married
off, they find other families, but a son takes care of his parents and buries
them.”
I feel like
punching the air.
“I asked ‘what
do you expect me to do?’ We’re going to Somalia in three days. You don’t want
to go stay with Mueni, or Kasyoka, or Mwende.”
“You should
have married a long time ago …”
Not marriage
again, I want to scream.
I scroll
through my phone while she goes on and on.
I want to tell
her that I have impregnated my Platoon Sergeant’s daughter, the one who did her
KCPE last year; that my ex faked DNA tests and came to the camp with a letter
from the Children’s Court and the CO didn’t listen to me when he wrote a letter
to DOD and told them to be deducting my salary from the source to pay for ‘my
child’s’ support.
“And have my
wife living in my mother’s house?”
“All this is
yours. I don’t need it. My time is almost over. She will live here …”
Marriage is the
last thing on my mind. Half my salary is going to that conniving bitch who is
stealing my money. Ati child support!
The other half is going to the Platoon Sergeant’s daughter. I hope she will
flush it, as we agreed, otherwise her father will take me to court for
defilement if he doesn’t kill me in Somalia and blame it on the enemy.
I have made up
my mind. I want, no, I need, to go Somalia. African Union allowance is a tidy
sum, not to be sniffed at. I will be away from all the madness. I might as well
die over there and not worry of that gold-digger.
“Then I will
take you to Nyumba ya Wazee …”
“What?” she
screams. She shuffles her unruly hair, throws her hands up, and begins to wail.
“In all my life I never thought you would insult me that way.”
“How have I
insulted you?” But she doesn’t hear me. She is hysterical.
“Did I take you
to a children’s home when you were born? I took care of you, nursed you.”
“It’s not like
that …”
“Don’t tell me
what it is like. Now you don’t value me, your mother. You want to stash me in a
home for the elderly, suppose I took you to a children’s home, where would you
be today.”
She is almost
going berserk, and for an instant I fear she will drop dead, like her husband.
I don’t know what to do, what to say. Instead of calming her, I recoil and watch her. If I feel I’m not going to get out, I remind myself. I want to live free, happy, not a normal life. If you’re not there life will move on, I affirm to myself. She will take care of herself.
When I stand to
go, the first step is the hardest, but I take it. All I am thinking is I want
to get myself out of the curse of being her ‘only child’. My spirit is bubbling
from deep inside. It is that liberating. I will go and forget I had an elderly
mother. I won’t look back, I decide. Even when, and if, she realizes that
daughters too are children who can take care of their parents, I won’t come
back, I tell myself. I am getting away from the curse, taking back my life.
That male child responsibility you talk about is indeed a huge one. Never thought about it as a curse though...as being that burdensome. Patriarchy does come with its downsides,neh?
ReplyDeleteI call it a curse because most parents would try as they may to have a boy child, and then bestow the responsibility even before they are born. Like a curse it is a cycle from generation to generation. If it was a burden someone would have decided to take it away from the boy child somewhere along the way.
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