My Mother,

I really love my mother.

I really do love that woman, I would die for her,but I'd never want to be her. You see,my mother is a teacher,a primary school teacher. My mother,married my father... father isn't really the name I'd call him but that's what people see..a dad..a respected member of the clergy even. But to us.. he's not all that…in fact.. he's worse than he's the best to the outside world.

Oh wait, I was supposed to talk about my mother,not his husband. My mum;may the universe grant her hundred years to see all her kids prosper, is the most hardworking and resilient woman I have ever met,but those are the same traits that makes me never want to be her. I am not saying hard work or resilience is bad,but for my mother.. they are. It is complicated about the way I feel about my mother's resilience. I do admire it. And I hate it. I admire how hardworking she is. I admire how resilient she is. I admire that when something needs to be done, she finds a way to do it. She has carried responsibilities that should have been shared, and somehow she has kept going. But those are also the very traits I hate about her. I hate what those qualities have allowed other people to do to her. Because when a woman is always capable, everyone starts expecting her to be capable of everything. When she can carry everything, the person standing beside her gets comfortable putting things down. And I think that is what makes me angry. My mother's strength has sometimes made her husband's irresponsibility easier. She is so resilient that he can afford to be less responsible. She is so hardworking that he can afford to relax.

She has shown everyone that she can survive without help, and people have mistaken her ability to survive without help for proof that she doesn't need help. Sometimes society praises women for being "strong" when what it should be asking is why they were forced to become strong in the first place. I never want to be the woman who can do everything. Of course I'm capable,but with a husband…why do I have to do everything?I never want people looking at me and thinking, "She'll figure it out."I want people to understand that my ability to carry something does not mean I should have to carry it. My mother's resilience saved her many times. But I also wish she had been allowed to be tired. I wish she had been allowed to say, "I can't do this alone," and had someone actually step up. So yes, I admire my mother's strength. But I also resent the fact that she needed so much strength to begin with. And that is why I am so careful about the kind of life I want for myself. I don't want to be praised for being an incredibly strong woman while someone else benefits from never having to become responsible.

My mother is married. Since the early 2000s but she is a single mother. When I was growing, I wanted to be married, but my reasons were.. to correct her “mistakes”.. the mistakes she made by marrying his husband. Looking back at that, it feels like I never really wanted marriage for myself, I wanted to heal her wounds through getting married if that makes any sense.(I’ll explain it better later)

My mother, married a man. A man who wanted her for so long,did she consider him at first?well.. no. But he was consistent and maybe that's how she said to herself” he is serious about me".. I guess . She was happy, (probably) getting married to this man who has wanted her for so long, hoping for happiness and raising a family together as a couple. Her dream however didn't come true. I sometimes wish, if a second life ever existed, I'd pray for my mother to be born again, get a husband who truly loves and values her so that she can taste the life she dreamed of but never had a chance to live.

She is married but is she though? I thought marriage was a partnership between two souls who have decided to come together and experience the beauty and harshness of life together. I mean marriage isn't really a bed of roses but they can overcome the challenges together as one right? That's not the case for my mother, my mother once told me to never settle with a man whose character (s) I don't like because they'll never change. Looking back, she was speaking from experience. Growing up, when we wanted anything, my mother's husband would refer us to her. My mother bought everything we ever needed. Our school fees, food, trips .. it was all her.

When were young,each month after getting her salary,my mother would go to town for shopping. It was always a Thursday. She would shop for my aunt,my grandma and her friend..her then best friend. We were the ones required to deliver the shopping,apart from her then best friend's because she'd take personally and have a chit chat..you know. She was that selfless . Being nice is good but sometimes.. detrimental.

My mother married a Catholic man . A charming man to the outside world,a man who could speak and everyone would nod envying his wife. But was he worth the envy? Absolutely not. This is a man who would watch you go to school without giving you even a cent. He didn't care about how our school fees is paid or even how much it was. Growing up in such an an environment where your mum is a single parent but still in marriage,you learn to be tough at a young age . You are forced to grow up and be an adult as a teenager. You feel guilty having to ask upkeep or rent money from her because,how ungrateful do you have to be to ask money from a struggling mum who has to pay school fees for your two other siblings?

My mother's fate was sealed when she agreed to do a church wedding in 2023. She was raised in a society that valued about people's opinions. It's also unheard of for a woman to file for a divorce in our village because she's among the few women married in church. The sunken cost …how could she possibly leave everything behind. She's worked so hard , invested in the marriage.. despite being unhappy, she can't leave. It would be the greatest loss.

If you saw her husband out there, you'd think he's the greatest man. He's got the speech,very charming. You would sound insane if you said he's irresponsible. Would you call him a narcissist the way he's charming on the outside but a devil when he us with his family? Treating everyone nice but his family? Maybe. I don't know. I am not a psychologist.

My mother is resilient. She's probably doing it for her kids . If you ask me though? She should just live for once . But can she?She has been in survival mode for long. If her kids are out of school because of school fees arrears,she has to figure out how to get them back to school because..who else would do it? Her husband? The same man who keeps saying he doesn't have money? The same man that the parish father highly respect because of of “how smart he is?” Or the man in 100+1 chamas that don't seem to give back the money? Of course she had to figure it out. But what was the importance of a husband if you have to figure things out alone? Is the '“Mrs” title so important? Was she afraid of what would happen if she left? Was she afraid of what people would say? Was she worried about being judged by family, friends, church, neighbours,society?Because I know my mother, and I know that she is not happy.And whenever I think about that, I keep asking myself..why did she stay?If happiness was in that marriage, it certainly did not last long. Maybe five years, if even that, she stayed for years and years, carrying responsibilities that should have been shared with a man who was right there. I sometimes wonder whether women are taught to endure marriages long after the marriage itself has stopped giving them anything. Maybe she was taught that leaving would be worse than staying, or she was taught that being a married woman even an unhappy one is better than being a divorced or separated woman, or the "Mrs." comes with a social status that women are expected to protect at all costs, or she was just afraid of becoming the woman people whispered about, or maybe she thought about us, her children, and believed that keeping the family together was more important than her own happiness. I don't know. I can speculate, but I cannot speak for her. What I do know is that watching her stay in a marriage where she had to carry so much has profoundly affected how I see marriage. Because from where I stood as her daughter, I didn't see marriage as two people carrying each other. I saw a woman carrying a family while a man stood beside her. I saw a woman becoming stronger because she had no choice. And I keep wondering whether she ever asked herself the same question I ask now…"Is this really what my life is supposed to be?"Maybe one of the cruelest things patriarchy does to women is convince them that leaving an unhappy marriage is a greater failure than remaining unhappy inside it. Sometimes I wish my mother had known that her worth was never dependent on being someone's wife. She did not need the title "Mrs." to prove that she had succeeded in life. She deserved a life that made her happy.She deserved partnership, not just a husband. And she deserved to know that leaving a marriage that was hurting her would not make her a failure.I will never know exactly why she stayed.But I know what watching her stay taught me…I don't want a title badly enough to sacrifice my entire life for it.

I wonder how her dream life would be. How she expected life to turn out for her. If given a second chance,would she ever get married and have kids? What life would she choose? I am her daughter but sometimes I look at her as that little girl whose wings were clipped before she could fly. Sometimes I think about my mother and wonder how far she would have gone if she had married a man who truly supported her. She has had to carry almost everything. She has been responsible for our school fees, our needs, our upbringing and so many of the responsibilities that should have been shared between two parents.She is a primary school teacher. One salary. Multiple children. And somehow she has had to make it work.

My father is physically present, but his presence has never translated into responsibility. He is a father to society, but not really a father to us. Sometimes I struggle to even call him my father because, to me, fatherhood is more than biology. Being a father means showing up. It means being responsible for the children you brought into the world. When it comes to school fees, the answer has always been, "I don't have the money." Somehow, he never has the money. And my mother has always had to figure it out. And I have watched what that responsibility has done to her.

My mother has high blood pressure, and I cannot help but think about the years of stress she has carried,constantly worrying about where the next school fees will come from, how she will provide for her children, how she will meet everyone's needs, how she will keep everything together. Even now that I am in university, I sometimes find it difficult to ask her for money.Not because I don't need it. But because I know she is already exhausted. I know she has to think about my siblings. I know she has to think about school fees. I know she has to stretch one salary in ways one person should never have to. So you grow up. You learn to think about money earlier than you should. You learn to hustle. You learn to figure things out yourself because you don't want to add another burden to your mother.I have to think about rent,upkeep,food,provisions…just everything. And sometimes you hustle like hell and it still isn't enough.

That is one of the things growing up in a family like this does to you. It forces you to become independent, not necessarily because you are ready to be independent, but because you know there is no room for you to be completely dependent on someone who is already carrying everything. And I think this is also where my feelings about marriage come from. For a long time, I thought maybe I would get married and somehow do my mother's story differently. I thought maybe I would find the man she should have found. Maybe I would find a man who was responsible. A man who supported his wife. A man who would actually raise his children with her. A man who would not leave the entire burden of a family on the woman he married. Maybe I could correct the mistake my mother made. But eventually I realized that I don't want marriage for myself. I wanted marriage as a way of correcting my mother's life. I wanted to prove that if I chose the "right" man, I could have the story she deserved.

But there is no guarantee that the person you marry will remain the person you thought you married. People can change. And sometimes the person who appears to be the perfect partner before marriage becomes someone completely different once there are children, responsibilities and years of life involved. I don't want to gamble my entire life on the hope that I will be the exception. I don't want to become my mother. And I don't mean that as an insult to her. I love my mother. I admire her. I am amazed by what she has managed to carry. But I don't want her life.

I don't want to be married and still feel like a single mother. I don't want to raise children with someone who is physically present but emotionally and financially absent. I don't want to spend my life wondering where the school fees will come from while the person who should be helping me says he doesn't have the money. And maybe that is also connected to why I don't want children.I sometimes feel like I never really got to be a child. I grew up watching my mother struggle. I watched her carry responsibilities that should have been shared. I watched money become a constant source of anxiety. I watched adulthood arrive before I was ready for it. So maybe part of me doesn't want to create another life until I have had the chance to take care of the part of myself that never got to simply be a child. I need to heal,take care of myself,give myself the softness, safety and freedom that I spent years watching my mother struggle without. And this perhaps is the most important realization I've had: I don't have to reproduce my mother's life in order to honour her. I don't have to get married to prove that I can choose a better man. I don't have to have children to prove that I can raise them differently. I don't have to enter the same institution that hurt my mother just to rewrite her story.Her life is hers. Mine is mine and it's okay if our stories are different. And maybe the way I honour my mother is not by becoming the woman she was forced to become, but by building a life where I don't have to carry what she carried. I can love my mother deeply and still choose a completely different life. I am not rejecting her story Maybe this is the first time her daughter gets to write her own.. JFC I'm broken 🤦 I can't bdo this right now.