TITLE: MY SWEET MOTHER
We give our mother more money than our father and he is complaining. I know you would want to know the reason behind our actions, well you would get the answers you seek when I'm done narrating my story.
My mother gave birth to four girls of which I am the first born. My dad was not happy with my mother for giving birth to only females and kept on nagging about it. He wanted a son, a real child like he would always say, a son who would carry on his name but unfortunately, my mother could not give him that which he desperately wanted.
The doctor advised my mother not to get pregnant again, after she gave birth to our last born because she had so many complications while giving birth to her.
Despite the warnings of the doctor, my father wanted my mom to get pregnant again. He was so blinded by his selfish desires that he did not care that her life was at stake. My mom had to secretly do a family planning to prevent herself from getting pregnant.
My mom could not get pregnant because of the family planning she did and this did not go down well with my dad. His behavior towards her changed drastically and he started maltreating her. Nothing she did was ever good in his eyes no matter how hard she tried to please him. He extended that hatred to us his daughters and treated us like a piece of trash. He no longer cared about our well-being and nothing about me and my sisters ever concerned him. We were living like strangers in our father's house totally neglected by the one we called our father.
He stopped dropping money for feeding and stopped paying our school fees. According to him.
“Of what use is it to train a girl child who would end up getting married and transferring all she has to her husband's house”
This was his reply to us whenever we asked him for money for our school fees or textbooks.
My father finally chased us out of his house and got married to his mistress without caring about what becomes of us. The lady he got married to gave birth to a son not long after he married her. I guess she was already pregnant before he paid her bride price.
My father was over the moon at the arrival of his son, he threw a big party to celebrate his arrival. The man I called my father abandoned us to our fate, he did not care if we died or lived he only cared about his real child.
My mother, my sisters, and I resigned to fate and swallowed the bitter pill as the realization that we had lost our father hit us.
My mother toiled day and night to train us. She singled-handedly saw the four of us through school.
She would always say,
"If your father rejected us, we won't reject ourselves. We would strive to be the best version of ourselves and prove to him that something good can come out of us".
Me and my sister held onto the words of my mother and promised ourselves that we would prove our father wrong. We promised ourselves that we would show him that we could be worth more than ten sons.
Having these in mind we faced our studies squarely each person having one goal which was to succeed.
Our efforts payed off, God saw all the sufferings and oppression we passed through in the hands of our father and decided to bless us. We all graduated from the university with good grades. On the day of my last sister's graduation, my mom had tears in her eyes. We all cried because we knew what we had been through as a family. I recalled all the menial jobs my mother had to do, all the loans she had to collect, all the embarrassment she had to receive, all the body pain and headaches she had to endure, all the sleepless nights she had to go through just because of us. We gave her a tight hug promising to wipe her tears away and we meant it from the depth of our hearts.
Life changed drastically for us, God gave each of us a good job immediately we were done with university. Not long after, we all got married. We did not bother to invite our father for our wedding, our maternal uncle was the person that collected the bride price for the four of us. The first thing we did immediately we started making good money was to build a magnificent mansion for our mother. When our father chased us out house we started living in a public compound where we shared toilet and kitchen with other tenants. It was so congested and tiny that we could hardly see space to sleep. We decided that we must get a befitting house for the woman who has sacrificed so much for us. We also got her a car and employed a personal driver for her. We did many other things which I cannot mention here but still it can't be compared to all the sacrifices she made for us. For Christ's sake, this woman refused to remarry when my father chased her away even though she was still very young and beautiful. She was just thirty-three years old. Many rich suitors were coming for her hand in marriage but she rejected all of them. She just wanted to focus and take care of us because we were her topmost priority.
Years later, my father became very sick and all his money was spent on his sickness. He later got well but he became broke. He lost his job during his illness so he was left with nothing. His new wife absconded with her son leaving him in his misery. It was later discovered that he was not the father of the boy and the new wife went back to the father of her child. He became a shadow of his former self, all his friends and associates abandoned him to his fate. He became a loner with nobody by his side. Hunger and starvation became his daily companion. Grief and despair were the only feelings evident in his life.
Having no other choice he swallowed his pride and came looking for our mother, the rejected stone. The woman he tossed out like a piece of shit just because she gave birth to only females as though it were her fault.
He located her and begged for her forgiveness and being the kind woman that she is, she forgave him and accepted him back. She begged us to forgive him because he is still our father. It was very difficult for us to forgive that beast that called himself our father but we had to forgive him because of our mother. A woman we have come to love and adore so much that we can hardly say no to her.
But the truth is that even though we forgave our father we can never treat him the same way we treat our mother. His position in our hearts is secondary and it would remain like that because he was not there when we needed him the most. Our mother remains our hero and no one can take her place in our hearts. We send her allowance weekly and make sure she lacks nothing. We even sponsored her trip to the USA for a vacation.
Now our father is complaining that we are partial, he is saying that we don't love and treat him like our mother. He should be grateful for the one we are doing for him, at least we still send him money monthly. We even celebrated his seventieth birthday for him but he was jealous because we did not give him an elaborate birthday party like we did for our mother when she turned sixty.
The question I keep asking myself which I don't seem to get any answer is, why the hell should my father be angry at us for what we are doing for our mother? He should never expect us to treat him the same way we treat our mother because that is practically impossible. That woman suffered to make us what we are today. Where was he when she single-handedly brought us up and trained us into the successful people that we are today? When he abandoned us and left us out in the cold she was our shield. Where was he when she was starving so that we could have something to eat? Where was he when she wore rags so that we would have clothes to wear? Where was he when she toiled day and night under sunshine and rainfall so that we would go to school? Well, he was nowhere to be found, he was enjoying himself in the arms of another woman, spending his money on a boy who later turned out not to be his child. Now he wants us to treat him exactly as we treat our mother, never!
So if you were in our shoes what would you do?
I will leave this question for you people to provide the answers.
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