I never knew my mum until I was 17 years old, although I met her for the first time when I was 10. But we didn’t spend much time together. She left home when I was 3 and I grew up in an environment where I was verbally abused. Verbal abuse limited my capacity to do things, even though I had the ability. 

I lived with my mum’s sisters because they felt my dad wouldn’t take care of me as a woman would. The first “aunt” I lived with thought the best way to correct me was to shout and call me names like “big head” and “ugly”. I would feel bad and as I grew, I started seeing myself as inferior. I left that aunt and went to live with my mum’s direct sister. I thought it would be better but I never knew I was going from frying pan to fire. All through my stay with her, the only language I could understand was hatred. I remember a time her son tried to rape me and the only thing that saved me was his sister shouting and crying, “Leave her, leave her, what did she do?” 

When my mum finally came home from abroad to settle down, it was quite hard, because I was already fully grown. I was 17 years old and done with secondary school, so trying to have that mother and daughter relationship was hard. Everything I went through made me hate her for abandoning us. I used to tell her, “Mum, you weren’t there when we needed you the most. We wouldn’t have gone through all the hurt and abuse if you were here.” We (my siblings and I) tried to get along with her but we had a love-hate relationship. She tried to be our mother though it was hard for us to accept her, even though we loved her. The harder we pushed to hate her, the more we loved her. 

I found out that God made me go through those challenges so I can be the voice of children to their parents, giving answers to worrisome questions in their hearts. Honestly, I wish I had bonded with my mum before she died. I’m now writing a book and would have wanted her to write the foreword.