Sins of Your Mother | Adédoyin Àjàyí

You were eleven when your father started beating your mother. You saw him beat her the way you saw angry traders and area boys in Ikorodu beat some thief  who had stolen a slice of pawpaw from a wheelbarrow. He once beat her so badly that she bled for three days before your tears convinced her to go to the hospital. That wasn’t the first time he had beaten her that badly. The first time, you were eight. Your teacher said you were pretty like your mother, and your mother laughed and thanked him for the compliment. When you got home, your father descended upon her with a fury that would have made Zeus puff his chest in admiration. He called her an ashawo, insinuating that she had probably fucked half the men in the neighbourhood before she married him. That was the day you first heard the word “fuck.” That was also the first day you saw your mother cry. You never forgot the image of your father. That was the image of him you held with you for the rest of your life. That was also the day you discovered your mother’s sin. She was born pretty. Your teacher called you pretty too.

It was also your sin.

Your mother never left your father. By the time you were fifteen, you regularly watched Wrestlemania in your living room. However, this brand of Wrestlemania had one undisputed champion, a perennial loser, and an unfortunate spectator. Your father smacked your mother, punched her, and choked her. If she tapped out, he never noticed. He beat her with the agony that stemmed from his failed dreams to leave the country and from the satisfying swiftness of her passivity. Your mother never tried to fight him back. Once, you had grabbed his arm from behind. You didn’t know what got into you. Maybe you were high from the cigarette smoke that drifted in from Mama Chidi’s beer parlour opposite your house. You didn’t know who was more surprised – you or your father. He turned, his eyes as wide as the steering of his rickety Mitsubishi. He smacked your cheek so hard a spittle spluttered from your mouth like a baby. At this point, you had started growing hair between your legs and had begun sprouting breasts. You liked wearing tight t-shirts without a bra, because you loved the way both the boys and the men looked at you. That day, your father grabbed your breast and squeezed your nipple between his fingers so hard you cried. You tried prying off his hand, but it was like trying to force open a Dobberman’s jaw clamped around a Frisbee.

You’re now a woman abi? You want to fight for your mother, ehn?

You cried harder. In later years, when you remembered that day, what made you cry wasn’t your bruised nipple; it was that your mother sat on the floor, her head bowed, and her eyes averted. She said nothing; nor did she raise a word of protest. He could have cleaved your head in two, and she would have neither said nor done anything. He could have raped you, and she would cover for him. That broke your heart. It made you cry. You felt betrayed, alone. For your senior secondary education, you were away in the boarding house; and every time you thought of home you felt some pity for your mother. When you stared at the ground in sadness, your breasts, so large now, blocked your view of the ground. Then you felt her betrayal afresh, and your pity gave way for hatred. You were like a zombie – drifting through school and doing just enough to pass. Your classmates left you alone. When you came home at the end of each term, your mother never showed happiness at your arrival. Maybe she didn’t want you to see how your father never stopped beating her, or he had smacked out her motherly affection. Either way, you thought you didn’t care anymore, till you saw him beat her yet again. You simply tolerated it, stayed out longer with the boys at night, and minded your business till you resumed the next term. The day you got admission to the university, your mother held your hand and cried, and the hot tears that pooled in your eyes surprised you.

On campus, you did your best to put your troubled background behind you. You were just like the average teenage girl thrust into that period that clung to vestiges of your childhood, its affectionate fingers slipping into the icy, callous grip of adulthood. You liked boys just like the average girl. They liked you too. You had your mother’s pretty face. Your hips had caught up to your breasts in the race to become one of Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings. With those hips that would have made you a fantastic showgirl, you had no problem attracting the attention of the boys. You made a friend whom you would remain close to for the rest of your life. You and Bunmi did everything together. She taught you how to apply lipstick so you didn’t get it on the inside of your lips. She was privy to you making a banana of yourself the first day you strutted around in heels in your shared apartment. Every time she playfully grabbed your breast in girlish mischief, you turned away and didn’t speak to her for days. She stopped doing it because she realized doing so transformed her into public enemy number one with you. You still spoke with your mother every now and then, and she usually sounded croaky over the phone. You often wondered whether she just wiped her tears right before speaking to you. Still she never complained, never voiced a word of protest. You hated her demure attitude. But you never told her so.

Pretty as you were, you still hadn’t gotten a boyfriend by your penultimate year. Bunmi had gotten one, and she teased you endlessly about it. You got tired of hanging out with them; you wanted someone of your own. You cramped their vibe. They never told you that, but you felt that way. One day, Seyi, her boyfriend, arrived at your apartment with his customary McVities Shortbread for you girls to munch on, and a bearded guy whose ready smile showed overgrown teeth that jostled for space in his mouth. Seyi introduced him to you as Dara, his padi from tipe tipe. You were cold towards him. You looked away whenever he tried to catch your eyes and only replied him in half-sentences. He never stopped flashing those teeth at you. He even ate your share of the cookies. You fumed in silence. You didn’t need Bunmi to fix you up.

Two weeks later, you agreed to go out with him. Your iyanga had finally gotten tired, and you tried to be cordial towards him. His teeth still annoyed you, but when he spoke, his words made them less significant. You had no idea the kind of man you wanted to be with, but you knew the kind you didn’t want to be with. Dara fell into neither category. He was along for the joyride. Your joyride. You were twenty. You drank. You partied. You had fun. You were a woman. You delighted in rubbing it in life’s face. You had no boundaries. You had nothing holding you back. You were your own boss. You took charge of your life. You seemed to want sex even more than Dara did. Why not? After all, you were now a woman. Dara didn’t seem to mind. However, the longer you were with him, you felt like a chore to him. In your final year, he broke up with you. He said you were an ashawo. You cried. You denied it. Apparently, an ashawo was not just a woman reputed to have slept with half the men in the neighbourhood, she was one who took charge of her man and slept with him when he wanted and didn’t.

You cried harder. Dara hurt you. When you were in the boarding house, a stupid dare left you with an embarrassing accident that bloodied the back of your skirt and made you the butt of jokes. It also subjected you to an exorcism from the boarding house matron, and ultimately landed you a two-week suspension. Apart from that, Dara had been your first. You neither resisted him nor did you make him sweat for it. You didn’t act like a girl. Not only did he get the cookie, your cookie, you served it to him with a fucking glass of milk! You were an ashawo in his eyes. But Dara didn’t know that women did what their men wanted, whether it was serving them food, fucking them, or taking a beating. They did so without resisting. You weren’t supposed to resist him, or make him sweat. You moped the rest of your final year. You thought you loved Dara. He thought you were stringing him along. Bunmi tried giving you ladylike lessons. They were bitter to swallow. It was like an ambulance waiting after you fell off a cliff. You felt foolish. You thought you taking charge. Maybe like your mother, you weren’t meant to take charge. You missed Dara, but you wouldn’t admit it for all the glittering jewels in King Charles’ crown.

You tried to move past it. You avoided Dara for the rest of your final year. At your convocation, his big teeth made him look like a chipmunk in a graduation gown. You pretended like you didn’t see him. You graduated, you moved on with life. At least, you tried to, with tempered brazenness and a more grounded approach. You found a job in Lagos. Your parents lived in Surulere, not far from Yaba where you worked, but you rarely visited them. You didn’t want to see more of the same. Your insides were still raw. Your body was still beautiful though, it hadn’t lost its shine. Your co-workers made passes at you. You ignored them. You paid no attention. You tried to take your mind off them. Till you met Patrick. He was the kind of guy every girl wanted to meet but hoped to never end up with. He waltzed into every place with so much bluster he almost needed a bag to carry it. He was a cool, yet simmering windbag of trouble who could have moonwalked to Smooth Criminal with a mouthful of hot water. You didn’t know. At first, you kept him at arm’s length. He didn’t have teeth like Dara’s; he had this booming laughter that shook your insides. He was the clubbable type. You thought he loved you. You felt something close to love for him. You regained some of your vivacity. You drank some more. You uncloaked a love for cigarettes. Patrick was right there with you. The sex was amazing. It was fucking mind-blowing. You weren’t frigid. You came like a fountain. He never called you an ashawo.

You moved in with him. It was like living with an irresponsible, petulant schoolboy. He had a quiet anger. It wasn’t like your father’s that shook the walls of your childhood home. It was malicious and delighted in tearing you down with words. You began having screaming matches. Bunmi told you to leave him. You were defiant. You stayed in it. You stayed with him. It was only a matter of time before the bubbling beaker of bristling emotions tipped over and scoured you both. Patrick slapped you after an argument. You hit him back. He shoved you and you tipped a hot pot of stew over. You howled in pain. After the wound healed, you would look at the scar in a mirror and your back would remind you of a crumpled map. You told your mother. She didn’t say much. It reminded you of the day she averted her eyes and watched your father violate you. You yelled at her. You called her names. But she was still married. That was all she had to say. You were twenty-five now, and unmarried. That cut you deeply. You walked out on her. And you went back to Patrick for more of the same. With every shove, every slap, and every smack, you gradually lost the will to fight. You tried so hard to be different from your mother, yet it shocked you how much like her you turned out to be. The roots in you both grew in different trajectories and shot up into the same dark place.

You told nobody else. Not even Bunmi. You stopped going to clubs. Your mother had cancer. Life looked bleak. You found fewer reasons to get out of bed. Bunmi was getting married. Life was so cruel. What shitty timing. You were her chief bridesmaid. It was like a mockery. You looked dashing in your lime green gown. It also hid the bruises Patrick’s fists left on your body and the stitched wounds they reopened. Your hair was lovely too. You felt like one of your childhood dolls that you stuck with pins over and over, yet braided its hair and wrapped it in your favourite dress. When Bunmi hugged you tight, she pressed hard on your wounds. It took all you had to keep from screaming. She mistook the tears in your eyes for happiness on her big day. When she asked you about Patrick, you said he was out of town. She gave you a long look and said nothing.

You drank even more; till you became an addict. You cut your hair. You took to wearing it low. You lost your job. Your boss dismissed you. You didn’t care. Your mother got worse. Life seemed meaningless. You tried going to therapy. It worked little. Nothing seemed to work. On your twenty-seventh birthday, you tried shaking yourself out of your funk. For the first time in a long while, you went to a club. You sat there, downing Guinness after Guinness. You watched couples dance. Men tried to pick you up and you turned them down. You went home. You woke up sober and cried. It made you feel a little better. Better than you felt in a long time. That became a catharsis of some sort for you. When you went out, you had to lay your mascara thickly to hide your puffy eyes.

You stayed sober enough to get a new job. You let off drinking a little. You still clubbed every now and then though. That was how you met Namina. You sat at the bar when she walked up close. The first thing you saw was her tight leather pants. It shone with the flashing lights of the club. She had broad hips, the kind that challenged men to try spanning with their hands. She turned to look at you and you looked up, into her face. She had skin the colour of your mother’s wooden chest and her bright red lips curled down at you. She said hi and you said hi back. She raked her eyes over you. Her smile never wavered.

“I like your hair,” she said.

Her statement flustered you. You kept your hair short; you didn’t care much for it. You looked at her again and noticed her stylish pageboy cut. Was it the flashing lights of the club or did you see a flash of blue in her hair?

“I’m over there,” she said, pointing to her seat. When she pointed, her blouse rode up and gave you a peek at her navel ring. You turned to look at her table. It was for two, but she was alone. “Care to join me?” She smiled again. Her voice was soft, something that reminded you of butter melting on a hot, sunny day. She smelled fresh, a mix of powder and perfume.

You sat with Namina that evening. She ordered a new drink for you, told the men who came to your shared table to fuck off and laughed loudly when they stalked away. She was from Zimbabwe. You didn’t say much, but you felt relaxed with her. You had the feeling of a chick looked after by a mother hen. There was a vacuity in you that responded to her. When you went to bed with her, it was like making love with a snake. She slithered all over you, coiled her legs around yours and rubbed her nipples against you, and thrust her tongue in your mouth and sought out yours. She pinned you down as if rubber-stamping her prints on you. But you felt protected. After the first night you made love, you lay on her; looking down at her while she ran her hands up and down your upper arms. You were mendicant for affection in a howling storm of past hurts that slashed at you furiously. She seemed to sense the hollowness you suffered. Without saying a word, you opened up to her. You lay your head on her naked belly and cried. Her navel ring glinted with your tears. She said nothing. She listened to you. She stroked your hair while your tears zigzagged over her dark skin. You showed her your scars. Her eyes shared your pain. She stroked your hair. She kissed you. You deleted Patrick’s number from your phone. You were in her bed till the next morning. You didn’t go to work. You called your boss and told him you had a family emergency.

Namina filled the hole in you. She made you feel loved. Your catalogue of hurts seemed farther each time you saw her. You asked her who she was waiting for that night at the club. She said she couldn’t remember. 

“I found you, baby, it doesn’t matter,” she said.

You never thought of yourself with a woman, and you never thought of being with Namina. However, the more you spent time with her, the more she swarmed your consciousness. You no longer went to the club alone. You went with her. You got to know some of her friends. She held your hand all the while. You drank less. You had her. You were in a black hole, and she was all that kept you from sinking. With each passing moment with her, you thought less of Dara and Patrick, but you still didn’t find joy in living. You liked her. You didn’t love her. But did you now like girls? After a wild night of clubbing, she would pull you into bed with a girlfriend of hers she brought home from the club. Nights sped by in a blur. You only enjoyed sex with her. Actually, you didn’t. No, you only enjoyed it a little more when it was just both of you. You had it wrong. Namina didn’t fill the hole in you. Blinded by pain and searching for respite, you stumbled into another hole. She’d become a hole you were sinking into. Namina appeared a benign presence, but now you didn’t know who you were. You had lost your way. In trying to stanch your bleeding heart, you ended up with a gaping chasm even Namina couldn’t fill. You knew you were heading nowhere with her. But she accepted you. She loved your scars. They didn’t repulse her. So you stayed. You stayed for more of her kisses. More of her affectionate head rubs while you played with the ring in her navel. You stayed for more bloodless threesomes that left you empty. However the thought of wriggling free into an even emptier world had you bound and shackled. You reduced your drinking after you met Namina. But it turned out you only swapped the bottle for her.

You cut your hair. Every strand of your low cut. You left your head bald. Layers of mascara could no longer hide your eye bags. They bulged like a bullfrog’s belly. Your breasts still beat gravity though. They hung on your chest, slightly facing away from one another, like disagreeable, sulking twin girls over a tiff. You resumed drinking heavily. You were twenty-nine. You finally left Namina. A girl overdosed in her room. That was when you knew you had to leave. Namina was history. You started writing. Most of it was shit. It was garbage and would never find a publisher. You didn’t care. It made you feel better. It kept the tears away. So you wrote. You kept at it. You still drank heavily though. When you were younger, you drank because you wanted to. Now, you drank because you had to.

Bunmi called you. Your mother still wasn’t getting better. Your father had abandoned her in the hospital. Oloriburuku. You hadn’t seen her in ages. You decided to go and see her. You wondered what you were going to say to each other because you hadn’t seen her in a long time. You grew up despising her, trying so much to be someone different from her. In her acceptance of her demons, she inadvertently drove you down the same alley. The cancer was eating away at her. Her breath rattled in her chest like a faulty, tired engine. Yet, she just patted your hand and ran her rough palm over the back of yours. She had that look in her eyes that made you feel she knew what you’d gone through. She never said anything though. She would never mock you. It wasn’t in her to do that. You needn’t have worried. You both sat there for a long time staring at each other. She only wrinkled her nose when you brought out your cigarettes and sparked up. When she told you “good girls don’t argue with their husbands,” she should have said “good girls don’t argue with life.” In your striving, it had left you a shell of yourself. You hated that she was so willing to stay down and let her husband, your father, trample on her. Annoyed by her docility, you unconsciously fought her battles. You did so every time you gave Dara your cookie. You did so every time you stayed for more taunts and beatings from Patrick that clawed pieces of you away. They were her sins. Yet it seemed you wore more scars. It was uncanny how you and your mother took different paths and ended up on the same collision course. You cried. She cried too. The tears flowed while you held her hand. Your mother’s sins imprisoned you. How sad. You both were victims of abuse who sought to break out of their chains in different ways.

You squeezed your mother’s hand. And you cried harder. She patted your hand.

“Don’t cry. Ma sukun omo mi,” she said over and over.

Index

Area boy – Means a street urchin.

Ashawo – Derogatory term in Pidgin English. Means “prostitute.”

Iyanga – Pidgin English expression for mock pride and petulant attitudes.

Ma sukun omo mi – Yoruba expression. Translates to “don’t cry, my child.”

Oloriburuku – Yoruba word which means “an unfortunate person.”

Padi – Means a close friend, a pal.

Tipe tipe – Yoruba expression. Means “from way back,” or “a long time ago.”

About Adèdoyin

Adédoyin Àjàyí is a young

Nigerian writer who is fast getting tired of the Lagos life. To him, writing equates creation. Nature is the biggest influence on his writing. His work has appeared in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, Afrocritik, Livina Press, Nantygreens, Literary Yard, and forthcoming in Literally Stories. When he’s not writing, he’s reading, daydreaming about being a sniper, or listening to The Weeknd. He self-published his collection of short stories, “Too Short a Tale,” earlier this year. He tweets @AjayiAdedoyin14.