BOXED IN (1)

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Life is different for me. Not 'good' different nor 'bad' different. Just...'complicated' different. I have never failed a test, been rude to strangers, nor had any kind of confrontation. I have never been in a relationship for longer that four months, the longest being my relationship with Donald, the Pug my mother bought for me on my twenty-first birthday as she said that I needed to learn to be responsible for another living thing other than myself before I got married and started reproducing. That relationship lasted for three months and two weeks as my father got tired of having to take Donald to the Veterinary Hospital himself and had the poor thing sold. I have never had a real birthday party either, as the ones I used to have as a child were more of my mother's parties as I hardly had friends, so there were hardly children at my parties. My birthday parties were usually an opportunity for mother to have her friends over at our house.
I hardly knew my father. I know what he looked like, that he was my father, and that he lived with us at our home. But that was all. He had a very important job which always took him away from home for long periods of time. Whenever he got back though, he came bearing gifts for mother and I. He also brought things for the helps. But he never spent any time with me. I had my gifts from him to play with, and he had one important thing or the other to do. I thought this was normal and that the father-child relationships I saw in movies like Parents' Trap were abnormal. That was until I got into High School and saw the way other kids my age related with their parents. I thought the problem was with me and courageously asked my father what was wrong with me but he gave no explanation that I understood. I asked my mother and she broke into tears. I decided to keep my questions to myself. That was until I found mother's journals.

You see, mother was the last child of her parents. She lived a sheltered life and did only what she was told to do. She went to the schools her parents chose for her and studied the courses she was told to. At twenty-seven, she was working at her father's company and was engaged to marry the son to her father's friend. A month to the wedding, she caught her fiancé in bed with some other woman. She broke off the engagement, explained everything to her parents, and traveled to Barbados to get away from it all. A week later, her mother flew to Barbados to 'see her'. Her mother's real intention was to give her a message from her father which was for her to "go home and get married to your fiancé or lose my last name and support". She stubbornly dared to stay back in Barbados for one week which she used in getting a job as a Janitor. Three days into the job, she quit and traveled back to Nigeria. She could not cope doing those kinds of work. Two weeks later, she was married to her fiancé, Mr. Jakes Ikenna Ani, my father.

But she was not the same woman that had left Nigeria a month earlier.

- The Lady

“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.”

Song of Solomon 2:1