I love(d) you but I love me more……..

As a child, I was constantly seeking to understand the psychology of human behavior and how our childhood experiences shape who we become. You know how most kids are often confused about what they should study at university? I always knew.  For me, it was either psychology or psychology. As I grew up I began to understand that my passion for psychology was a way of me trying to understand why I was hurting.

In early 2015, I read an intriguing article on psychology today about daughters of unloving mothers and the moral argument on whether or not such a daughters should cut ties with her mother for her own sanity.

At the time, although I was very conflicted; comparing how a loving mother should behave with my own reality, It never crossed my mind that divorcing her was a possibility. I mean I am a Christian and an Africa, how am I suppose to critic or dare accept to myself that a mother was unloving and highly abusive, who would believe me? Plus, she is the parent so people will generally empathize (after all she carried me for nine months and went through labor pains).

Africans (Nigerians) act like labor pains or being a sperm donor automatically activates parental instint, well, it doesnt.  In our culture of shaming the victim and hiding all our dysfunctions, hurting people are forced to bury their emotions. It is almost as though that ‘don’t look don’t tell’ attitude is what makes us Africans.  So we resolve instead to using manipulation to downplay and guilt trip victims because, in Africa, children are pawns on chess boards that evil birth channels and sperm donors use for their social experiment on how to be brutal to sooth their own pains.

Yes hurting people hurt other people, but instead of confronting their own pains, parents in Africa will use their scapegoats to cover up for how shitty they really feel about themselves. In the words of my therapist “people do the best they can, but the minute you become self-aware, it is your responsibility to correct the things about your life that you wish never existed” when you know better, do better. If there is one thing my birth mother taught me, it is exactly the kind of woman and mother I do not want to be.

It is not the Christian and the African thing to do but I had to cut off my birth channel, with that came the loss of the majority of her family members and because I never knew my biological father, so imagine the loneliness of feeling that you have nobody but even the people you call family are not good to be in your life right now. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, howbeit, a necessity for my own peace of mind.

The combination of being a Christain who happens to be African makes doing such a thing an absolute taboo.  My decision to leave and cut them off was an impulse act triggered by “her” hateful actions building up over the years but triggered when she crossed all boundaries and brought drama to my work place.  Knowing who she is, I anticipated an attack on me to make people question the integrity of my decision, but never in a million years did I expect it to the level that she escalated it to.

I lost friends who struggled with the idea of believing my story and or comparing it to the lies she and her children went about spreading about me in the process of trying to get back at me for daring to leave. That I was that child that constantly seeks approval from people because my birth mother always said and did things that made me feel like I had to do something, to merit being loved, accepted, acknowledged, claimed as her  child. I was a thing of shame, the child nobody must know she had out of wedlock. I have stood countless times and listened to my mother introduce me to people as her sister’s child. I always thought, there must be something wrong with me if not that, why will my own mother deny me, heck in my presence? She would even say stuff like “you are not pretty enough like your sister”.  My natural response to that was, well since I am not pretty, I have to be a straight A-student, maybe then my mother would be able to say that I am her child. So I went through life always seeking to please people, because I always felt, not good enough.

That process took away friends from my life whom I never thought would leave for any reason. I am not saying I did everything right, but one thing my therapist told me when I cried about losing those friends was “often, storms come to take away everything and people whose role in our journey is over, but those who are more concerned about you being ok nothing can take them away, no drama, no lies, nothing could”.

I will never deny loving her, I probably still love her but I don’t have to like her or want her in my life right now, but the only thing that has changed now is that I love me more…………