Everyone has dreams..some lofty,some simple..
Mine was probably the simplest of all. I wanted to be a mother ever since I was young.
Perhaps it was a coping strategy to survive the childhood abuses that I endured. For me then the future involved having children and doing all that no one did for me.
That was the only way to right the wrong.
No one hugged me when I fell down, actually Amma thrashed me so much when I fell down and broke my leg and instead of taking me to the hospital right away, she waited till the next morning. Her reasons
 I deserved the pain because I didn’t take care ( and perhaps she thought that I decided to fall down deliberately in order to give her more heart aches apart from being deaf, dumb and blind)

It costs money to fix a broken leg ( I don’t think so. treatment at district hospitals were free)

She wanted to be absolutely sure that I did break the bones, instead of wasting time and money to go all the way to the hospital and finding out that it was just a sprain. My maternal grandmother was a traditional medicine practitioner and she was home that day and she told Amma to take me to the clinic. Amma also didn’t let her apply herbal medicines, which my grandmother made after seeing me in so much pain, because Amma wanted to see the oedima to confirm that I broke the leg and felt the my grandmother’s herbal remedy might distort Amma’s diagnosis.

When you endure the abuses, you have two choices. One, you continue doing the same to your children or you right the wrong. ( trust me, only a fool will tell you that you can forget the abuses)
I wanted to right the wrong. Because all it takes is a hug when your child is in pain to remove that pain ( all I wanted from my mother when I broke my leg was a hug and for her to tell me that it is ok, it is nothing major, everyone breaks their bone once in a while! instead I spend the night listening for the sound of kalan (god of death) coming to take my soul because I was sure I was going to die)

I did that all through my children’s childhood. I hugged them every time they fell down and hurt themselves.

Yaya came and slept with me last night. She hasn’t done that for ages. ( she lays down with me in the mornings to ensure that she nags me enough to get me out of bed to make her lunch and in the evenings she would lay down with me to read. but she always preferred to sleep in her own bed)
I can only hug her.
But I can’t protect her anymore.
I am in this position
Because of the mothers who doesn’t raise teach their sons to respect women
because of the mothers who wouldn’t teach their sons what is right and wrong
because of the society that unnaturally segregates our children and unnecessarily distort their behaviour in the hope of creating virgins.
because of the society that pretends such behaviour doesn’t exists
because of the society that doesn’t react when they see such acts being committed daily in the buses and trains
because of each of you who forgets that the same can happen to your daughters and your sisters.

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