No sooner had she put a cigarette between her lips than a willowy waitress with a tremendous smile blew over to our table. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, “smoking isn’t allowed in the cafe.” She couldn’t have been a minute older than 21. Beautiful in the way caucasian men like their girls beautiful.
My interviewee looked up at her with a look that could melt plastic—a look that can cause a blood clot. I waited for her to say something acerbic and sarcastic—as is her nature—but she thought the better of it and chose to be the bigger girl. Instead, she picked up her lighter and growled, “Be right back.” I saw her standing in a patch of shadow in the parking lot, smoking and looking wistful, like smokers tend to do when smoking.
When she came back she sipped her latte and sighed. “I can’t believe you are making me talk about that woman.”
“That woman.” is her mother.
***
My mother had an affair with my father. I’m the result of that affair. He was married. I’m a bastard.
And as with such illicit affairs, things started going tits up at some point and they soon began locking horns. I was very young but I remember their fights in our house in Upperhill; booming and loud and endless. Their hatred for each other would blow through our house like a wrecking ball.
I remember my dad beating my mother into a pulp, breaking her hand one time.
One time he beat my mother so much, she bled all over the bathroom tiles. There was so much blood it looked like an abattoir. I remember standing in the doorway of the bathroom and seeing my mother’s small footprints on the bloody tiles, it looked like she must have been staggering.
I’m an adult now but I can still smell the blood on the tiles.
My mother didn’t take this lying like an envelope. She was feisty. She clawed back. She openly disrespected my father. She hurled ugly things at him; names mostly and they must have wounded him. She called him stupid, an idiot. A whore. She cast him as a villain to my brother and I. Eventually, she moved out with us. I was maybe four. We then moved around a lot, staying with relatives and a couple of her friends. At some point we lived in a lodging in Nairobi West, stealing soap from the housekeeping trolley. Best past-time ever!
She met a man she fell in love with and told him I was her sister, and my brother was her cousin. Our relationship was vicious and virulent. I was terrified of her. She would beat us savagely like she wanted to kill us. Her words were even worse. She would call me names; she said I was built like my father which wasn’t supposed to be a compliment. “You are built like a block.” She’d call me ugly. I struggle to look at a picture of myself even now because all I see is the ugliness that she constantly referred to. If she was horrible towards me – she was even worse towards my brother.
My dad would later come looking for me, and find me. That was the happiest day of my childhood because it meant he chose me. I wasn’t unwanted, after all. I finally belonged to someone, to something, a structure of sanity. But belonging is a fragile thing. When I entered his wife’s carefully curated world, I became a ghost. Not the haunting kind—more like a smudge someone refuses to acknowledge on pristine white linen. She didn’t just ignore me. She unmade me.
Her silence was a scalpel, surgically removing my existence.
Nights passed in rooms where my breath seemed to make no sound. I learned the intricate art of non-being. Furniture, at least, has purpose. A chair supports. A table holds. I held nothing. Not her attention. Not her compassion. Not even the space I occupied.
I was a living testament to my father’s moment of weakness. Every glance I didn’t receive was a verdict. Every meal I didn’t share was a punishment. In her world, I was less than a memory. Less than dust.
Invisibility, I discovered, is its kind of violence.
When I became old enough to fend for myself, I was out of that arrangement faster than you could say Otis Redding. In my quest for freedom, I became a pebble that rolled downhill, gathering debris and snowballing into a monstrous avalanche. When I buried my beloved father, the only man I ever loved (and I loved him deeply) I buried myself. I became an alcoholic, a raging one. Years dissolved into a liquid haze. Then I got sober.
However, the shadow of my mother continued to loom large over my life. She wouldn’t go away. I hated her. Loved her. I hated her. I hated the power she had over me. Every choice, every rage, every insecurity—she had carved those into me like initials on a tree. I was her most perfect work of destruction.
I needed help. Often one isn’t even aware that they need help. I needed therapy and I found one therapist – referred by a friend. Therapy was hard…standing and confronting your demons is hard. I had to travel back into the past and confront my mom and the legion of demons she hung with. It was during this journey that I was re-acquainted with the phrase, travelling light.
I realised all these years I was doing all BUT traveling light. I carried pain like others carry lucky charms. I was motivated by it, motivated to be better than the people who hurt me.
It was an impenetrable fortress that kept me immune from hurt…or so I told myself. It’s funny how we rationalize grudges. We tell ourselves that our grudges are a shield, a way to ensure we don’t forget the lessons learned from being wronged. I’d go as far as saying that to me, it was a form of justice – believing that my refusal to forgive made me hard; that it was a punishment that my mother deserved.
My therapist said, “As long as they are your motivator, they continue to have some control over you”. To think all these years I had the illusion that I had my peace and freedom, but these fuckers were out there living their best lives, not thinking about me, but somehow pulling my strings like I was some sort of marionette? That stuff made me sick to my bones.
My therapist suggested that I write a letter to my mother. It was the hardest thing I ever wrote, The hardest thing I ever did last year. I couldn’t bear to address her, it felt like being in a room with her. Breathing her air. I couldn’t even call her mom.
“Dear Dorothy”, I started the letter.
I told her of the very few moments of happiness I recalled from my childhood. Our old home. That I remembered their fights with my dad. I mentioned how recently I walked into the bathroom of a house I was viewing and suddenly brutal memories of her blood on the tiles came at me. The smell was so assaulting, so fresh and alive, I brought my palms to cover my nose. I wrote how she played me against my brother, how she let him go to school and not me, how I watched him walk towards the bus station to get the school bus, and how stupid she made me feel. I told her that I remember her taking me and my brother to the witch doctor to get protection from “your evil father.” How that man smelled of something that evil would fear.
I told her that she thought I didn’t recall her boyfriend from the presidential escort unit. I do. I did. His name was Kiptoo. He’d come around in a big car. An “Intercooler,” you said. How that’s all she spoke about; intercooler this, intercooler that. The big TV he bought us, the money he’d give her…I’d never seen such crisp notes in my life. I made her a ‘congratulations’ card when she told us she was engaged. I remember how surprised she was that I could spell the word Congratulations.
She didn’t even know me.
I had already read half of The Concubine by Elechi Amadi by the time she was being swept off her feet by Kiptoo. I recall how she forbade us from calling her mom in front of Kiptoo, and how, when later he found out the truth, he dumped her, taking away his TV. She treated us so poorly after that- like we were the obstacles to her happiness.
“You laughed at me and said I was straight as a ruler.” I wrote. “Dorothy, I was a child, children don’t get curves. You made hurtful comments about my appearance; called my nose big, like my father’s. I have never forgotten that.” I wrote to her extensively about how poorly she treated my brother. How she erased all his confidence. Called him stupid, slapped him a lot for getting answers wrong, and how he would try not to cry. How she called him ugly because he was darker than I am. How she berated him for the gap between his teeth.
“I really hate you, Dorothy.” I wrote while I cried. “The more I write this, the more I hate you.” In my letter, I called her a liar, a psychopath. I called her a cunt, “You didn’t deserve to be a mother.”
I wrote about a day in the principal’s office when I was summoned to find my father seated there with his dear old friend. I hadn’t seen him in so long. He had come looking for me, his daughter, and he had finally found me. When the principal asked, “Do you know this man?” I was scared to admit that I knew my own father because you had forbidden me to ever acknowledge him. My little heart was beating so fast with fear and longing. I looked at my father and I disowned him, claiming that I had never met him in my life. “The fear you instilled in me made me deny my father”, I wrote. The look of kindness on his face even after I denied him made me feel like Judas. And it tore my heart to hear him say, “Ba, wherever you are, I will find you and I will love you always.” I still think about that day and think of what an upstanding man my father was.
When my dad eventually took me away, you wrote me a letter denouncing me as your daughter. “I’m no longer your mother,” you wrote. “You have been bewitched by your father’s people.” That letter hurt me. I must have cried for the entire preps. I was inconsolable. Now in hindsight, you were like a convenience store parent; coming and going as you please. I remember the long stretches of your absences. I can’t forget the success card you sent me when I was sitting for my KCPE, because you refused to sign it like a normal mother would. Your message read, “By my colleagues.” You didn’t have colleagues, it was you who signed it.
“This therapy has allowed me to express what a despicable human you are,” I wrote. Everything you have done has left me with deep emotional scars. But it has also allowed me to hold a mirror up, which made me aware of some of the traits we share. I listed them out in the letter; I am creative. I take that from you; your decor skills, your sense of style. I have the same mannerisms as you; I like big stuff, finer things. I can afford them, that’s the only difference.
I wrote about how I suffered from anorexia in the hope of getting the curves that she wanted. How I wished I looked like her at some point, with her perfect teeth. “I’ve always felt that I don’t belong anywhere,” I told her, “For a long time I struggled with abandonment, anger, and great feelings of inadequacy. Thoughts of you make my blood boil,” I wrote. “Your very existence makes my blood boil.”
I realised that even as I hate her, part of me is driven by desperation to have her actually love me. “All your put downs and abuse seem to have actually held me captive,” I wrote. After many pages of memories, tears and release, I closed the letter quickly like you would a door to a room full of smoke. “…for the avoidance of doubt, I want you to know that by the time I have left all my emotions in these pages, you would have died your first death to me,” I wrote. “And for your actual death, you will be just another face in the obituary.”
It took me a whole year to write that letter; thirteen pages of it. In fullscaps, in blue ink. I wrote it during the day, and sometimes in the middle of the night. I wrote in daylight, and in the hollow hours of night. Sometimes just sentences, other times whole pages would pour out. The emotions gutted me out, rage and pain spilled out of me. I cried often. She seemed to dominate my whole of 2024.
Much as I struggled to write it, I had to. I want to travel light. Therapy and conversations with loved ones has taught me that unchecked childhood trauma always shows up later. It echoes loudly in your life.
Forgiveness is hard, especially for those who have never apologised to you. I also discovered that forgiveness is a balm for the soul. Do you ever see those elephants in Asia that are finally released and they don’t know what to do with their freedom? I stood at the edge of my own freedom, hesitant. By the time I was done writing that letter, I felt like one of those elephants; untethered to pain, walking towards a new adventure. I feel like I have reclaimed some of my power. This self-improvement journey is about decluttering my mind and making room for love, for joy, for happiness, for a more hopeful future where I hopefully will not go around breaking others the way I was broken.
This is about travelling light.
PS- If you’re reading this- Trauma is not your fault, but healing is your responsibility. Travel light.
***
What’s the hardest thing you did/ experienced last year? Let me know; [email protected]
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