Today is day 100 for me in France and I have moved three times.
Y’know many times, I’ve asked why life just has to be so dramatic but recently, I’ve started realizing my life isn’t extraordinarily dramatic. It is just that we have created a fragmented society, both emotionally and socially, that it’s considered a badge of honor for people to suffer in silence. Look how far that has worked out.
If everyone keeps quiet, how will we find collective solutions and move forward as a society? Why does the society keep emphasizing on individual successes and “just me and my family?”
Don’t you realize individuals can never survive outside of the collective?
I want to tell a story but it’s a difficult one to tell. I always feel better after letting it all out tho. I release it back into the society, this thing that feels like a personal problem, I make it everybody’s problem that needs to be fixed.
Because WE are the society, I am part of that society.
On my arrival to France, I stayed with this family without paying rent. In exchange, I babysit their two kids for certain hours per week.
That’s a great arrangement, no?
A part of me felt this was too good to be true, and I soon found out why I felt that unease. The night I landed, their daughter asked where the person staying in the room I was about to occupy would now be staying? The mother hushed her. This meant there was someone there before me that left without saying goodbye to the kids (there are two of them, a 10-year old girl and a 6-year old boy). I brushed that comment off. My bad.
I had to figure out everything on my own; opening an account, getting a Navigo etc
In fact, it was the daughter who had to scream at her mum to help me get a sim at least!
I was in a strange land with a spoken language I didn’t really understand but hey it’s me, I’m tough.
I was beloved by everyone in the family and I think that’s the trigger because the woman suddenly changed.
I mean, we got along really well at first and in a twinkle of an eye, she became this person I didn’t recognize anymore.
It’s funny how she kept hammering on racism and how I would experience it but I tell you that white people have been amazing to me and it’s her, the African from Morroco that showed me shege.
The grandma came visiting from Morocco, I met her when I landed. She didn’t speak English at all so I would try to communicate in French or just type in a translator and she would read it. She loved me so much she asked me to come see her in Morroco. She told me there were many beaches and it’s sunny and I would like it. She would make me eat fruit salads with her. I will never forget her.
In two weeks, the ten-year old girl kept saying “Oh, Dasola, I wish you were my mum!”
I had to cajole her to stop saying that because her mum already hated my ass for reasons I didn’t understand?
Then came the random harassment to go get a boyfriend!
Ohhhh, if you were so insecure, why would you house a young unmarried woman then?
I had to lie I was seeing someone in Paris to get her off my back.
I started being mean to the husband by ignoring him and stuff y’know?
I literally started sucking up to the woman and tried very hard to appease her. I was very desperate to get her to stop hating me even when I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.
The more I tried to appease, the more the irritation and hatred increased.
She would tell me I didn’t speak English enough with the kids! I was supposed to make them speak in English.
Ma’am, I literally don’t understand much French, what other language would I speak to them in?
Of course, I didn’t say that, I went okay okay, I’ll adjust.
There were days that were not parts of the specified hours I was supposed to work for them and look after the kids, she would still make me work.
And she and her husband kept commenting about my body type that I wasn’t muscular and ‘strong’ like an average Nigerian. It was derogatory in the way they said it. Like Nigerians are these poor bastids that would do anything for money, like manual labourers y’know?
But here I was, slender and classy and all. The beauty standard here is slimness, the woman is fat. So add I being slim to the list of my sins, especially factoring in her psychotic husband who would randomly pinch the girl for no reason whatsoever. While raising a patriarchal monster of a boy that would most likely end up being a serial killer. Colour me not surprised when I was told he’d started telling his dad he would kill him.
If the woman had asked me to start breathing correctly, I would say yes ma’am.
I was that desperate.
There was a turning point I knew I had grown up and I forced myself to because I felt I was in France for a reason. I need to be here for something bigger than me, so I kept my mouth shut and took it all.
She would intentionally serve food and snacks and pointedly ignore me while they all ate. Of course I had food, but that intention hurt y’know?
On a Sunday, she did this and the kids were eating while I sat with them. You know how kids would play even while eating?
This woman called me into the kitchen and started shouting at me; why wasn’t I playing with the kids? Why did I just sit there looking?
At that very moment, I had this great urge to just choke her or smash her head into her kitchen table or pull her hair. I shouldn’t have those thoughts I know, but it had gone on for too long and I just wanted it to stop and I thought smashing her head would do that.
Wait.
I’m a psychologist and of course I can psychoanalyse myself. I KNOW exactly why that was what came into my mind and I will tell you later.
I did not do any of those things.
While she was shouting and breathing very fast and spoiling for a fight, I told her to calm down.
It’s okay, calm down, don’t shout. And I left her presence and went to pack the kids’ plates.
There were many other incidents she harassed me but that particular one would always stick with me.
I just subconsciously rerouted my nervous system.
I never knew how to healthily respond to outbursts like that. I would always fawn and if that doesn’t work especially if I fawned for a long time, I’d get really angry and get violent.
And I learnt this coping mechanism from living with my mother.
I didn’t understand why I started losing my mind, why everything felt overwhelming, why I desperately tried to please someone who fucking hated me and didn’t deserve I trying to please her at all, why I would be walking on the streets and suddenly burst into tears, why I’d cry to sleep, why I didn’t tell anybody and just kept silent when I could have just called my prof ref and left, why I was afraid I’d be blamed for someone abusing me, why I chose to stay and walk on eggshells and try to please someone desperately trying to instill it in me that I was a nobody, why I’d quickly grab at the little crumbs of friendliness she threw at me like a pathetic idiot.
And like a sudden cold shower, it dawned on me that my brain thought we were dealing with my mother all over again in France!
After shouting at me that day on Sunday and I told her to calm down, she came five minutes later offering me tea.
We finished laughing together one night and the next morning, she treated me like crap, a nonentity.
It’s EXACTLY the same with my mother. It’s like it’s a struggle for her to like me and she couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to like me.
It’s currently five years I’ve run away from that woman and the whole family but she still followed me to France.
I cried on the streets, I became depressed, I was going crazy, and it’s all because of my mother that I hadn’t seen in five years!
Trauma is deeply engraved in our nervous system, it never leaves us. We can only get better.
No matter who I talked to about my mother hitting me, being mean to me, telling me I was a nobody, constantly harassing me for one thing or the other, ALL OF THEM would always tell me to shut it, beg her and be a better child. My brain thought we were in the same situation and so I never told anyone about what I was passing through in France. I am about to clock 29 years old and I cried like a child. I became disoriented and dumb and couldn’t save myself.
There were a lot of things I could have done; I could have reported her to the Mairie (she refused to give me the promised contract and made me overwork), I could have called my prof ref to report, I could have simply asked for help and moved, but I stayed rooted to the ground trying to fix my mother, but in a Morrocoan’s body and in another country. Trauma reenactment happened to me but I could never fix anything.
You know why?
Because it’s not on me to fix it!
It’s never on me or you to fix other people, and it’s NOT true that something is fundamentally wrong with you and that is why people abuse and treat you poorly.
They’re the sick ones. The society at large is sick.
And you should get out of that situation and save yourself.
“Family is NOT family” and “Blood is NOT thicker than water.”
The actual saying is “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”.
The meaning of this saying is actually the opposite of the way we use it. The saying actually means that bonds that you’ve made by choice are more important than the people that you are bound to by the water of the womb.
More directly, it means that relationships you make yourself are far more important than the ones that you don’t choose.
I can never capture the emotional pains and rollercoaster of staying with that family. But all I can say is it was my mother all over again. I started believing it again that I was unlovable, that there should not even be any reason for people hating me, I was fundamentally flawed so people don’t need any reason, it’s okay to just hate me.
But then, there’s that one kid in that same house that loved me like hell. There’s the mother who told me I was kind and I must come visit her, there’s the husband always coming to my defense whenever she was being mean to me, and there’s the unloved and lonely little boy that wanted my attention by all means.
I wasn’t unlovable.
But my mind never rested, I needed to get everyone to love me, including that woman.
I didn’t feel safe with that one person not liking me. The same way I get very scared when just about anyone at all, even people I don’t know, don’t like me.
Because as a child, I was a very good kid and everybody liked me except my mother. And just that one person made my life hell.
So of course, I would run around like a headless chicken trying to make everyone like me.
Because one person not liking me means they can beat me, hurt me, try to tear my clothes in public, humiliate me every chance they get and they would get away with it.
So please please please don’t hate me I beg of you.
Don’t hate me.
Like me please.
I don’t want you to beat me, or tell me I’m nothing.
What my mother did to me will never leave me. Heck, it’s one of the reasons I don’t want kids, I feel I’m a mess. I would most likely do the same to my child. Because I know I’m trying very hard to be a better person, but I can’t take that gamble and make my child go through this.
My mother doesn’t like her mother too, and my grandma doesn’t like her mum too. It’s not a family generational curse, it’s the way the family system is structured but you goddamn fools will never listen. It’s easier to scapegoat and spiritualize these things rather than have real intellectual conversations that bring solutions.
The family institution is modelled like a cult; you can’t get out no matter what. Of course, that alone dangerously builds abuse! That builds top-down control! That builds hell!
A Nigerian girl recently wrote about how her mum and dad would beat her, put pepper in her private parts, push her out of the house at night that led her to getting raped multiple times and so many other traumatic stories I wouldn’t want to recount. It’s the first time I would read about another person’s experiences with their family and I’d open my mouth in shock. Because I never knew no other stories could beat mine.
But what did people say?
Oh, they’re not your parents!
Ask for your birth story!
There can be paternal dispute indeed but what about the mum? You’ll always know your mother, no? And there’s DNA test to show paternity. And in what world is it okay to abuse people just because you’re not their parents? Why is that your go-to explanations? Is everyone crazy or am I going crazy?
Not one single person questioned the family institution. Instead, this idea has been so deeply sold to us that your nervous system just automatically rejects the idea that the family institution can be and is very abusive. People get sexually molested by their family members, by their parents! A lot of shits go down, but you always want to paint that structure as perfect and anyone that voices out about their negative experience is told to shut it or further shamed and told they’re just unfortunate in life because how could your own parents hate you?
Teal Swan once said something about the universe putting you in similar situations over and over and just changing the narratives a bit. So that you can heal.
This is what happened to me with this family.
My mother beat me so much one day I ran to my grandma’s. Of course I got there and while they sympathized with me, the family institution had to be upheld by all means. On realizing this would be my life for like forever, I picked my phone and went out of the house to call my mother.
She still has the recording until date so she can tell everybody how much of a horrible child I was and I don’t care.
I calmly told her the next time she ever touched me again, I would unalive her. I repeated it again;
If you ever beat me again, I will kill you.
I said it in Yoruba so the message got passed deeply.
Ọjọ́ tí e bá tún na mí mọ́, ọjọ́ tí e bá tún fi ọwọ́ kàn mí, màá payín dànù!
You can’t expect someone like me to go through domestic violence, someone that can tell her mother to rein it in or she’d pay with her life.
Now I’ve got guts, and my survival instinct is very strong. How many people can defend themselves this much?
Now tell me how many people go through domestic violence because of the way the family institution and its close cousin, the marriage institution, are both structured.
Instead of looking for personal and collective solutions, you shame people like me, you make it look like I’m the crazy one who refuses to talk to her mother, you ask me to go back home.
Because YOU are all cowards and I’m throwing it in your face that you are.
Because YOU are sick and I’m throwing it in your face that you are.
My existence makes you uncomfortable.
The fact that I’m still surviving and okay and doing much better outside of the family institution makes you uncomfortable.
Because tell me why people who don’t give a flying fuck about me when I was alone and sad and needing help in Nigeria are now reaching out and still asking me if I told my mother or reached out to my mother that I was travelling out.
If you are not a sick excuse of a human being, why would you do that?
What exactly should I reach out to her for? What’s your aim? What do you want? What are you trying to achieve? You hate that I’m doing something you don’t have the guts to do?
Because one of these people is a woman in her 40s who is still being controlled by her father!
Something she couldn’t do in her 40s, I did in my early 20s. I got free!
I said fuck it and got out of the family cult!
And I had a better free family in the world. In fact, the quality of love I’ve got outside of the biological family structure is very very very high.
Family ain’t about who you HAVE to be with. It’s about who you CHOOSE to be with and that ain’t got nothing to do with blood. ~ Carlotta Brown in the movie STAR
Because while my mother actively hates me, the rest of the family loved me in their own way. But still, the quality of love I’ve got outside of them can never be on the same level. I’ve got love so pure I wonder even if I deserve it sometimes.
The next time anybody asks me to go back home or call my mother or anything, I will post your pictures, your contact details, where you live, where you work, and ask everyone to help me ask you WHY you think that is a good idea. You will make a case for yourself as to WHY it is okay to mindlessly ask me to go back home.
Heck, these people scared me into realizing that there are actually people who would wish me evil so they can finally say “See? It’s all because she ran away from home and has refused to reconcile with her mother!”
If I died this second, it is NOT because of her or my family. It is because death is natural. If somehow, I became poor and alone and whatever evil you could think of, it is because of our failure as a society not because I ran away from home. There are many people who failed in life and it’s not because they ran away from home! There are many people who have done everything by the book and by what the society asks them to do and their lives are shitty! Whose lives can’t be compared to mine!
This woman never called me once for five years!
I am relieved.
She is obviously also relieved we don’t have to forcefully do this for all of our lifetimes!
Why then are you harassing me?
She’s just 20 years older than me. I thought I had to do life with her until one of us dies. Look at how many years either of us would have to be miserable?
Once again I ask, am I crazy or everybody else is just crazy?
Why are you desperate to uphold a structure that’s obviously failing and in need of an urgent reform? At the expense of people’s freedom and happiness?
Because you KNOW the family institution is at the core of EVERY form of oppressive structures?
I was back in my mother’s arms in France.
But this time, I talked and people believed me.
I talked and people rescued me.
I talked and in response, I was not told to suck it up.
I talked and I was immediately removed from the situation.
I told my Prof Ref and she immediately got another foster family for me. This time French, and omg, I didn’t want to leave but I was allergic to their cats. They were awesome! Don’t believe everything about racism. The French were awesome to me while a Morrocoan woman made life hell for me.
Now I’ve got my own apartment, very low rent, no charges included AT ALL. People living abroad would understand the gravity of that.
I don’t pay for light or water or gas.
In fact, I complained I was still cold even with the big heaters in the apartment and they laughed good naturedly and brought me an EXTRA heater!
That Morrocoan family still came to my room to stop a part of the heater from working, like the husband came to dismantle one part of it. I would sleep dressed up like I was going to the moon, my hands were constantly freezing!
When I opened up, everyone kept screaming at the mention of Morroco. How they’re slavers and stuff.
But I will always remember that grandma and say no, I will not generalize.
I would always remember the purest form of humanity I’ve come across in that little girl and say no, I will not generalize.
It’s the same way I wouldn’t want someone to hear I’m a Nigerian and think of me as some black scammer.
I healed from my mother again and I know I will still be put in similar situations again! The healing is painful but it’s peaceful at the end.
When all else failed, the promise of violence and murder saved me from my mother. I didn’t know my nervous system saved that information. I didn’t know I’d been walking about subconsciously capable of murder if I feel threatened enough.
But if I had as much raised my voice at this Morrocoan woman, what would I say in court? I didn’t even understand their language that much, it would be my claims against hers. I would have been deported, jailed, anything.
And I would not even be given the chance to trace my history, my story, my trauma, my reasons. I would be called an adult and told to take charge of my life. And told to bear the consequences of my actions.
Here I am trying to take charge of my life, trying to survive, trying to be happy.
But over and over, the society says I must go back inside that cult or I’d never be accepted as a part of the society.
Over and over, I’m told what my mother did to me is right and I’m wrong and should go back to make amends.
Over and over, the society collects those sticks from my mother and hit me with it by putting the burden of reconciliation on me, a reconciliation that should reasonably NEVER happen.
Over and over, the society failed to rehabilitate even my mother herself who you forced to give birth to a child she didn’t want.
You know I made an entry about why I was deeply triggered by my pupils laughing at my writing when I could have easily laughed it off and make fun of theirs too that I can’t see what they’re writing too. They write in this squiggly manner and I can’t make it out, it’s a cultural difference I suppose.
Here is my entry;
“I think I’m reacting strongly to the idea of my writing not being ‘fine’ because of her. In fact, I feel that any strong (or weak) negative reaction I have can be traced back to her. I should have been able to laugh it off and jokingly ask if the children could see my writing. She was always mocking me in a really bad way. There are good-natured mockeries right? But hers was always so evil, like she just needed to prove that I was bad, that it was a grave mistake forcing her to give birth to me – even if all I had done was have bad handwriting.”
There are so many systemic collective solutions we have to do taking this article alone into consideration but it’s easy to say I’m sick, it’s easy to say it’s just MY own family that have problems, it’s easy to pretend abuse in families is not a general issue, it’s easy to ask me to go back and patch up a broken failing structure, it’s easy to wish me evil so you can hold on to your family delusions, it’s easy to try and sabotage my personal and collective efforts, it’s all so easy and doesn’t require much mental, physical and intellectual efforts. It’s easy to ask me to forgive and forget even when that’s all I’m trying to do and it’s not in anybody’s place to even ask me to do that in the first place.
None of these people cares whether it’s safe for me to go back home, whether it’s reasonable, whether there’s even a need for that.
Y’know when one of these people asked me if I reached out to my mother especially now that I’m in France, I said okay, would you like her contact so you can just ask her directly?
Ha, don’t be angry o.
I said of course not, I’m not angry.
And honestly, I’m not. I’m just exhausted by how blind the society is. It gets really lonely sometimes, being that “wayward” one that just doesn’t stay in the fold. I had my own version of “father forgive them for they know not what they’re doing.”
I’m not pissed anymore. All I feel is pity, and occasional waves of loneliness. These people that ask me to go back home, I don’t ever want to be them. Because believe me that they’re not being wicked, they’re even in worse situations themselves and you being strong makes them uncomfortable. They need you to stop disrupting their delusional beliefs.
I’ve healed over and over and I know it’ll never end and I’ve accepted it. But while I’m healing, I’ll still hold on to a level of vawulence.
The next person that asks me to go back home or whatever, I’ll post everything about you in every page and group I can. Please dare me.
Until I learned the lessons I was supposed to learn, I never escaped from the mental fog keeping me from finding solutions and escaping that family.
So one day, I really asked; what lesson is this situation trying to teach me?
I stared intently at my mother again. I was mad at her all over again. And then I pitied her. And I told her she’s an adult, she should also be able to bear the consequences of her actions.
I saw her not as my mother, which is this big deal construct, this whole family thing. We’re just mammals reproducing, there’s no big deal about this whole idea of “family.” We’re mammals that give birth, it’s as simple as that. My mother is a female mammal who gave birth to another female mammal. That’s all.
I saw her as a very necessary ingredient in my story, in who I am, and who I will become. I mean, évidemment, without her, I wouldn’t have existed.
Without her roles in my life, I wouldn’t be this person exposing the family institution on behalf of myself and many other people who don’t have the guts that I have. If she wasn’t so mean to me, I wouldn’t be here writing about the evils that go on in the name of “family.”
She has contributed to I being a strong person too. She’s a very strong person, and I had to stand up to her. Of course, that makes me strong.
Make no mistake, my trauma hasn’t made me strong tho. I’m strong in spite of my traumas.
At that very moment, the last shred of hatred left me. I just saw her as a tool needed to get me here, to get me to exist physically, and to get me to who I am mentally.
She was supposed to play those roles and she has, perfectly if I may add.
It’s like the biblical Judas. Christians wouldn’t have their Easter fairytale without him.
So there’s nothing to forgive my mother for really, she’s just playing her part. And she’s done. Other people would still play their roles in my life, the same way I will in other people’s lives.
See? I got here on my own. I didn’t get here by y’all badgering me to forgive and forget while you do nothing as a collective to stop me from hurting, or stop the same situation happening over and over again to different people.
I got here on my own and with the help of the very few people I let get too close to me.
Complete healing isn’t possible without a collective healing.
And a collective healing is only possible when there are provisions made for freedom; freedom of expressions for starters.
Do not shut people up!
Let people talk!
And you listen you fucking moron!
Instead of shaming people into silence or saying all the rubbish you usually say when someone says their family isn’t being nice, you shut the fk up and listen!
Being listened to alone is sometimes enough.
If your family is evil, I’m not gonna tell you what to do. Of course, nobody else’s opinion should even matter at this point, this is about YOU.
Just know that it’s not just you.
We’re many.
I just happen to have a loud voice that refuses to be silenced.
Tó bá kọ’jú sí e, kóo taá.
Tó bá kọ̀’yìn sí ẹ, kóo taá.
Tó bá wáá k’ùwọ nìkan, kóo tún èrò ara e pa.
I won’t say more than that.
Ire o.
Written by Sisí Afrika on January 1, 2025.
