Hello blog world. Someone left me a comment suggesting that I should advice my dad about being fair since some men are known to have a soft spot for their daughters.
Such a great advice, but it reminded me of an incident that happened in my life when I was I think close to 11. My dad left my mum and my siblings when I was 10 to go and live in our hometown when he got a better job. My dad's second wife at that time was already living alone with her children in the family house in our hometown. So what happened was he more or less left us to be with her. He did not divorce my mum or anything. He even suggested she (we all) move together but my mum declined. Reason was, my mum was working and she uses some of her money for household expenses and she thought leaving her job (which was not a high income job) to go live in the family house with her co-wife and be at the mercy of my dad, who is known to be very stingy with his money would be unbearable. So we started living alone with my mum, and dad visits us like once a month or 2 months. Whenever he comes, he gives mum some money for food and money to pay our school fees.
Within a few months, he started visiting less frequently and things were a little hard because my mum was a junior worker and it was difficult for her to do everything with her meagre salary. We then moved from our 3 bedroom flat to a one bedroom flat because my mum ould no longer afford to pay rent for the bigger house. We could barely feed in the house and my mum sometimes needs to borrow some money from her friends to buy groceries and she pays back at the end of the month. When it got to a stage whereby we were sent away from school beause we could not pay school fees and she could not afford it, she decided it was time to go to my hometown to vivsit my dad and get the monthly money he gives for feeding and that of our school fees. Just before she left the house, I gave her a letter to give my dad and she took it from me without bothering about what was written in it because as she said later, she just assumed its a short note to say salaams and tell him we miss him and other whatnot because my dad and I had a great relationship and they all call me daddy's girl.
She returned after 2 days and we were able to go back to school and life went on as usual. Shortly after that, maybe 2 weeks later or so, my dad came to visit and I noticed he was cold towards me but I did not make anything of if. One day, before he returned to his base, my mum was snooping around in his bag and there she saw a letter written by me in which I talked about the difficulty we were going through in the house, how we could not even eat easily and how we had to be sent away from school for not paying school fees. Then I ended it with "you should not have married another wife" or something worded along that line. Then she saw something that broke her heart; below my letter was my dad's reply to me and it read: definitely mena, you are not my child, You are a bastard. He wrote some other things that I can't remember now but the first sentence has been in my memory since then. I know what I wrote in my letter questioning why he married a second wife was harsh. But what does one expect from an eleven year old girl who is going through difficulties along with her mum and siblings and who is totally helpless as there is nothing she can do about it?
So my mum took out the letter and called me to her presence. She said she would not have delivered the letter to my dad if she knew that was what I wrote in there. She was so scared and disturbed and she scared me too. There I had just been disowned for daring to question my dad's reason for marrying a second wife and making all our lives difficult. My mum later calmed down and went to a friend of hers for advice and that friend told her to destroy the letter and never mention it. I think my dad planned to give me the letter but when it mysteriously disappeared from his briefcase, he did not bother to mention it again and he left after some days...
