No. PDOA, Please
The story about dysfunctional parent-child relationships and how they set the patterns for our lives by Ghanaian Victoria Naa Takia Nunoo
No PDOA
I have never seen my parents kiss. The closest I’ve gotten to seeing them exhibit some kind of open affection towards each other is in a still picture, and their mouths didn’t touch, only their tongues did. It was a bad performance orchestrated for the camera. Like someone was being taught how to do something for the first time. Not even the smiles could suppress the uneasiness written all over that nineties black and white wedding photo. One could feel the holy awkwardness just by looking at it.
I remember that day well. I was nine. The news of my parents going to have their official white wedding was exciting. My mother was going to wear a white off-shoulder ball gown. Yvonne and I were to be the flower girls, and Abraham, the page boy. Dad made us rehearse the walk several times in a day around our grey-coloured Toyota Corolla. My grandmother and aunts would watch on, amused.
They didn’t even kiss in the church auditorium. They hugged. The tongue-hugging happened during the photo session. Once. It was also the last time I ever saw my parents hug each other.
I have never heard the words, I love you from my middle-aged parents. It will be strange even, to imagine something that warm coming from any of them to themselves or to us, their children.
I have never heard either of my parents call me beautiful. The closest I came to my mother commenting about how I looked was when she told me, “You look like a stick”. I did, indeed. How I wept that day — standing in front of the bathroom mirror as her words echoed and re-echoed in my ears.
Ugly ugly ugly stick-like me.
In my house, to be insulted with a smile is a compliment. “Thank you”, is “Oh get away, you silly girl”, “Well done” is “This is why I gave birth to you”. One of my dad’s famous compliments is to call me a goat.
I try to understand why my parents cannot, will not, say please or thank you, or lower their voices when speaking to me. I try to understand why they won’t tell me they love me, like in those American movies I watch where parents hug their children, kiss their foreheads, hold their hands, compliment them on their dresses, tuck them in bed, and have hearty chats with them. I wonder if it has anything to do with the color of our skin. I wonder what it will feel like to be loved, to be told you were loved. I long for such affection. The telling affection. The holding affection. The kissing affection. How will it feel like to have all this love, inside of me?
Two wrongs, one made right
When I was eight or nine, I cannot really remember, I used to play a game with my cousin. It was one that involved me hiding and he finding me and vice versa. I would hide behind our neighbor’s unplastered wall, right under their window and listen as he counted one to ten. I would hold my breath and listen to his footsteps draw into my direction. He would find me. He would tickle me. I would laugh. On other days we took the game indoors. That game was a playing-parents-game. He would touch me. I would squeal. He would cover my lips and touch me again. He would ask if I liked it. If I wanted more. I would smile. I did. Oneday as it happened, I told him I will get pregnant. I hadn’t even seen my period.
One day mother caught us. I was riding on his stomach, playing some game that had no name. We were on the bed. Alone. Mother pulled me away from him and threatened to tell father when he returned from work. I spent the rest of the day dreading the sort of beating I’d receive, not knowing exactly what I had done wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d be whipped for something I wasn’t even sure I did, or knew. I was right. That night my father whipped me particularly well, and when my mother questioned why he didn’t whip my cousin too, my father said to both my mother and me, “He’s not my child. She is. And so I will beat her as I please.”
They still did not tell me what I did wrong.
Be Longing
When I was thirteen, I had a real hunger to be. To belong. To feel a part of something, someone. My girlfriends in school would endlessly talk about a “thing”. I later learned this ‘thing’ was menstruation. None of us had had it yet. Each of us was excited about it.
Normally we peed together. Then my friends, on certain days, started peeing in turns and would stay longer in the washroom.
One afternoon after school, I saw my first blood while I was bathing. I wasn’t scared. I was nervous. I rehearsed for several minutes how I was going to tell my mother what I had seen. My words to her exactly were “Ma, look what I found in my pantie”. She looked at me, then at the pantie I was holding to her face. She took me to her room and taught me how to fix my first pad. What ensued next for me, was something as difficult to understand as Algebra, and for her a subject terribly difficult to teach. The rules were simple, I was not to play with boys or I would get pregnant. I was not to do anything with boys or I would get pregnant. She spent the rest of the talking-to time fending off my brother who was eavesdropping by the door.
I went to school the next Monday eager to share the news of my maturity with my three friends. Deceptively, I was the last one to be called into womanhood. I had always been the last one. They had kept theirs a secret only to make me feel better. To put me at ease. To help me belong. To be part of this thing I actually wasn’t, ritually.
Stranger in my own body
Boarding school. Of all the places one could not belong, this place was the worst. It was hell for those who had known a little bit of heaven and a bigger hell for those who had known no heaven at all. I was part of the latter.
It would be the first time I’d be away from home. First time I’d sleep in the same room with a bunch of unknown kids. First time I’d see girls my age with real breasts one could actually cup. I would stare at them in our giant bathhouse — bodies upon bodies, hips, buttocks, even their pubic hair was amazing. Their bodies were without fault. Right in all their teenage places. Without burden. Without a grain of inconvenience. Their bodies were not like mine — small, with breasts like little green limes and buttocks like something that was made out of the last piece of earth mud, in an attempt for it to not go to waste. Whichever god moulded me, this flesh-lacking containment, this reservoir of torture, had run out of clay or must have been very stingy.
My mother had been right.
Ugly ugly ugly stick-like me.
Self and Love
Two words.
Two separate words.
Two very separate words I can never fathom to become one.
Self-love. How does one give it? How does one take it? How does one put it together to create something you can actually say without a pause in voice — to become something? Singular.
Self-love. This merger. Odd. Curious. Unknown to me.
Ladder of timidities
Kill yourself first and nobody will be able to kill you. I have known rejection all my life rejecting myself is the easiest thing I can ever do. And the safest too. It is easy for me to say no to myself.
“No. I’m not that pretty.”
“No. I don’t deserve this.”
“No. I can’t be that.”
“No. My body isn’t cut for this kind of dress.”
“No. I’m not brave enough to step out in this colour.”
“No. This compliment isn’t mine. He must be jesting.”
Denying myself, to me, is in some way showing myself love. It is loving myself enough to let me down easy. To be without hope means no disappointments. To be without expectations means no damp squibs. It is being comfortable. Being safe. Being well-zoned and protected. It is security.
Surely, this is love. Somehow.
Fears and Strange Things
I have many fears. I am afraid of meeting new people. Something about unknown faces frighten me. There is something strange about how they look not knowing me. What goes on in their heads? What are they thinking about? Do they notice the blotch on my shirt? Or the huge pimple that grew on my face overnight? What do they think of me from a distance?
I’m afraid of new environments. Unfamiliarity makes me feel narrow and leaves a sweat-patch and an itch under my armpits.
I’m afraid of heights. I have had too many dreams in which I fall and fall and fall into nothing. One of these days, I might actually fall.
I’m afraid of not fitting in. I don’t want to be a square peg in a round hole. I want to be a square peg in a square hole. I want to be a round peg in a round hole. I want to be any kind of peg in any kind of hole. I want to fit in. To integrate perfectly. I want to hold my space and belong like everyone else. If everyone is heading East, I want to head East. I want to walk the side of the road everyone is taking. I want to jump the puddle everyone is jumping over. I want to be sheep.
I’m afraid of the dark. I never sleep with my lights off. The one time I did, I had a dream a ghost slapped me. She slapped me over something rather trivial. She slapped me and I didn’t understand why. She slapped me because I insinuated she might be in heaven. What could be so wrong about that?
I’m afraid of disappointments. My father once told me I was a disappointment. I wrote it down in my diary. I always wanted to remember. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Then maybe I’d have forgotten. Maybe I’d have been free of this voice ringing incessantly in my head. Maybe I wouldn’t try too hard to please everybody — to peel my skin so others could have warmth.
I’m afraid of the sea. I don’t want to be left inside her. Sometimes when I’m bathing, I close my ears and imagine things. I imagine her surrounding me. Everywhere, salt water. Up to my neck. I’m alone. I cannot breathe. My feet cannot touch solid ground. There is nowhere to run.
I’m afraid of things I do not know. I’m afraid of things, the end of which I cannot immediately or eventually see. I’m afraid of lone-standing. I’m afraid of being different. I’m afraid of not being accepted. I’m afraid of me. Being me.
No. PDOA, please.
Sundays. Church is a large extended family. Every old person is an uncle, an aunt, a grandfather or grandmother and you owe them answers, explanations. Your family business is their business. Your married or single status is their business. They are marriage contractors, financial controllers, private investigators and counsellors, school headmasters, and family heads. After church is when they operate and after church is when we, the young people, knowing the routine and the ritual disappear into our own spaces.
Today we are hanging around an old neem tree behind the church building, talking and laughing about how we absconded from the old people and their homilies. Soft-bodied J.O and I are hugging when father passes by. He looks at us. That look given to children when parents feel dishonoured by them. There are five of us, but I’m the only one who sees. The other three are standing idly chatting and laughing.
What can possibly be wrong with a hug a boy gives a girl?
Father passes by again. We are still hugging.
Tonight I turn my throat inside out and find my voice. My father, he too finds his whip. He says only adults who don’t live under their parent’s roof, or eat their parent’s food can show such affection. He says “Look, I’ve been married to your ma for so many years, but have you ever seen us hold hands or hug in public?”
He says it like it is a shameful thing. A filthy thing. And it is at this moment I understand why I never received the telling affection, the holding affection, and the kissing affection. There is shame and embarrassment associated with open and public display of love from husband to wife, parents to children, friends to friends.
I now understand why I have a big black hole deep inside me. Why I have this urgent need to be part of something. Anything. I now understand why self and love are two very separate words. Why I am living like a stranger in my own body. I now apprehend the source of my many fears and timidities — an upbringing very toxic and demolishing to a child’s evolution, my evolution. These barriers must be broken.
Tonight I become an adult.
