Mom comes to find me a few minutes later. “He’ll do it again,” I announce, sitting up. “You know he’ll do it again.”
“I have hope that he won’t.”
“You have hope? Why are you doing this, mom? You’ll end up hurting yourself even more. You’ll end up hurting us all.”
“God doesn’t support divorce. Marriage isn’t just having a family. It involves fighting for your family, trying to make it work, forgiving when it seems impossible. You’ll understand all this later.”
“Honestly, I hope I never do. If marriage is nothing but dishonesty and hurt, I never want to experience it.”
“Don’t talk like that. Your marriage, your life, will be nothing like mine. It’ll be perfect and peaceful and a blessing.”
“So you’re really going to do this? Live in pain just because you think that’s what God wants.”
“I know he’ll want me to make my marriage work.” She sighs deeply and adds, assuring, “We’ll be okay, Danny. We will.”
The last time she promised me I’ll be okay, it didn’t turn out that way.
But maybe in the long run, maybe it’ll all end up okay. Naomi said she believes that everything will wend well, no matter what. But I’m not sure I believe that it will. I don’t think I’ll be able to survive living under the same roof with my dad, knowing what he’s done and what he’s likely to do, knowing that it will shatter my mom in the end.
Mom leaves the room and I begin to wonder what exactly my life has in store for me. I hope it’s something good.
I pick up my phone to play a game, then I see the messages I missed over the week on Whatsapp. There are also a few text messages. I check my text messages first, because I know they’ll be from my network provider. I delete the messages immediately after.
The Whatsapp messages are mostly from group chats, a few from family members mom reported me to and one from Max. I don’t open any of them. One of them is from an unsaved number.
I open the message and it’s like an epistle. The first line catches my attention;
Hi, this is Naomi.
I lie back down to read the rest of the message.
I know you didn’t believe me when I said everything will work out. So I want to tell you a story about my life.
When I was fourteen, my uncle raped me… on my birthday. That’s why I hate my birthday.
I got pregnant. And my mom, she was a pastor and a disciplinarian, and she freaked out. She also took her frustration out on me. To her I was a disgrace, an abomination, so was the child I was carrying. She never believed me when I told her what happened. She hated me even more. I wished my dad was alive, he would’ve believed me.
I had just finished my WAEC and I was unable to write my JAMB that year. That and the hatred my mom fed me daily led me down a dark path. I aborted the pregnancy, thinking that would at least reduce the reasons my mom hated me. But instead she hated me even more. I became a murderer in her eyes.
That uncle still visits us like nothing happened. He’s married with kids of his own. He has what he deems a perfect life. But he destroyed mine. Anytime I think about what he did to me it hurts and I withdraw from the world. I resulted to hurting myself in a bid to make the pain go away. I thought, maybe if I hurt physically my emotional pain would subside. To be honest, it did, but only temporarily.
I even thought of suicide a couple of times, but I was never bold enough to go through with it.
I got to school a year after everything. I was sixteen and broken. But I eventually got help. I’m getting better, although I’m not there yet. My mom still hates me. But I know there are greater things ahead of me in life, and that’s what keeps me going. That’s what helps me truly forget the pain.
That’s what I want to keep you going. You may not see it now, but you, Daniel are destined for great things. With your writing talent you’ll explore worlds no one thought existed. There is a gold mine hidden within you, all you have to do is dig for it. Don’t be distracted by the happenings around you. It’s hard but it’s doable.
Horrible things will happen, and you’ll think, ‘This isn’t what I want. Why’s this happening?’
Just remember, you don’t always get what you want. But if you try hard enough, you’ll find that you get what you need, no matter what happens. And that’s Serendipity.
You’ll be okay, Daniel. I know this for a fact.
I place my phone on the bed and lie back down slowly. I didn’t know all these about her. She never acted like someone that has being through something as horrible as that. Except that one time she stayed away from school for a while and I saw a cut on the back of her hand after she returned. Was that one of the times she hurt herself? I didn’t even know.
I suddenly feel sad for not noticing, for being so caught up in my problems I didn’t stop to think that other people have problems of their own.
But I suddenly believe that if she could live with what happened to her, I can live with what’s happened to me. I won’t allow Rich’s death pull me down any more. I won’t allow my father’s discrepancies ruin me anymore. He has his life, I have mine.
I’ll strive to be better. I have to. I have a life to live.
I’ll miss Naomi. I’ll miss Rich.
Life’s definitely going to throw more obstacles at me, but I’ll be alright. I have to be.
And for the first time in my life I truly believe that everything will be alright. Because what else can I do but hope?