Shadows. I see them everywhere—around street corners, in the kitchen when I step in to cook, in the bathroom whenever I pull off my clothes to bath. I see them in my mind when I close my eyes to sleep. I also see them whenever someone smiles at me or reaches out to touch me; there are male and female shadows, and while the male ones are stronger, believe me the female ones are scarier.

All these shadows, they're part of me, they're living inside and outside of me; sometimes I do not know when I am dealing with an inside shadow or outside one. This is because they all look alike, and most of them look like my parents—the majority of the male ones look like my father and the rest like the numerous customers of my madam; the majority of the female ones look like my mother and the rest like my madam who treated me like a commodity to be handed to every customer who had N1000 to pay.

I don't blame her though. If my so-called mother hadn't handed me to her, she would not have used me like a sex rag who was used to clean up the lust of fat, drunk men. All my life, I've never really known what the love of a mother felt like; whenever I hear people say such things, I scoff and imagine ways I can return all the favours my mother had given to me.

I am an orphan; my father died in a vehicle accident three years ago, and my mother is dead to me. Over the years, I've tried to explain and rationalize why someone who claimed to have given birth to me would dish out so much evil and hate to me, her first and only child. It was something that even God cannot explain despite claiming that he knew everything.

It all started when I turned twelve, when the tide was of puberty swept me off my feet and carried me to the waiting laps of my father, who used me to slake his lust over and over again. He had squeezed my tangerine of breasts, grabbed my little buttocks, and had taken and taken so much of me that I became bitter to myself. I hated him, but I hated myself the more for being his daughter. I hated him for saying that he would kill me if I ever told my mother, because I knew he would.

It was one day after school when I was hawking pears that I came across a group of people on the road teaching people about domestic violence and the need to speak up. I had been so touched that immediately I came back from my hawking (I did not sell all the goods that day because not many people wanted pears), I had gone into my mother room, and in tear-choked whispers, told her that my father was raping me.

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https://www.thezenpens.com/2020/03/09/spoils-of-motherhood/