I doubled up in the corner of my room, sometimes i paced the floor. My broken heart would not give way in my chest. I have been down this road before. It's a strange yet familiar terrain, didn't make it less gruelling.
I had nightmares.
I tossed and turn in my sleep. I've contemplated suicide. The jokes are all on me.
People said that I deserved the disgrace that Dre brought upon my head. I shouldn't have left Jerr for Dre. Dre is a slithering serpent.
While I locked myself inside, dying of heartache and humiliation, I was told that Dre was up and about, happy and sociable. He moved on with his life as if nothing had happened. I was left to pick up the broken pieces. I am a mess.
My mother rebuked me with scorn. She chastised me for being a weak woman, a foolish woman.
She was the mother whom I witnessed at age of three year old, when the father of my younger siblings chopped her in the palm of her hand. There was blood everywhere. I was a baby and the room was redolent with the scent of fresh blood. It's a sight that stained my memory just as it had done my maternal grandmother's floor.
My mother groped her palm, her boyfriend fled the scene. Less than a year later, my mother had a daughter with him and then she had another child with the man that chopped her hand before her pre school daughter. She had two children with a man who tried to dismember her.
My mother forgave him, just as she'd forgiven my father for saying that I was a jacket. Two years later, she had another baby for the my dad who didn't own her first child until after a Paternity test. Two children for the man who deemed get a whore and her child a bastard. Me a bastard.
My mother despised me for allowing Dre to treat me like shit. What did she expect? I am after all my mother's child. Taking bullshit from men is in my genes.
Like my grandmother whom I witnessed being repeatedly beaten and cheated on by her husband.
Mama would go out of her way to cook the best dinner for him. One plate with ground provisions, the best yams, dumpling and banana and a rare dish packed with large chunks of meat. The tallest glasses of soursop juice. Some nights he didn't turn up. Some nights he came home and didn't touch his food and mama cried, and read psalms twenty three facing the rising and setting of the sun.
Mama would cook the best dinner after an evening of beatings, crowds gathering, police car siren deafening and my father holding a bloody clothe at the side of his head after he defended my grandmother from the tyranny of her husband.
I the perspicacious, introverted five year old, seethed with anger and promised myself that no man would ever do this to me.
Until I met Jerr and I met Dre...
Taking bull shit from men is in my gene.
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