Numerous things radicalise women and make us decide to live better and more fruitful lives. For some women, it could be observing the way their fathers treated their brothers specially.
For other women, it could be going to school and observing boys being scolded for “letting a girl” take the first position.
What then happens when your own radicalisation happens with your mother who should be your first port of call on what female agency looks like? How do you navigate that?
To properly answer this question, Urban Woman Magazine asked some women to share how growing up with male centered mothers radicalised them and made them want better.
Read their responses below.
Akuabata*
It hurt me, over and over again.
As a young child, my mother told me “she had prayed to birth only boys”. Yes she said those exact words to me, a young child, without filter, so I was a mistake solely because of my gender, as an only daughter that should tell you how I was treated.
Unlike most only daughters, I was the lesser child but the one who was stressed to do the most chores, even the ones the boys “would or could not”. I could not be as selective of food or certain experiences like my brothers, my preferences were nonexistent mostly, and my welfare when I came of puberty age was externally provided first, then managed by me.
It made me hate a lot of things, but growing up it made me see a lot of patterns that I am averse to being a participant of.
Now she’s more aged, we were never close or had much of a relationship, but even as a boy-loving mom who is traditional and a patriarchy aligned woman, I see and understand the struggles she’s playing to, and as a daughter, I can’t not worry about her, I do that the most.
But I will be building my life around different principles:
– For her: Marriage and family were her top and sole source of community and companionship. She let go of friendships that would have saved her mentally and physically today. Today she is staying married to a man who isn’t hers anymore (they’ve been sleeping apart for years, and he’s been seeing other people for years), she’s staying; for the people (“what will society and church say”), and for herself (because she put so much into it😭😂), even though it is unhealthy, he hates her and expresses it constantly in many different outspoken ways.
– For her, she took a career break that cost her a lot so she could have babies, and her career in the government never recovered from it by virtue of the service-ranking system, only to be living as a legally married but realistically single woman with zero financial resources because she did a joint savings for years with her husband, where he squandered it all.
She made her marriage and patriarchal standards her whole personality, alongside being a kindhearted empath. She had no outside interests or hobbies, and no real friends but a leeching network of fellow church-goers who took advantage of her kind heart, and drained her more than they cared to help her heal.
Things I will not be doing:
– Prioritizing marriage as a life goal over my own financial and career growth that will make sure I can live a better life regardless.
– Living with the idea that family is the top/only source of community – they can be unsafe and unhealthy too. As kids we have seen this play out so much that we do not have a good relationship with both sides of the families, and we really/desperately tried to, obliviously so. Also, my mom is a community person, she had good people around her before him, and she needs community, now she has idle time as a retired woman with no community to keep her sane or psychologically engaged and sated🥺 No one to gist with, her husband is her enemy fighting her with the world.
I will be building and maintaining my friendships and community.
Also, I’m learning to be more financially knowledgeable so I don’t fall for any financial scam, especially the one dressed as joint finances or investments where one party somehow has a non-transparent or unethical upper hand.
Because now mommy has nothing to her name- no property, as it is in her husband’s name alone and her family name (yes she is a first daughter who got properties before her marriage – “for the family”, and now her family doesn’t want her to own any piece of it, despite having their own lives and some individual possessions).
Which means she’s stuck where she is, and she was worth so much more, if not that she did joint savings. Just months before her official retirement she detached from the joint savings, thankfully in that time she was able to buy a land which she can do anything with later on.
MI
My relationship with my mother is great, but I can’t deny the fact that I hold a quarter of resentment towards her choices in life and how it’s affected me and how I see men or relationships and marriage.
She’s male centered and as much as I’ve called her out on it, it hasn’t done much good because she believes the worth or importance of a woman is tied around marriage.
Unfortunately, she condones and believes in some nasty systems of the patriarchy that upholds women’s subjugation in marriage, and binds it with her beliefs of the bible.
Her husband, my father is quite the center of her existence…in the sense that she’d punish herself to please him and make him comfortable but he doesn’t care about her that way.
Recently, she almost lost her sight because she kept ignoring herself to accommodate her husband’s incompetence towards her. Until it got so bad, she couldn’t see and she had to rush to the hospital. Same thing, she did for her bone issues.
She keeps having this hope that the sense of urgency that my father has for himself when he’s sick and how money miraculously comes out for him to treat himself, he’d have the same urgency for her.
She believes in the struggle culture, the suffering in marriage for years and enjoying towards the end.
Recently, she’s coming to terms with the reality that I’m serious about not wanting kids and I’m only considering marriage or dating for companionship, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my decision on being childfree.
Besides the fact that she has no voice of her own and she doesn’t truly know who she is and what she’s capable of, which irritates me to the core, our relationship is good.
I still can’t wash away the resentment I feel towards her over her choice of a husband which affects who I have as a father.
I feel my life and hers, as well as my siblings would have been more healthy, and I wouldn’t be suffering auto immune diseases gotten from trauma today, if she had not let religious psychosis disrupt her thinking processes of choosing a partner and career path.
Angel Nduka-Nwosu is a writer, journalist and editor. She moonlights occasionally as a podcaster on As Angel Was Sayin’. Catch her on all socials @asangelwassayin.