I am the last of five children. My parents had me late in their marriage so their first child was almost 20 years older than me. I was still very young when my oldest sister married her first husband. She took me to live with them at a point in time.

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There was no peace in that house. She and her husband fought over everything. In the end they got a divorce and my sister moved to Accra. She got into a new relationship and had a baby. When she came home to visit our parents with her man and their new baby, she convinced our parents to allow her to take me to Accra. My parents agreed. Little did they know they were sending me to hell.

My sister had the worst temperament I’ve ever experienced in my life. She was nice and sweet when she wanted to be, but on the flip side she could be fearless, disrespectful and had the strength for fights. I was ten years old at that time and so I was learning to adapt to my new environment but she just wasn’t patient with me.

I was once pounding fufu whilst she stirred it. She felt I wasn’t pounding it well so she angrily grabbed the pestle and hit my head with it.

After a while, she opened a shop in front of the house to sell provisions. I took care of the shop after school each day. One day she realized I had eaten some of the toffees in the shop. The moment she found out she asked me to go look for money to pay for the toffees or I shouldn’t come home. I walked from Labadi to Alajo to take the money from our brother who was learning to be a mechanic. My brother couldn’t believe his ears when I told him what had happened. He gave me the money to give to our sister. When I came home with the money, she took it without flinching.

I tried running away from home once but didn’t succeed. Back in the year 2000, phones were not easily accessible so I had no means of communicating with my parents. I lived in constant fear and always walked on eggshells around her so I wouldn’t trigger her. Along the line, she got married to the man and had another child. They decided to move to another city so I had to go back to our mom to allow them to settle first before coming back for me.

Two years later, I went back to her although I swore never to. This time around the beating and maltreatment was times ten. Every blow she gave me was intended to maim me. Her slaps were meant to blind me. Even neighbors advised me to run away.

One day, she gave me a list of things to do before she came back from an outing. They were so many that I forgot to do one of them. She had asked me to take out spoiled food from the fridge and trash it. That food was in a ceramic bowl. When she came back and realized that the food was still in the fridge, she called me to the kitchen and smashed the bowl on my head. I had a cut and was bleeding but she went to sleep and left me there. A good neighbor took me to his room to clean the cut and dress the wound.

Not long afterwards, she saw me talking to a guy in our area. She assumed the guy was my boyfriend. She beat me so much that I thought I wouldn’t survive that day. After that, she plugged in a hair curling wand and said she wanted to give me a mark that would remind me to stay away from boys. She burned my leg with the hot curler and dragged me outside to show her the guy’s house. I honestly didn’t know where he lived. After walking for a while and insisting that I didn’t know the place, she left me on the streets and went back home saying I should only come back when I was ready to talk.

I found a nearby church and slept on the stairs in front of the church. Somewhere in the middle of the night, her husband came looking for me and took me back home.

Sometimes she would strip me naked and then lock me outside for all to see my nakedness. After a while, I became so used to the beatings that I could take multiple slaps across my face without moving an inch or crying. This infuriated her so much that she graduated from just beating to biting me on my back when she didn’t get the reaction she wanted from me. If I forgot to put food in the fridge and the food went bad, she would make sure I ate the food till it finished.

I went to school one day and came back to meet an almost empty apartment. Apparently they had moved back to Accra without informing me. She said I was in secondary school so I couldn’t move with them. She expected me to live alone in that apartment at age sixteen. How I came out of that situation unscathed is just by the grace of God.

My sister damaged me as a child. I became extremely timid and jumpy. She made me feel worthless. The effects of what she did are still very evident in my life even till now. I can’t rest even when I overwork myself.

Three Months After Our Breakup, He Got Married

Unfortunately she didn’t live long enough for me to ask her why she did all that to me. I have a lot of questions I wish she was here to answer but she belongs to the other side now. Dead people don’t talk so I’m here living with the questions.
#MyChildhoodTrauma

—Eno

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