I don’t know how to explain the relationship between my mother and me without sounding harsh. Sometimes I tell myself I’m being too emotional. Other times, I feel I’m being too forgiving. But every time Bee, my mother, calls me, begging and crying, something tightens inside my chest—a mixture of pity, anger, and memories I wish I could forget.

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My earliest memories of childhood are a blend of confusion and loneliness. My father, Charles, left my mother when I was still young. People say their breakup was messy. My mother cursed him, screamed at the sky, even threatened to take her own life if he ever married again. I was too little to understand the rage, but old enough to feel unsafe.

She took me away from him. Not because she loved me so deeply, but because she wanted to punish him. I became the weapon.

From there, life became a blur of strange uncles, drunken weekends, and nights I slept at the neighbors’ house because Bee had gone somewhere and forgotten I existed. I remember being only fourteen when I began to understand what “a different man every night” meant. I wasn’t naïve. I could hear the voices, the laughter, the arguments… all happening in the one-room space we lived in.

Charles still sent money. He still called to check on me. But my mom would lie. She’d tell everyone my dad abandoned us, that he never paid my school fees, that he left her for another woman. Meanwhile, I was starving. Sometimes the only meal I got in a day was *gari* soaked at the neighbor’s house. Yet Bee walked around shamelessly acting like the world had wronged her.

The day I broke down and told my father, “Please take me away,” I wasn’t planning it. He had come to visit, and the sight of him made the dam burst. I told him everything—that I wasn’t going to school anymore, that I was hungry, that I was scared, that I couldn’t live with my mom anymore.

The anger on my father’s face terrified me. I had never seen him like that. He turned to my mom, “Why is the girl not in school? What do you use all the money I send you for?” My mom just shrugged, as if my life wasn’t collapsing around her. Then my dad said, “Jane, go inside. Bring your things. You’re leaving with me.”

I ran. I packed everything I owned, which wasn’t much. A few clothes, my school books, and a hairbrush missing half its teeth. I expected my mother to fight—just a little. A “Don’t take my daughter.” A “Where are you taking her?” Something. But she stood there. Silent. Watching. Smiling faintly. She didn’t hug me. She didn’t ask where we were going. She didn’t tell me she loved me. She didn’t even look sad. That day, something inside me shattered to pieces—something only a mother could have healed, but mine chose not to.

My dad wasn’t a perfect man. He was a truck driver, always on the road, always in another town. He didn’t know how to raise a teenage girl. But he tried. That was enough. He took me to meet Aunt Afia, his girlfriend, the woman who would eventually become my stepmother. Aunt Afia hugged me like she had been waiting her whole life to meet me. “This is my daughter I’ve been talking about,” my father said.

“Wow,” she smiled, “I thought she was small. She’s so beautiful,” Aunt Afia said. She pulled me to her side, and somehow, just like that, I felt I belonged with her. Aunt Afia became my safe place. She fed me, loved me, disciplined me gently, protected me fiercely. She treated me better than my own mom ever did. She told everyone I was her first daughter, even after she had two biological children with my dad. Her love healed me in ways therapy probably would have. She didn’t just take care of me; she re-parented me. She made me believe I was worthy of being loved.

I lived with Aunt Afia while my dad came in when he was in town. He would live with us for a few weeks and travel again, but Aunt Afia was always there for me. I grew. I flourished. I went to secondary school, then the university. I found work. I found my footing. I became the woman my mother was too wounded, too bitter, too reckless to raise. Now I am grown. Independent. Stable. But the past never really leaves you.

Out of nowhere, my mom called one day. I don’t even know how she got my number, since she didn’t look for me after my dad took me away. She calls almost every day. She acts as if she never abandoned me. She talks like a mother who raised me with her blood and sweat. She wants support—emotional, financial, everything. She has three more children by three different men. None of them stay. None of them help. And somehow she believes I am responsible for all of them.

When I say, “Ma, I don’t have money right now,” she starts crying, “I know it’s your father. He has poisoned you against me. After everything I went through because of him. He beat me. He cheated. He divorced me because of that Afia woman. Remember what he did to me.”

That’s the thing. I remember everything, but not the way she wants me to. I remember the nights she left me alone. The weekends she didn’t return. The strange men who spent nights in our single room and disappeared in the morning. I remember the insults she told people about my father. The moment she watched me walk away without blinking.

My father doesn’t even know we talk. He doesn’t know I send her money sometimes. He doesn’t know I still feel guilty for a woman who feels no guilt toward me. Sometimes I wonder, who am I trying to save? Her? Or the small, crying girl I used to be, the one who begged her father to take her away? Bee is my mother, but she is also my wound, and as much as I want to heal her, I know that very soon I might stop trying.

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I cannot keep mothering the woman who refused to mother me. I cannot keep giving to someone who only remembers I exist when she needs money. I cannot keep being her emotional crutch when she was never my emotional shelter. People say blood is thicker than water, but sometimes, water is the reason blood starts to drown you, and I’m tired of drowning.

—Jane

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