TRUE-LIFE STORIES WITH FUNMILOLA SOTUMINU
I have been reading various true-life stories about couples in your newspaper, but I hardly read stories that centre around women’s problematic or evil association with their men. I am a 50-year-old man, who lived for 40 years without a woman.
Not that I could not afford to get married when my mates were bringing their wives home, but because I could not come to terms with marrying a wife and facing what my father faced in the hands of my stepmother.
My mother died a few days after I clocked three years, and my father had to wait for five more years before he succumbed to pressure from all sides for him to get another wife.
He used to tell me stories about how much my mother loved him, and how happy they were together as husband and wife until death snatched her away from him. For me, however, I never witnessed it.
The only picture of marriage that I saw for the better part of my life was that of my father and my stepmother, and it was a horrible one. She had two sons and one daughter for my father, and practically made him forget that he had a son before them.
I was nine years older than her first son, and as small as I was when she had him, I was the one taking care of him like a nanny. Most times, I would miss school because I had not finished my chores, including preparation of meals.
My father witnessed everything, the cruel treatment, but could not talk. I was initially angry with him, but one day, on my 12th birthday, I overheard him telling my stepmother that I was 12 that day, and that he wanted to take me to church for prayers. It was a Sunday.
Then she started yelling, saying my father himself, would not step out of the house. She held his shirt and even attempted to tear it. She was screaming and asking my father when last he took any of her sons to church on their birthdays.
My father quietly removed the shirt for her and turned back inside his room. That day, I cried and cried and decided to forgive my father for not being able to cater for me the way he would have loved to.
I saw clearly that day, that he had the will, but his wife would not just allow him to come near me. Yet, I was too small to appreciate what my father was really going through. He lost his job along the line, and converted his car to a cab.
He did this for a while until a friend got him another, but less paying job. I was always going to school with tattered clothes when I was with my father. But, somehow, my mother’s people got to know about the inhuman treatment I was receiving in my father’s house and decided to take me away.
I started living with my aunt, my mother’s younger sister. Life was a lot better there, at least, I could concentrate on my studies, even though I had become used to working very hard, which my aunt appreciated.
When my West African Secondary School Certificate Examination was approaching, I told my aunt that I was missing my dad, and that she should give me permission to go and say hello to him.
I had not seen him in two years. She allowed me. I was shocked when I got to our house and saw my father inside his room, crying. For the first time since he married his second wife, he stood up to hug me amidst tears.
Then he said I should sit, that he wanted to share some things with me. He said I was still too young to understand all he was going through in the hands of my step-mother, but begged me to take the children she had for him as my own, not minding their mother’s behaviour towards me or him.
He also told me that when it was time for me to get married, I should study the woman well and not allow people to choose for me. He told me that he was in a spiritual bondage and would need fervent prayers to break loose.
Contrary to what he thought, I understood all that he told me, even if not in details. So I started praying for him, along with my aunt, who was a prayer warrior in her church. Sadly, not long after that visit, my father passed on.
I had just written two papers when the news came. I cried uncontrollably because I had promised myself to take sorrow away from my father’s life, no matter how long it took me.
I committed so much to my studies because I wanted to make it in life and liberate my father. I wanted to take him away from that place where he said he was in bondage, far away from this country, to make him happy again. But I was never able to do any of these because death snatched him away; just about the time I saw the need to urgently intervene, physically and spiritually.
At the burial ceremony, my paternal uncles gave me the privilege of a first son and told me to be in charge of my father’s properties, but my maternal relatives declined there and then.
They said they should allow an older person like my stepmother take over everything because I was still in school. They thanked the family and took me away. That was the last I heard of anyone until I became an accomplished medical doctor.
On my graduation day, when my aunt and some other family members joined me in school to celebrate, I asked her if she knew the whereabout of my younger ones and their mother.
She said no, but that the reason they did not allow me to have anything to do with my father’s properties was to allow me live. She went on to say that, from what they found out about my stepmother, from my father’s relatives, if I had taken any of my father’s belongings, I might not have lived “to witness today.”
She, however, said I was a grown up now, and should know my right from my left, that I could reach out to my younger ones at that time, in line with my late father’s wishes. I did just that, and got very close to the second son in particular.
As God would have it, my stepmother also died mysteriously in her sleep. My brother, her second son, told me that she suddenly started foaming at the mouth around 12am on the day she died, and that she also started calling my name until she gave up.
I could not understand why, but with my little understanding of life, I felt she was calling my name, either to help take care of her children or to forgive her.
Then it became my turn to be forced to get married. My aunt would not let me rest until she innocently allowed me replay my father’s life in a very painful manner.
To be continued…
