Wounds Heal, Scars Remain
Abuse, silence, and the scars that remain.
I wonder sometimes what it is like to grow up in a home devoid of violence. Not necessarily one filled with love. Just one free of emotional abuse and mental manipulation. I did not grow up in such a place, and I occasionally wonder what that has done to me as a human being and as a woman.
When my mum got married in June 1997, a week to my eighth birthday, I was ecstatic. I was going to have a new father. A second father. A charming, generous one. The thought of living in a home with both parents made me giddy. I scratched out my surname, Egbedi, on some of my books and replaced it with Taju or Tajudeen so that it read Fejiro Tajudeen or Fejiro Taju. Taju is short for Tajudeen. I wasn’t always Hadassah. Growing up, I was addressed by my native name, Fejiro, which is also my first name – Oghenefejiro. It means God is worthy of praise.
One day, my aunt, Oghogho saw one of the books that had my new surname and commented in Pidgin English, “You cancel your papa name? Body dey catch you.” Which can loosely be translated as “You struck out your father's name? You must be feeling quite happy.” She was being sarcastic but she was right, I was pretty excited. I didn't think my father would mind. I only saw him occasionally when he’d pay me a surprise visit in school. Or on days when aunt Oghoghor would take me to see him at his workplace after I’d persistently asked to see him.
Before he married my mum, my stepfather was gentle and sweet. Whenever he visited, he never came empty-handed. He would buy me candy, ice cream, snacks, or a toy. Something. Anything. He was funny and charismatic and made everyone around him laugh. He was good looking too, I think. I get why my mum fell for him, why she chose him from among the suitors she had at the time. She could have married Brother Marvis from our church’s home fellowship, the one who lived two streets behind ours, but she didn’t.
Like Brother Marvis, my stepfather was a church brother. He and my mum were in the ushering department. That is how they met. I think they hit it off almost immediately, courted for about four months and got married. He was 24. Mum, 28. They were in love and happy. I moved in with them from my grandparents’ home about four months after they got married. My mum was already pregnant with my brother, Ayo, by then.
The early years were bliss. My stepfather was sweet. He’d take me out on Saturdays to go shop for storybooks and chocolates. I loved books. I was an avid reader. So we got new books and Mars chocolate bars every weekend. It became our thing, a ritual for some stepfather-stepdaughter bonding. I liked him. I liked him a lot. I especially liked that we were a family.
When he got his orange Mercedes 280 a few years later, he’d drop me off at school and pick me up at the end of the day. When he couldn’t do that anymore, he hired a driver for me. It was pretty cool to suddenly be living a life that I only ever saw other kids live when it was just me and my mum.
Then things changed. Not all at once, but little by little we began to see new layers of this man - as a husband, as a father. He had anger issues. The measure with which he’d be happy and cheery was the same measure of his rage. He did a pretty good job of hiding this part of himself, revealing it to us in small doses over time.
With me, he started with punishments like “kneel, face the wall, and hands up.” I’d be in that position until I couldn’t feel my hands. Isn’t that the point of the punishment? Then there were occasional slaps. Heavy knocks on the head for mistakes or misbehaviours expected of a child. I especially got a good beating whenever I did not come first in class, which became often. My grades dwindled as I moved up classes and maths got more complicated. Once, I came 2nd place in class and cried all the way home from school in anticipation of the punishment and flogging I’d receive.
The first indelible beating happened when I was 11 years old. I had just finished my home lesson for the evening and had packed up the plastic table and chairs that my teacher and I often used. My cousin, Vero, arrived home from my Mum’s convenience shop. She’d moved in with us a few months after my brother was born. Vero helped with house chores, but her job was mainly to man the shop every day but Saturday, when she went to school.
On this day, she let herself in through the kitchen back door when she arrived. She must have knocked, then pulled the door and realised it wasn’t locked. When she came in, she headed straight to the living room to greet my stepfather, as is the norm. A few minutes later, I was standing in front of him in the living room, unable to give him a satisfactory answer to the question, “Why was the back door not locked?”
The back door ought to always be locked. For security reasons. It was one of the house rules. Our neighbourhood wasn’t unsafe. Armed robbers had attacked us at our former home which was not far from here, but not here. We never had or heard of a burglary or robbery in our years of living in this place. But he was quite concerned about having the door locked at all times. He’d said it often enough for us to know it was a time bomb. And so we always made sure it was locked. On this day, however, it wasn’t.
I think I tried to explain that for the past hour I had been having my lesson and hadn’t had time to go into the kitchen to notice that the back door wasn’t locked. Tick tick tick. He didn’t listen to any of my explanations, or apologies, or my insistence that it wouldn’t happen again. Tick tick tick. I pleaded with him not to beat me, but he didn’t listen to that, either. Boom!
He must have started with a belt. When I grabbed it and held on, he proceeded to kicks, slaps, punches, then chairs. The plastic chairs that served my tutor and I, that I had just packed in became his tools for corporal punishment. My stepfather doesn’t like the subject of his wrath to have any form of freedom or composure when he is inflicting pain. I observed this over time. He wants you cornered, on your back, and afraid. I think he fed off the fear, the sound of the whip, the screaming. The bruised or torn flesh. The blood. How much wound he’d inflicted determined when he’d stop. Or maybe a demon just took over him at such times.
By the time he started hitting me with the plastic chairs, I was on my back, screaming. He was striking me with so much force that the chair split. But that didn’t stop him. Every time the chair came down on me and broke, he’d pick up parts of it and continue. The sharp, jagged edges of the broken chairs tore into my skin as he brought them down over and over. When he was done, there were shards of broken plastic all over the rug and an 11-year-old on the floor bleeding from the places where her body had been broken.
Vero helped me up and supported me with her body so we could go to our room. I limped the whole way there and collapsed on the floor. Body badly bruised. Skin swollen red with belt marks and bleeding cuts. There were plastic shards buried in the open wounds I now had on my legs and Vero carefully pulled them out while I screamed in pain and horror.
I cannot quite remember my mother’s reaction when she came home and found me looking like I’d been in an accident. She must have consoled me. She must have said something along the line of “Doh.” Meaning “Sorry.” Perhaps even continued the first aid treatment from whatever point Vero stopped. But I do not remember. If she confronted her husband over the beating, it was not to my knowledge. But if she had, she’d have said, “Honey, why didn’t you use a cane?” Because whenever he’d want to beat my brother, Vero, or me in her presence, she’d insist he uses a cane. Less injuries. But canes were never enough for him. They didn’t invoke enough fear. Didn’t do enough damage. Didn’t satiate his rage.
For about two weeks following the beating over the unlocked back door, I had to be driven to school and picked up after because I struggled to walk. I had to be dropped right in front of my class and helped up the stairs to get in. My classmates thought I had been in an accident. I told the true story only to Meleah, my best friend. In the weeks after the beating, she’d often tease me by calling me a “handicap.” “The disabled is able,” she’d say of my limping, and we’d laugh. It was the name of a show on our local TV station that chronicled the lives of physically challenged people.
On Sundays, I had to wear clothes that covered the cuts and bruises so people wouldn’t ask questions. Left to me, I didn’t care. I wanted people to see them and pry. I especially wanted them to do so when my mother and her husband (the title I now refer to him by) were present. I wanted to see how they’d react; what answers they’d give. When a close family friend would see my bruises and confront her, my mother would say in Pidgin, “She no dey hear word.” She doesn’t listen.
It was my mother they’d always confront. They all feared her husband. She always took his side. I guess she believed that that was what a good wife does; she honours her husband by making excuses for his behaviour. Even when she was the one with the bruises. Thanks to a prevailing culture of silence owing to socio-cultural constraints, and a flawed logic that dignifies women’s ability to endure all forms of abuse. I wish I could have told my mother that long-suffering in the face of domestic violence and abuse is not a virtue.
Over two decades later, I have two visible scars from that beating. One is shaped like a protozoa on my right leg just below my knee. The other, a fairly long stroke on the left side of my left leg just below my knee. Those were the places from which Vero picked shards of plastic. What we didn’t know at the time was that in a few years, I’d be the one tending to her, gathering pieces of a broken bar stool off the rug in the living room and picking her wet, bloodied clothes off the bathroom floor.
PS: My mum is an amazing person. She is actually my best friend now. We’ve worked out so many things over the years. I don’t understand or agree with all her decisions and choices, but I’ve realised our parents are just people too. And sometimes, they make bad decisions. This often depends on how enlightened and knowledgeable they are. There’s a common saying in pidgin where I come from - Na where person know reach, e dey do. Which translates to - You act according to what/how much you know or you can’t do more than you know, or the extent of your knowledge determines the boundary of what you accept.
Also, I wrote this piece in 2020. It was my submission in an essay workshop Write Your Heart Out hosted by Roy Peter Clark for The Poynter Institute. My friend, Jennifer, is the only person I’ve shared it with before now, besides RPC.
I wasn’t going to publish a newsletter today because I was not done with what I was working on for today. Then I remembered I had this and a few other unpublished stories. So here we are!
I know this sort of story is not peculiar to me. Many Nigerian children have similar stories. Many grew up thinking it was normal to be treated this way by parents, siblings, relatives, or guardians. It’s not. Many have grown to repeat these same treatments on their children or wards, hence perpetrating cycles of abuse and trauma. It is not right. Let’s do better.
I want to say more, but I have a wedding to attend and I am running late. So toodles! Do leave a comment, I appreciate you engaging with what I put out.
This was so heartbreaking to read.