CRYING BABY
"Hey, man! Look. It's the crying baby again. Does her eyes ever dry?" A guy says as I pass by them.
"Hey, snobby. You want to share your problems with me? My house is just nearby." His friend says, but I pay no attention to them. I am used to people calling me all sorts of funny names. I can take the funny names, what I can't wait to hear is someone referring me to as the daughter of. I can break my legs running away to avoid hearing the last name. I have always been the talk of this neighborhood since childhood, and before you start wondering why that is, let me introduce myself.
My name is Tessa Angeline, I just turned eighteen a few weeks ago. Practically I have nothing except for those two beautiful names of mine. No sir name. No father. No happy family. No friends. No papers. No descent job. I am one very hopeless human being.
I am born and raised as the only child of my alcoholic and abusive mother. Ever since I was born, I don't have even just a single happy memory of my mother. All I remember was her yelling, shouting, scoldings, and beatings even before I could barely differentiate between right and wrong, or right and left. I survived by mare chances until I learned to croll, as my mother would leave me in the house and go out the whole day. As soon as I learned to croll, I became a community kid. I would croll to the neighboring homes and stay there the whole day. That way, I got to eat with the kids of the owners of the houses I went to, and sometimes some people would be kind enough to change my diapers. In the evening, I would croll back to our house, or someone would just pity me and take me back.
When I was barely four years, I had to learn to feed myself, else hunger would have mercilessly killed me. The only thing my mother was good at was and still is alcohol, and bringing different men to the house, and taking her frustrations all on me. As a way of survival, I started walking to the neighboring homes again, this time not begging for food or some used rags to cover my nakedness, but to ask for small jobs that I could do to earn one or two coins to buy food. To some, especially the rich, they send me away like a sick dog whose main aim was to infect them with my disease. To some, I learned to forgive and forget as time went by, but there some whom I still curse for one or two despicable things they did to me. Likewise, there were good and kind at heart people who understood why I was doing what I was doing, and they helped me. Everytime I went to their houses, there were some dirty utensils set aside for me to wash, some soft clothes for me to wash, a compound to clean or a house to mob. In return, a few coins and an additional plate of food from the most generous was what I went home with.
With what I was getting, I was able to enroll myself to school, though late, but eventually, I thought a door to chasing my dreams had just opened. But that hope came crumbling down the moment my mother learned I was old enough to take up jobs and earn. She made me the bread winner of the house. Most of what I got went taking care of both of us in terms of food, and sometimes, she would just take away all my little savings and waste them on alcohol. When I was getting to the fifth grade, I was not only the bread winner, but the whole burden of managing the house was bestowed on me by my mother.
Life was nowhere close to easy at all for me, but I struggled. I would go to school in the morning, stay the whole day without food, go back in the evening and take up easy chores from my neighbours, pass by the shop and buy food for that day, then go home to cook and do the house chores, including washing my only single pair of uniform. During the weekends, I would go to hawk fruits on the busy roads. After doing all that, all I got in the end was for my mother to come home all drunk and munch on that hard earned food with a random man. Sometimes she would just beat me up for not cooking a balanced diet. If she found me washing her clothes at night, I would receive the beating of my life.
The eight years of my junior school finally passed, and I was lucky to get to my senior school. This was the climax of my problems. Getting bursaries to fund my education was the toughest job of all. Only God how I struggled for these years. I tried, but in the end, I failed to raise money for the final exam registration. I had some, but my mother found out my save without my knowledge and stole it all. That is how I said goodbye to education. All my dreams and hopes went down the drain. I had prayed to get that certificate, I had wished to be called at least a highschool graduate, but none of that was possible. All because of the woman I call mother.
Two years later, I have managed to put up a small grocery store that is only enough to feed ourselves and pay some bills. I am still feeding her and her men. I am still bearing with her insults and maltreatment, not to mention her bad reputation. Nobody ever wants to see her near their house. She is nicknamed all sorts of horrible names. A whore, a home wrecker, a prostitute. Back in my highschool days when I felt like I could not bear with her anymore, I went and talked to her two sisters to take me in. I was so fend up with her, but woe unto me, nobody wanted the daughter of a whore in their house. None of them wanted the daughter of a prostitute to be among their disciplined children. I suppose they thought I am just like my mother, which I am not. I am suffocated by her deteriorating behavior, but the fact that she is my mother, is the sole reason why I have stayed by her side. I have bared everything, holding on to the hope that one day, she will come back to her senses. But will that day ever come? What if it never does?