Chapter one : BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD
Chapter One: Before I Understood
I was only three and a half years old.
My younger brother was about one and a half.
At that age, I didn't understand what was happening around me. I only knew that something was wrong.
My parents were separating.
I remember both of them wanting to take me and my younger brother with them. There was a lot of noise. I remember crying. I remember being pulled from one side to the other because they both wanted us.
There was blood because the adults were fighting.
I was too young to understand why my parents were fighting or why our family was suddenly falling apart. I only knew that I was scared.
My maternal grandmother was there, and I remember her saying that if we followed our father, we would never become something in life.
Those words stayed somewhere in my memory, even though I was too young to fully understand them.
After the separation, my younger brother and I remained in Anambra State.
My father was a businessman and traveled a lot. He tried to take care of us, but life became difficult. He was often away, and the situation also affected his business.
For some time, we stayed with my father's younger sister and her family. They tried to care for us while my father was away.
But things were changing.
My father eventually went away to marry another woman. We didn't even know that was what he had gone to do.
When he returned with his new wife, whom I will call Auntie Comfort, our lives changed again.
We were still children.
We didn't understand adult problems. We didn't understand marriage, separation, money, or why people made certain decisions.
We only knew that we needed someone to care for us.
Auntie Comfort tried to train us, but growing up in that situation was difficult. There were times when I was beaten when I did something wrong. There were also times when I did things I knew were wrong, including taking things that did not belong to me.
I knew stealing was wrong, but I was a child who was struggling to understand life and survive the way I knew how.
Sometimes, even food became part of the struggle. There were times I was forced to eat food that had been left for too long and no longer smelled fresh.
I didn't have the words to explain how I felt.
I was just a little girl.
But slowly, I was learning something I should never have had to learn so early:
How to survive.
I didn't know it then, but my childhood was already shaping the woman I would one day become.
And this was only the beginning.
