Life as a single parent is going to be tough, though not very tough. After all, almost all married women bring up their children single handedly while their husbands stray and make lame excuses of having to spend long hours in the office in order to meet the needs of their families but in reality, they are out there hitting on young girls, young enough to be their daughters, whom they think are more presentable, prettier and would make great second wives, but all these girls are after is whatever these men's money can buy.
On some days though, raging sexual hormones might drive me crazy. I don’t intend to introduce a new uncle to my son every weekend, or befriend my shamba boy, or worse still, lure a young and sexy college toy boy to a cheap hotel bed where none of my friends will find out, only for him to infect me with an embarrassing STI.
With a kid on my lap, every educated and ‘well’ brought up man will assume that I will be bringing in too much of a burden into the relationship, hence will prefer a decent girlfriend. What he doesn’t know is that the decent girl he cherishes was once in my shoes, but out of shame, she got rid of the pregnancy. Year after year, the perfect gentleman and the decent girl will try to make a baby, but never will they be blessed with one. They will fight, separate, get back together, give adoption a chance, or hire a surrogate, but still, he'll not be fully satisfied. Eventually, he will start acting friendly to a woman like me, the woman he once dismissed, but it might be too late, for if I won't have reached my menopause, his sperm count will barely be enough.
The less educated men from the village have a different presumption: they prefer single mothers. Single mothers know all about handling tough times, and if you put a ring on her, she will never stray; so they believe. If getting a husband is going to be that hard, then maybe I should start thinking about befriending a lesbian.
The rain continues pounding on the roof so hard that all I want is to let it hypnotise me till the very late morning hours. Though I can no longer resist sleep, no matter how hard I try to pave way for it, my body says no. Down there; I am dying to release some fluid. The whole pregnancy has gotten me so excited that I am urinating every time I see or sense water. This has to be one of those nights that you want to take that soda bottle from the corner of the room and urinate in it, so that you can go back to your not so often beautiful sleep.
Finding my way to the switch, I realize that there is a blackout. I should have known better. Lights always go off whenever there’s a light shower, thunder or lightening. I can even count the few times I have been blessed with power over the past few years. Living in a cheap house simply means getting used to living with barely any social amenities: water is always a problem and so are electricity and the drainage system. Our landlady is so mean that she even installed a gadget that bars us from 'wasting' electric power. We can’t use electricity to iron, boil water or power up a computer or HDTV. The only supported devices that can be powered with electricity are the 14 inch black and white TV's, the very small and fake radios-such as mine, mobile phone charging and energy saving bulbs. Whenever one person tries acting smart and screwing up with the connection, we are all forced to stick with the blackout for at least two days. On the third day, she sends a fake electrician to come check out the problem, which he does, but within a couple of hours, the same problem kicks in again.
Here I am, stranded. The rain is likely to cause a small flood thanks to the poor drainage system. Power won’t be back for at least the next 12 hours. I have no candles in the house, my phone battery is almost empty and when I think about the mess created in the public loo outside whenever there is no power, I want to find me a bottle to pee in. That’s exactly what I do.
The feeling is so good. It’s like quenching a thirst after a whole day of trekking without hydrating your body, or passing wind after you have had to hold it in for so long while chairing a public meeting, or climaxing during sex for the first time. Pure ecstasy.
Going back to bed, my phone buzzes, with another one of those Battery Low alerts. The screen lights up the room with a neon blue light transforming my little shack into a small Las Vegas club. I had a friend make fun of it once, asking me whether that was a sign that it had Bluetooth.
As I get back to bed, I notice a couple of stains in my bed. Blood stains.
Almost every girl I know of uses her menses as an excuse to everything: She asks for extra pocket money because you can never say No to a woman with no sanitary towels. She misses her classes for she cannot multi-task between paying attention and handling the pains. She takes a day off from work because the pain is unbearable, and nothing in life is as important as her health.
I call up Andre to try and explain the situation; that I can’t make it to work today, because I am ill. I don’t like using my womanhood as an excuse to not meet my responsibilities, but today, this is more than I can handle.
He says that I have to be there.
“There is so much work to be done and the other girl just sent me a text saying that she is on her period.”
“On her period? I never take a day off when I'm on my period. Why don't you ask her to come in at least later in the day? Coz I just can’t make it today.”
“You don’t understand. Tasha’s cramps are really painful-o, and I don't want to be the one rushing her to the emergency room now. Just get your ass in here or you consider yourself laid off.”
“So she can take a day off because her cramps are more painful than those of any other woman in the world right?” I ask him, pissed.
“Neema, this is not a matter of discussion. Are you coming in or not?”
“The thing is that I am also on my period, and…”
“No, I can’t have the both of you away. Tasha’s situation is serious.”
“I had no idea that you are her fallopian tubes to know that.”
“What?”
I don’t answer back. I am pissed, but I just can’t afford letting this job slip off my hands, not now, but I also can't bring myself to apologise for something I am not sorry for.
For a few seconds, there is a disturbing silence on both sides of the line. He finally breaks it by repeating his final decision,
“I’ll be waiting.”
then hangs up.
I recall the first day the bloody flow paid me a visit. I thought that I had pneumonia, or something serious, one of those rare diseases that you contact and die a few minutes later, like anthrax. I was so very scared of telling anyone, for they would think that I had been misbehaving. That's how stupid kids who never get to study Home Science are.
The weird infection had left my limb joints feeling as though I had been taking a week’s long hike to Mount Kilimanjaro during the very cold month of August. Lucky enough, it was on a Sunday, during the December holidays, and no one really cares about anyone's business during the day that God set aside for all of His creation to sit back, chill out and enjoy their me-time.
The pain I feel in my stomach right now reminds me of the one time I had diarrhoea. You feel like emptying your bowels every two seconds but, nothing ever gets to come out. If only I had a five star bathroom, I could spend the whole day sitted on top of the toilet. Yet, nothing feels as pleasurable as passing wind, which happens every couple of minutes. I don't really know what this is, but had I been less smart, I could have no doubt believing that someone had cast a spell on me.
This pain I assume is the exact pain, or ever worse, like the one a young girl feels after she has stolen her grandma's knitting needles and used them to knit out an unwanted baby from her uterus.
It's during days like these that I choose to not to eat or drink anything, for I can’t stand rushing to and fro the toilet every five minutes, not forgetting 99% of the time, I usually don’t use hygienic sanitary towels. Despite all this, I have never skipped a single class or missed out on performing my chores.
On the brighter side, this punishment only last for a day; and this is the day.
Four days later, the flow is yet to disappear.
At first I felt glad, glad that there had been no pregnancy, and my life would finally be back to normal. My friend Google calls it self-impregnation; the feeling you get when you deeply believe that you are pregnant such that you start experiencing all of the symptoms despite there being no foetus in the womb.
A part of me is excited that I can get my life back on track, but the other half feels as though I have just killed my Ethan. The idea of mothering a young boy had scared and excited me at the same time. Now that he is no more, and never had been, I feel confused, but somehow relieved.
Why then had I been experiencing all of those symptoms? Had it been as a result of poor diet, or being very depressed? It’s hard to tell whether I had been depressed, for when depression becomes a part of your daily routine; it ceases to be depression, but instead becomes your definition of life. I have never been happy, so the only thing that can depress me is happiness: the kind of happiness that peeps through the window like a ghost and by the time I open my arms to embrace it, it has already vanished.
I know I was pregnant, or so have made myself believe. There is no way I could have made up all those symptoms in my head, especially considering that I had been with a man while I was ovulating: And this bloody heavy flow, coming from nowhere and sticking around for an entire week! This is so not the flow that I have grown au fait with in the last couple of years.
My mind tells me that I should see a doctor, the kind of doctor who is credible enough and lacks the aggressiveness of passing word around that I was inviting boys into my panties without first doing a background check on them, and comparing it with mine. I would hate it were she to use my personal medical files to conduct a research and base her findings on my sexual behaviour. At the end of the year, she and the rest of her fellow medical doctors would share my and other girl's files with the ministry of health, present our files to the government as evidence that the girl-child still needs protection, beg for an increase of condom supply in colleges and try to push forward for the legalisation of safe and affordable abortion.
What I don’t want is a doctor to squeeze me off my bits of cash, but what I really need is a bit of energy to drag me into the Mama Wangari’s kiosk to get me a 10 shillings phone credit for my phone and do more traumatic Google research. The last couple of days have been taking a strain on me. It’s obvious that this is no ordinary menses but an extra ordinary condition, a miscarriage maybe; a thought I have been irresistibly trying to fight off my very intelligent brain.
Had I grown closer to my mother, and had she been more open to her daughter, she would have prepared me for all this, and educated me on everything I needed to know about transforming from a girl into a woman. She is not to blame for any of this though. I'm certain that she must have been waiting for the right time to do the talking, like on the night before my wedding. Or, she may have presumed that being the smart girl I am, I would have read all about it in books, heard about it from friends and teachers or, researched about it from the internet.
Had I mentioned this piece of news to Dru, he could have had me blacklisted from all the male gender. I had let him know that I was a virgin, of which he doubted and proved me wrong. Then there would have been this pregnancy; that pregnancy, which he would also have doubted, and yet again, he would have won for the pregnancy was no longer verifiable.
This must be a sign, a sign that God has listened to my cries and after many years of abandonment, has finally come to my rescue. He is finally showing up to rescue me from public ridicule, abandonment by parents, dismissal by potential husbands and giving me a chance to experience a bright future.
Still, it could have been another form of a sign. Like a sign that I will never be able to carry a baby in my womb again, that it is a punishment from God for sleeping around, or a prophesy come true as prophesied by my father; that I was a foolish woman whose future was doomed.
#4
She’s a baby girl!
Another stupid woman in the family lineage
She'll be as stupid as her mother; never will she amount to anything
At first, she feared him;
Walked out when he walked in, ran away when he came her way
She had to forget his hugs, his smile, his touch, his compliments and later; his presence
She watched as her skin cracked, walked to the market barefoot like the homeless and mentally insane
She had to keep her hair short otherwise it would get lice
She forgot all about having friends, looking good, feeling good and being a lady
Every other month she would pump in dirty clothes to suck her fertility
Someday somehow, she had to let him go; for good
The day she spread wide her innocent legs to a man his age…just to have a meal…a basic need
Then, the desire to be daddy’s little girl died
‘May thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread…’
At one time in my life, I had wondered what it meant to have a daily bread. The first thought that crossed my mind as a little girl was having Supaloaf for breakfast, hence would get really mad at God when mama made us porridge for breakfast, or whenever she had us eat boiled sweet potatoes and tea. Having never gone a single meal without food, I couldn’t understand why it was necessary to pray for food, but that was until I saw the grieving images of the Turkana people dying of drought and famine. Not long after, I too became a part of the starved.
Stating that I always had a daily bread doesn’t mean that I had the right kind of bread. There are different kinds of breads. There is the white bread which tastes great but has loads of yeast and sugars that make me sick; there is the yellow bread which tastes great too but smells really awful; and there is the brown bread which tastes really bad but is highly nutritional. The kind of bread I grew up eating was none of these three. It was both bad tasting and nauseating. After all, isn’t that what every parent exposes their child to when they send them off to a far off prison that takes in the name of a boarding school?
Though I loathed the prison-like boarding school, at least there too was enough bad tasting and sickening daily bread.
College life however exposed me to a different taste of daily bread; bread that only came to being ever so rarely that for the first time in my life, I understood what it really means to not be hungry, but to be starving. I watch as many girls covet my petite physique, congratulate me for knowing how to stay in shape, but if only they knew what my secret diet is, they would donate all of their left-over’s into my beggar’s plate.
At first, it was okay.
Then it got bad.
Later on, it became unbearable.
When you are hungry, you can choose what to eat and when to eat it. If you are starving, that's something else. You eat anything, and everything that your eyes sees and your hands get hold of.
Starvation is like a chronic mental disorder. When you are starved, you can barely chew or swallow lest you increase the intensity of the pain. The worst part is that you have to deal with systematic fantasies of you dining in a four star café or, taking part in a food eating competition. For the past couple of nights, all I have been dreaming of is hosting a cooking show, and having to eat everything I prepare for my guests. Due to this, my beddings really smell nasty now that I drool all over them whenever I fall asleep on an empty stomach.
When I first came to campus, I thought that this was to be it, the Big IT. I would have the freedom, my own space, live a stress free life away from my father’s criticism, eat all the foods I never had a chance of eating before, put on some good amount of weight in all the right places, and above all, get plenty of me time.
I ended up getting the exact opposite.
You know, to enjoy life, be happy and contented, you need money. Not a lot of it, just enough. Enough is what I never had
. God knows that I did my best to get enough. Calling my father, trying to apply for part-time jobs, marketing my writing skills to magazines out there, but still, there was hardly anything forthcoming.
When the whole world turned against me, I resulted to swallowing my pride and regaining the strength to make yet another one of those most hated phone calls. I always tried my best to not hit the nail on the head immediately, but rather use a more diplomatic approach. Call my mother, talk to her, then ask her to pass the phone to my sisters, then to my father, and, after I was done saying hi to everyone, I would introduce the financial aspect of the conversation. My phone credit wouldn't last for long, and so the call would be disconnected before I was done explaining how much I spend buying a cup of tea and two slices of bread for breakfast, a plate of rice and beans for lunch or a plate of ugali and sukumawiki for supper. I would wait, wait, and wait for a couple of minutes, to a number of hours and then to a couple of days, for him to call back.
I would then call again, this time, using borrowed credit from my mobile network. I would skip the greetings part but instead go straight to the point. Still, I would have to wait patiently for more minutes, hours and days for him to call back, or apologise in form of an M-Pesa text message.
Then I would result into begging for credit from a friend in order to send him an SMS, but still, nothing.
At last, I would resolve into a Flashback.
After all my hardwork, it became clear that I had become more of a nagging mistress than my father's daughter.
What did he expect me to do? Start sleeping around with boys for food, or sleep with lecturers for money? Or maybe he was under the assumption that if he gave me money, I would do drugs. After all, isn’t it much better to die of starvation than of drugs?