Ade and Ayo VI: The Devoted Wife

TRIGGER WARNING: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Naomi

I raised my daughter to be like her father. He was the person I loved and looked up to the most. He was strong, ambitious, intelligent, wise, but most of all, he was a predator. I wanted Ayo to not be like me, a victim to her circumstances, prey. I wanted her to be like the man I married; cunning, loyal, and a danger to all who would ever try to destroy her. It was something I always tried to show her: "Don't be like your mother, don't be weak, my darling."

When I first met my husband, we were both young trying to figure our way through life. He came from a poor family, and my father was the chief in our village. My parents disapproved of our meetings. We would meet in secret, exchanging cakes and sweet treats, while my younger sister was on the lookout. He was a sweet boy, but he was smart, cunning, a long-thinker. I liked that about him, that he knew what he wanted out of life.

I was a young girl from a royal family, I had been raised to be a good wife, to be supportive of my future husband- who was to be a boy from another royal family. The only talent I had was my art, but even that I couldn't pursue fully. In my mother's eyes, art was a foolish endeavour for a girl of my social standing. My husband didn't think that, he loved my drawings, so he would save his allowance to buy me paints and pencils so I could explore my talent.

As soon as we were old enough, my husband and I ran away from home and got married. It was one of those things I did where I felt I had thought it through; he was the man I loved, and he was rescuing me from potentially marrying a stranger: I adored him for it. However, when we began our lives in the city and he started going to law school while I had to stay home and nurse my many miscarriages (alone), that adoration turned into resentment.

I resented him because he got to escape the graveyard that was our home. I saw it as the place where I had lost so many of my children. He never gave up on me though, on us, he supported me throughout his school days, and even as he started his career. He quickly became very successful, and moved us into a new home; where we made and raised Ayo. My husband had always had a temper, but when Ayo came, that temper turned into violence. We would fight, sometimes physically. I refused to be one of those women who let themselves be beat on without fighting back. So I would fight back. That is what we raised her in, we raised her in violence.

I made sure that Ayo would never bear witness to these fights, my daughter would never see me fight her father, she would never see her father fight me. I wanted her to trust both her father and I with everything she had. I also didn't want her to think that it was normal for a man and his wife to fight each other the way we fought. I knew it wasn't normal, but I couldn't leave my husband. I depended on him for a lot of things, Ayo worshipped him, and I loved and needed him. So we would fight, but I would always forgive him and go back to raising his daughter and taking care of his home. Being someone's wife is all I had been raised to be, and I would be a good wife, but in the same breath, I would teach my daughter to be nothing like me.

When Ayo met Ade, she told us about it first. She didn't have many friends my daughter, so as her parents she confided in us. She told us there was a boy she liked but I didn't think much of it. My daughter has liked many boys in her life. She brought him home and introduced us to him, Ayo knew the rules, she wasn't allowed to date anyone we didn't know. My husband had liked Ade, said he was charming and a good boy. I had thought he was too cheeky and outgoing to be with my sweet girl but she liked him, so I forced myself to tolerate him. I had thought, 'How serious can it be? She is only twenty two anyway.'

It didn't take long for me to start taking it seriously though; when, a month into the relationship she told us she was moving in with him. Like any mother, I warned her against it, I pleaded with her to be careful, told her it was a bad idea to invest so much in someone she barely knew. I remember what she said to me clearly, "But mama, you also invested into papa quite early, he was your first love, wasn't he? Ade is mine."

Her words had filled me with dread. I didn't want Ayo to ever think like me. However, she was her father's daughter, and she was stubborn. So I let her go, and I prayed for my daughter. I prayed that the man she was living with was nothing like her father, at least.

She came back after two months or so, her face swollen and tear-streaked. I welcomed my daughter with open arms, helped her clean up and I told her plainly that she would never go back there. I hoped that it would be enough to stop her, Ayo had never been the rebellious sort. I helped her hide the bruising from her father, who I am sure would have had Ade arrested had he known. Ayo told me that it was a drunken mistake, she insisted; "Mama, Ade is not a violent man. He is good, and kind, and he has always been gentle and respectful with me. He probably did drugs, that's why he was like that."

I gave her the speech I think most mothers give their daughters, "You shouldn't have to plead his case in front of me, you shouldn't have to defend him. He shouldn't hit you, ever, he shouldn't try to force himself on you. Drunken actions are sober thoughts, the drugs simply unmasked who he really is. A man who loves you would never lay hands on you Ayo, sober or not." She gave me a long hard look, and I saw in her eyes a word she would never vocalise: hypocrite.

She stayed with us for a while then she was lonely, depressed. It hurt to see her like that, irritable and angry at everyone. I told her father that she had broken up with Ade, he was sympathetic to her burst outs, and we spent all our time nursing her back to health. One day, she started being happy again, she would smile at her phone and suddenly became secretive. She started having sleepovers at a 'friend's house' for days on end. My husband, of course, wasn't concerned, he was just happy that Ayo was back to normal. I was very worried. I knew that the friend was Ade, and I was scared on her behalf.

I didn't know how scared I should have been though, until the day she came home with bruising on her neck, back and arms, as well as blood in her nails and a tear-streaked face. She had looked me in the eye then and said, "I understand what you meant mama, when you said sometimes you love someone so much that you would fight them in order to keep them." It broke my heart to hear my daughter say that, I had been speechless, and she had just gone up to her room. However, that was the last time she came home. Leaving us only with a note that she needs to start over, with Ade. My husband, angry, had then barred me from ever speaking to her again.

You see, the last time I saw my daughter she looked like she had been in a physical altercation with someone. I know for a fact that it was Ade.