Who is the adult in the relationship?

 

When simple tasks like brushing my teeth or styling my hair became a battle of wills where I always lost to my guilty feelings that I was being a bad mother if I didn't respond to my toddler's often tearless crying, my (adult) husband weighed in on our codependent relationship and set my priorities straight.

As my little one continues to show more independence for instance when she is able to tilt and drink from her own cup or yank my breasts from their pockets to take what's hers lol, I find myself struggling with breaking the codependent habits we both formed during her totally dependent stages.

Then, I had to go everywhere with her including to relieve myself because she clung to me to the extent that I had to lift her onto my knees and use the toilet at the same time.

Till now, we haven't succeeded in getting her to sleep in her crib and so co- sleep but even that is not enough for my gugu. She still has to sleep skin to skin and no matter how many times I place her back on the sheets, she snuggles and wriggles until she finds my body heat. Now that she is stronger, she can jerk her body backwards when I try to adjust her, wringing herself from my hands before assertively climbing onto the body part she wants to spread herself over- my head!

My day used to revolve around her and simple things like taking a bath or washing dishes had to be scheduled around when she fell asleep or when her daddy came home from work. Until we discovered that she could be tricked into being happy in her own company if we put on baby rhymes for her to watch. But even that had its time limit.

l was becoming so limited that my sleep was suffering, my masters programme was suffering and I was not regaining the life I had before. All it took was a forlorn look and loud, long crying and my own independence was thrown out the door.

I was complaining during one of our conversations when my husband leveled a question at me. "Who is the adult in the relationship?", he asked, returning the invitation to my pity party.

His own idea of parenting was that I should ask myself who was served by my carrying her everywhere with me. Wasn't it me and my story that until I sacrificed myself, I wasn't loving my child?

His logic was sound.

It was to her benefit that she exercised the independence she was gaining from walking and taking herself places she wanted to go. I could even be subverting her confidence to venture out when I pulled her back because I couldn't be chasing her around to prevent her from going somewhere or disrupting my things lol.

It was to her benefit that she exercised the independence of having teeth and my on and off approach to weaning her off sucking milk because it was the main way I bribed her to sleep, stop crying or eat, was more about me.

It was also to her benefit that she exercised the independence she was displaying as she expressed herself by repeating new words like "bye" and "go" and responding with recognition to used ones by saying "Ka" when she heard the word "Quack" or "Rowwwww" when she heard the line "Row, row, row your boat" or "mmm mmm" for the silent letter "B" and "I" in the rhyme that spelt B.I.N.G.O before retracting one letter each per round. So her tearless crying or fearless tantrum throwing when I repeated "NO" while taking away things she shouldn't play with, didn't warrant any guilty feelings.

And I didn't have to tie myself to her cradle strings. I could wash the dishes while she waited then get to her while my bath waited its turn too.

All in moderation.

One at a time.

The book I wasn't to write

On the post on Bellanaija introducing Toke Makinwa's book, #OnBecoming, my attention was drawn to a comment from a person under the name Hmmmmmm, who said she had been Toke once and had written about her bad experience presumably in a marriage and even secured a publishing deal. She said her father then read it and although she didn’t intend to hurt him (maybe she didn’t mind some other person getting hurt), she inadvertently hurt her father by it in some way. He then advised her to let it sit for a year and if she still felt like doing it she could go ahead. She took his advice and a year later the book title and content had changed because she was a different person- healed.

About a year ago, I wrote a story about a harrowing experience I went through. It was so internally harrowing I needed the whole world to hear. I needed something large enough on the outside to make up for what was eating me on the inside. I was so inconsolable one person couldn’t console me; I needed to tell the whole world about it.

It was a “must tell” as in the words of Toke. Like Tiwa Savage's song I also felt “If I start to talk the thing wey I don take my eye see, we no go end”. E no go end because I wouldn’t let it end. If the whole world could really line up, I would go down the line of everyone in the world at least everyone in my world or just people in my life repeating the thing wey my eyes don see.

How ridiculous? They probably are also looking to recruit me into their own line of hired mourners who can pity them for all the things wey them eyes too don see.

But this is what pain is- ridiculous.

As ridiculous as it now sounds to me, I wrote my story for a short story competition. What better way to use the pain if not to get something out of it? My own version of the story would get heard at the same time I would get a cash prize. That money would be used for a good cause. Now that I replay those motives it was almost like I was justifying a bad thing like stealing from a rich man by saying I would give the money back to the poor who deserve it more or cleanse it by tithing a tenth of it to the church.

Several months later, a book got into my hands. It had been written by someone I knew and in it she wrote all about her daddy issues and husband issues. I read the short book in one seating. It was full of anger and questions I couldn’t answer for her. Anger and questions meant to be directed at somebody else. Another case of what we cannot say/confront for whatever reason that rationalizes not saying/confronting it, ending up as sickness in our bodies eating us alive or angry words that will in turn create more anger as people react to them and even more anger as we don’t get the desired response.

I felt the book didn’t add value; there was nothing in it to learn just anger. It was a “How to be angry when your father disappoints your mother as a child and in adulthood when your husband disappoints you” book. Now this anger would be passed to another generation. A wife’s anger at her husband would become a daughter’s anger at her father just as her own anger at her father was in response to what she felt was mistreatment of her mother. Another generation would form another link in the chain of a generational pattern of daddy issues.

I thought about my own story as I read on. As if on cue, an email from the competition’s organizers flashed on my phone screen as I finished reading. It said my story had not been shortlisted. Was it a coincidence that on the same day minutes apart from reading that story, I was getting a message preventing the publication of mine? Even though it was the very thing I thought I wanted and the thing I thought would bring closure, God who knew it was healing I wanted, was kind enough to show me this wasn’t the way to it.

The judges too must have thought it was another how to be angry book. But it didn’t register then. I still believed it was a must tell to end all must tell stories of private pain and public gossip. I still believed it until Toke’s book happened.

Like the other book, I read hers. Again it was there- daddy and hubby; pain and anger. It wasn’t my story but it was my anger, my rant as though written by another person then put in my hands to judge. I was brutally honest about this my book- it was another diary of a mad black woman!

Vicariously through Toke’s work I could see what it would have been if I had done it- medicating pain with book sales and titles, convincing myself I had won. And it suddenly was not enough. What an empty victory it would have been for me.

I knew that now because I was beginning to taste the victory that comes from really healing. I recognized it in the final chapters of Toke’s book where she recognized pain as her teacher to teach her about herself and anger as her real enemy preventing her from learning. If I was a victim, I was only the victim of my making- the Heroine, Martyr and Saint all rolled in one.

Suddenly it was not the must tell. All I wanted to tell the world, my world and people in my life was to rid themselves of this consuming anger that destroys.

And I did in this must tell- here.

It’s a must read.
 

What I learnt reading the dairies of mad black women