An interesting piece i recommend every young lady should read.

Link: https://okadabooks.com/book/about/how_not_to_end_up_like_my_mother/45723


CHAPTER 1

The afternoon I broke up with Soji hadn’t actually been as hot as it had seemed, but it was always that way in his tiny room, void of any form of ventilation apart from the small window on one side which was always open, or maybe it was the fact that I was boiling inside that made me feel hotter than normal.
I watched as Soji replaced and readjusted everything I had touched or mistakenly shifted in his bedroom. His face was squeezed into a frown as he mumbled unclear words while refolding his blanket. I sat quietly on his bed staring at him, I knew then I had to end the relationship with this one too.
Soji hated it when people touched his stuff, he noticed it when objects where moved even slightly from where he kept them, even if it was moved just an inch, he would get really pissed. He was like that with his siblings too –I know this because I have seen. He liked his stuff exactly as he placed them, he was organized to a fault and didn’t hesitate to insult anyone who attempted to disorganize his space.
In a way, especially after the day he slapped his younger sister in my presence because she misplaced his pen and he had to go through the stress of searching for it, I saw his actions as lack of tolerance for others and I called his attention to it severally but I was always brushed off. This behavior baffled me as much as it irritated me each time he got like that and this was the reason I had to end it, he was too much like my father.
The thought of my Soji being like my father further irritated me as he was one of the things I didn’t want to see in my future life partner. As far as I was concerned, he was the sole bad decision my mother ever made, a decision she would have to suffer for all her life.
I had many rules I had set out for myself but my first rule was to never end up like my mother who was married to a man who didn’t hesitate to hit her at the slightest argument they had, a man who never showed gratitude for the little things she did that mattered, who never failed to insult or belittle her at the slightest opportunity he got, a man whose things she couldn’t touch or access freely. I could go on and on but when I asked her if she didn’t see warning signs before they got married, she didn’t have much to say other than she didn’t know it was going to be that bad.
There was so much she went through that I was determined to never go through. I lived everyday bearing this in mind and I was always careful enough in my deeds especially when it came to relationships and men generally, I took every red flag or warning signs seriously. I also constantly consulted my mum for advice knowing she would give from experience. I was her only daughter and so I had all of her attention.
We both agreed any man that had any of the characters of my father was a no-no, Hence the reason Soji was wrong for me.
Soji had entered the shower by the time I made up my mind that it was best we went our separate ways, so I just waited for him to come out before giving him the news. He soon stepped out of the shower with a white towel wrapped around his waist, his body and hair dripping wet and his dark eyes fixed on me, I remember, he looked so beautiful and I almost changed my mind. In that moment I pictured my mother’s sad face when my dad slapped her one night because she poured water on ‘his’ rug mistakenly. I also simultaneously remembered the slap Soji gave his sister for losing his pen. These thoughts made my chest swell with anger and I didn’t know when I blurted out, ‘It’s over Soji, I’m sorry but I really can’t continue with you acting like this all the time your stuff is touched.’
I grabbed my bag and left his room before he could utter a word. I didn’t want to wait for him to say something that might change my mind and make me want to take him back, handsome boys are known to be capable of that kind of evil.
Anyway, that was the last time I ever saw Soji.
I can’t even remember if I was ever in love with soji but I remember he ticked all the other right boxes. He was a Christian just like me, he was Yoruba, tall, dark and handsome and his command of the English language was topnotch. He appeared really perfect and I think that was why I was with him in the first place.
My mother approved of him when she met him but since the very first day I told her about that his behavior, she had advised me to think carefully before things got too serious with him.
Who wanted a man whose things would not be seen as yours too? Not me.
While some might think that what made me leave Soji was not really a big issue and was something we could have worked on together, I strongly disagree and I’ll tell you why.
You can’t really know how it feels, until you’re living the reality of something.
My mum used to say you can’t really change a man and I wasn’t one to ignore warning signs. It hurt badly enough seeing my mum carefully return the things she secretly borrowed from my dad’s wardrobe –just because he wouldn’t give her if she asked –we the children walked on eggshells being around him as he could flare up at any moment. For me it was that huge a deal.
I usually had long talks with my mother and it was mostly her telling me parts of her story, saying to me how she wished she didn’t make some mistakes and sadly most of her sad stories evolved around my father.
The man married her at such a young age –she was 20, young, beautiful and with a lot of dreams. He had promised her the world, or something like that and she had fancied herself in love. She told me of how at the beginning she had ignored the signs, the red flags that would later come to sadden her married life.
One time she told me how my dad jealously deleted the telephone number of someone she was about to close a huge business deal with, it was a very competitive deal and she had been really close to getting it when she woke up one morning to find the number missing on her phone, all their texts deleted. Without thinking twice she knew her husband had done it. Apparently, he had been questioning her about who she spent hours talking to on the phone and she had just answered him casually that it was just business but her husband had been nosy enough to go through her phone at night and had out of jealousy deleted everything associated with that man on her phone. Instead of fighting him, she had simply tried to get the number back, contacting people and all, but unfortunately when she eventually got the number and called the man, someone else had offered him something better and she had lost that deal. According to her, my father was relieved that she wasn’t going to be doing business with a man, instead of being sorry.
Nothing happened after the episode, he didn’t apologize nor did he try to make it up to her, they had just moved on. ‘He has always been a jealous man,’ she told me, ‘but at the beginning I thought it was because he loved me too much.’
I made a mental note that jealousy in a man was a deep red flag.

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(continuation)

Six months after Soji, I met Malik. Malik was really sweet, caring and well brought up. He was a business man in his early thirties and was really well to do but one thing that held me back was that he was a Muslim. Being from this part of the world and born into the kind of family I was, I knew that was totally impossible. No matter what I did, or where I went, if I was ever going to bring a guy home, he had to be a Christian like us. Any other religion was prohibited or my parents would never bless it. Now what was a union without parents’ blessings? There was never a time my mother didn’t make this clear.
Malik ticked several boxes, he wasn’t arrogant, he actually apologized when he did wrong, always considered my opinions and supported me even when I wasn’t officially dating him yet, he wasn’t stingy and always gave money to me even when I didn’t ask. On top of it, he never failed in dishing out compliments to me and he noticed everything about me. All of which actually meant he was nothing like my father and everything I had been looking for. He was perfect except for the part of religion.
When I told my mother about him, she only reminded me how impossible it was because it was sin and would confuse our future children in deciding on a religion to practice. ‘You can only drag a man to the church, you can’t force him to be a Christian. Remember you can only force a horse to the river, you can’t force it to drink water.’ She had said.
She then told me the story of how she had once met and dated a Muslim guy even though she knew it would never lead to anything because her own father was a pastor then. She told me how perfect the guy had been but in the end she had had to let go and it had left her heartbroken. It had been right before she met my father.
When she told me that story, I thought to myself how happy she might have ended up if she had married that guy. I’m sure she thought the same thing too and it was such a pity that she chose religion over her happiness.
It was this that made me go ahead to date Malik. After all the goal was to not end up like her and I was determined to do all within my power to see that I did not.
The thing about the kind of relationship I had with Malik was that it didn’t matter how deep our relationship got, I couldn’t take him home. Yes, I was a 25 year old lady who worked in an insurance company at the time, I could make decisions on my own but I was too cowardly to take Malik home. I would just embarrass the poor boy.
He pressured me to take him to our house because he wanted to meet my family but I only gave him one excuse after the other, too scared to tell him the truth. I even consoled him by introducing him to my elder brother, Joshua who I later begged not to tell mum and dad I was dating a Muslim.
To cut the long story short, after two years, I ended it with Malik too. Yea, I know you are probably thinking, she wasted two years of her life deceiving herself, or that, she could have just fought for the relationship if she wanted it to work. Well, I didn’t think I had the strength to engage in that kind of fight with my parents not to talk of with my entire family. I was young and beautiful, I would definitely meet another man.
* * *

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(continuation)

Chapter 2

During the days that I still lived with my parents, that was before I got the job at the insurance company, I realized the love lost between my parents. They didn’t hate each other, there was just no more affection. They still slept together on the same bed but that was about it, my dad didn’t make my mum blush nor did he do affectionate things for her that would make me long for marriage. They literally just went about their separate businesses and lives and came back home at night to sleep on the same bed.
Sometimes I heard them arguing and then I would hear what sounded like slaps, followed by screams and sobs from my mother. On such days, I just locked myself in my room and plugged my ears, drowning myself in music, pretending to be oblivious of my surroundings.
When I was much younger, I used to rush into their bedroom whenever he started to beat her and I would protest, jumping in between them and forcing him to stop but every time I did that, my mum would scold me later, she would tell me to stay away, that it was none of my business and that she wouldn’t want me to get hurt. I later realized when I got wiser that it was because she always didn’t want me to see her like that, defenseless and weak, yet unable to leave.
I once advised her to leave him, I told her to file for a divorce or better still, pack her bags and go. Her reply had been, ‘Adesewa, I know you think I’m suffering here like this but if I should leave your daddy, then I will really suffer. I don’t have money to take care of myself, the society will ridicule me, a woman who leaves her husband’s house has no honor, that is not to talk of the kind of situation I will be leaving you and your brother in. You will both suffer the consequences of a broken home. If your father should marry another woman, you will suffer my dear. It shall be a loss for all of us.’ She had told me sadly that day. I was barely fifteen by then but even so, I understood.
That is the kind of life a woman was often subjected to in our society. Having to endure everything her husband threw at her for fear of what the fate of leaving him might bring her. I often thought about the reply she had given me and I decided it was women who didn’t have enough financially, to stand on their own and live without their so called husbands that suffered that misfortune. My mother was one of them and I decided I wasn’t ever going to be. I wasn’t going to give a man the power to disrespect me, I wasn’t going to be powerless or poor such that I wouldn’t be able to liberate myself from any man that was abusing me. I wasn’t going to be a slave to the society and whatever it thought.
I often thought to myself that the reason a lot of rich and successful women like we knew then were either divorced or unmarried was because their husbands or boyfriends probably realized the women could do without them and they felt intimidated, so their marriages and relationships crumbled.
Bottom-line was that I was going to do all of my best using all of the resources I had in life to be successful. This pushed me to study so hard that I always came top of my class and at the end, I graduated with a first class degree in Accounting.
My father, not knowing what drove me, was the proudest.
I was more interested in being successful than in getting married or hooking a man and I was so busy gathering my wealth all through my 20s that I forgot my biological clock was ticking.

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I worked at the insurance company for three years before joining the banking sector where I worked for another four, giving me a total of seven years working experience with quite enough savings to set up something of my own.

I opened my own unisex boutique a year before I resigned from the bank, it was situated in an elite part of Lagos and was fully stocked with various contemporary and in-vogue wares. I employed some workers to manage the place for me while I still worked at the bank and once I stopped working, I took full charge, monitoring everything, making sure it all went well and it did.
By then I was already 31 years of age. It’s really quite unfair how time passes by so quickly and there’s nothing we can do about it. My business was up and running and I had millions in my account at the age of 31, I was a self-made woman, I mean I had all I didn’t want to lack but I was no longer exactly young.
My attention was called to ‘my early old age’ as my mother had put it, on the morning of my 31st birthday.
As I usually did, I had called my parents very early, right after I woke up, for them to shower me with birthday prayers and blessings and they had done just that. They also sang the birthday song for me and we were all laughing until my mum had said in a stern voice, ‘Adesewa, how old are you now?’
The tone she used caught me off guard and so I stammered as I answered, ‘31… ye..years now, Mama.’ And then her reply had been, ‘why won’t you stammer? You see you’re in your early old age already, all your mates now have children o Sewa. We are waiting for you to bring the man you have been dating home.’
Wait! Was this not the woman who had supported me and encouraged me to keep searching for the golden man?
I could hear my dad telling her to spare me in the background but she wasn’t even listening to him. I rolled my eyes and told her I would be bringing him home soon enough.
After that call, it dawned on me that there was really no man, at all.
My mind flashed back to all the men I had turned down the previous year because they didn’t measure up to my standard and I began to laugh, I laughed so hard at myself that tears began to roll down my cheeks. The tears soon became real. I was actually crying that I was single, it was sad as much as it was funny. I had everything I thought I needed and even my parents were living well because I could afford to give them that life but still a non- existent man or should I say the absence of a man in my life still managed to make me feel so sad when i should be so happy.
That’s the thing right? I thought to myself that day, men always manage to ruin everything one way or the other.
I decided later that day to go the club. It was my birthday after all and I was my own boss, so I could totally spend my entire life wherever I wanted. I was also a single ass sexy rich girl, I felt like spoiling myself or rather loosing myself in anything even if it was only for that day. My mother’s words stuck to me like glue. Deep down, I was unhappy. So, to the club I went.
That night was wild. I can’t remember all of the details now but I surely did have all of the fun there was to have. I danced till I could dance no more, I am not one to drink more than necessary but that night, I dawned a lot of glasses of vodka and rum. I was on cloud nine, tipsy or maybe drunk as hell and it really felt great if I can remember correctly.
Till today as I am writing this, I still can’t say exactly how I met Femi. I don’t know if we stumbled into each other or if I stumbled into him or if it was him into me. All I know is we woke up the following morning in each other’s arms, fully clothed and under the duvet in my own room.
Very funny right?
Unbelievable too.
Well that day, it wasn’t. I woke up first and screamed out loud upon seeing myself in a stranger’s arms. He woke with a start, he just got up as if hypnotized, rubbed the sleep off his eyes and walked right out of my apartment without a word.
I stood there dazed. It was almost laughable but I remembered being so scared, I started to scramble for my phone only to find it wasn’t even in there with me. I was really confused and was still trying to recall what exactly could have happened the night before when Femi knocked on my door two hours later.
He was then already properly dressed and smelled really nice as he handed me my phone. ‘How did that end up with you?’ was the question that came out of my mouth.
‘I don’t know either,’ he replied, ‘found it in my pocket as soon as I got home, I was perplexed too but had to freshen up first. You should do the same,’ he murmured, looking me over.
‘Wait, who are you again?’ My brain finally made me ask.
‘Femi.’ He replied and brushed past me into my house. Now this is the part where the whole goal of not wanting to end up like my mother started becoming impossible to achieve.

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