Content Warnings: Anxiety, depression, self-deprecation, emotional abuse, social ostracisation, economic stress.
Dear S*******,
Madam Olu increases her decibel on every syllable. A very important customer for my mother, Madam Olu’s weekly patronage keeps my mother’s business in the green for at least a month.
“Hello, Lawyer”
“Hello, Doctor”
She says this loudly while receiving a call on her phone, her mouth poised towards the sky as if she were expecting manna to drop from the heavens.
“Okay, Doctor”
“Okay, Lawyer”
She says again with her voice increasing. My mother looks at me with contempt. I could almost imagine her in Madams Olu’s position.
But since I have failed to study law, medicine, engineering, or any other “important course,” I am just a failure to her.
Mother never fails to remind me how she ought to be at peace at this stage of her life since she spent all those years sending me to school.
She compares me to doctors and lawyers, Mrs. Olu’s sons who are both abroad and who give her money to be able to shop at our shop.
Every time Mrs. Olu comes to our shop, she regales my mum with stories about her two sons. In fact, not many people know their names. We simply know them by their occupation: doctor and lawyer.
My mother believes that even as the first son, I am of no benefit to her, and worst of all, I studied a very stupid course: theatre arts.
Hear me out, I really did want to be a lawyer, and I tried my very best. However, words just seem to swim in front of my eyes and I couldn’t read for a long period.
In better places, I might have gotten the help I needed to cope with my disorder. But in a place like my town, where dreams go to die, where differences meant death, I was labelled lazy and a dunce.
So I changed my course from law to Theatre arts and my parents never forgave me.
Here I am a college graduate, still seeking a job after 2 years and relying on my parents to feed me.
Recently, I’m in a phase that scares me, a mood that disturbs me. I have the wildest urge to smack Mrs. Olu or to strangle her. Anything, just to stop her from talking about her perfect golden boys.
Perhaps I am the failure they think me to be.
Yours Truly.
Dear S*******,
I can hear my parents’ voices again, they think they are talking in low tones but what difference would it make in a house whose walls seem thinner than cardboard.
“Did you see Ken’s car? Tear rubber” “Mr Kunle was just telling him how his son will be funding his 60th birthday celebrations” “Why’s Bolu so different, When will our time come?”
I felt tears gathering in my eyes and moved outside before it fell. The boys I called friends are now into internet fraud or “yahoo Yahoo.”
They have money in dollars and spend lavishly on their families. For families who have never seen a dollar in real life, the source of such windfalls are not asked at all.
I have determined not to go this path. Apart from it being a crime. It goes against my ethics, my religion and my very being. Causing other tears so that I may laugh is not something worth considering.
By the day the pressure grows, from snide remarks of my parents to accusing eyes of my food-deprived siblings. I’m afraid it is only a matter of time till I succumb to this vice.
Yours truly.
