I don’t know how other people interpret what the Bible says about women submitting to their husbands; but I do know it doesn’t include suffering and dying in silence.
My dad started beating my mum and calling her all kinds of names since I was eight years old. That was some 14 years ago—that was a long time ago, and he still descends on her every other day without any sign of letting go despite being close to his sixties. My mum is a complete stoic, and would soak up all the beatings and harsh words. She describes her refusal to pack out of the house as a price of womanhood and the sacrifice she needs to pay to raise us.
It is the opposite with all the friends I have around the neighbourhood because their parents live in peace and harmony. It is not like my friends’ parents don’t have issues, but I have never seen those issues degenerate into physical or even verbal abuses like my sisters and I experience every day at home.
My mum lost her dignity as a woman long time ago, and this is gradually taking its toll on us. How it degenerated into this stage none of us can explain, but we do know that everyone in the neighbourhood sees it as normal. She doesn’t have friends who come to look for her, and she doesn’t smile or enjoy herself whenever dad is around. It is one form of abuse or the other because dad thinks and believes that African women have no value and dignity.
Mum doesn’t want to be helped…
My mum is dying from pains emotionally and physically from verbal and physical abuses inflicted on her by my dad. It is so strange the way she defines submissiveness in marriage because she still serves my dad his food on her knees, washes his clothes, iron his clothes, and doesn’t go to bed until dad comes back very late in the night on most occasions. Dad is never at home, but whenever he manages to stay at home; the atmosphere is never different from what we have in a graveyard. He is such a sadist, and I can’t but wonder if my mum was forced on him before they got married.
She doesn’t want police involvement because she thinks it is tantamount to washing one’s dirty lining in the public. How do you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped? Words fail me and I don’t know what to do because I feel she is living on a borrowed time.
I can hear him calling her all sorts of names as I write this in our balcony. It is as if dad has lost it because you can hardly hear mum respond to those insults. How can a man as educated as my dad call his wife “fu***ing illiterate and parasite?” He uses or calls her all sorts of names and makes her feel like she doesn’t deserve to be called his wife.
This has to stop; but I just don’t know how…
