As Told By Ada: My Parents Have No Idea When They’re Seeing Me Next

As Told By Ada is a Culture Custodian weekly series exploring the unique and often chaotic experience of navigating life as the oldest daughter in a Nigerian household. Over the course of these mini therapy sessions, we give you a peek into the ups, downs and lingering effects of growing up “the first.”

My parents are divorced, so I’ve been splitting my time between them since I was ten. I don’t necessarily care for either of them, but my dad is barely ever home, so I usually prefer staying at his house.

I come to Lagos often because it’s somewhere I can breathe. It’s somewhere I can get some respite from my parents for a while. This time, though, I don’t think I’m going back home anytime soon. I was recently outed as queer, so for now, I’m avoiding them.

I’m pretty active on social media, and I’ve never really hidden who I am. I’ll post videos of myself smoking, partying or just talking about my life because, honestly, I’ve never cared enough to pretend otherwise. Outside of paying school fees and providing somewhere for me to sleep, my parents haven’t really been involved in my life, so I was never particularly afraid of them discovering my online presence.

Then my very religious cousin found my TikTok account and showed it to my dad. The account had plenty of things he wouldn’t approve of, but obviously the queerness took centre stage. My dad didn’t really know what to do with the information, probably because he barely sees me, so he passed it on to my mom to handle. She tried talking to me about it. We went back and forth for a while, and eventually I just blocked her.

I genuinely don’t have the strength for all the extra drama. My parents have no idea when they’re going to see me next. My mom has tried looking for me. She’s threatened my friends, but that’s about it. Nothing particularly dramatic has happened since then.

This isn’t even one of the worst things I’ve gone through. I suspect my parents know that too, which is why their reactions have been relatively muted.

I think most Nigerian parents are bad parents. With mothers, you can sometimes sympathise because so many of them are victims of circumstance too. But fundamentally, I don’t think my mom is a good person. She’s not even a decent person.

I’ve been cooking, cleaning and babysitting for as long as I can remember. My parents separated when I was very young, and whenever my siblings and I stayed with my mom, she would disappear for days at a time. I’m three years older than my brother and about five years older than my sister, but it would be just the three of us in the house with no adults around. My mom would be out partying, seeing friends or doing whatever she wanted while we figured things out on our own.

Even when she was home, there wasn’t much of a difference, which is probably why she was so comfortable leaving us alone. We were completely reliant on my dad, and my mom hardly contributed financially, even though she knew full well that he could be a deadbeat. Beyond paying school fees, he didn’t do much. He was notorious for spending money on women, and it always blew my mind that she was comfortable leaving our wellbeing entirely in his hands.

That’s my mother for you. A lot of the time, it feels like we’re the least of her concerns. 

At one point, she abandoned us for over a year.

My parents’ separation was very long and very messy. My dad is extremely physically abusive. He routinely beat my siblings and I as well as our mom, which was why she eventually divorced him.

Before the divorce, they had several mini-separations that involved her leaving the house and taking us with her. The last time she left, though, she didn’t take us. We were alone with my dad for over a year before she finally came back to legally separate from him, and even then she didn’t come to collect us until the divorce was finalized. 

According to her, my dad wouldn’t contribute financially if we weren’t actively spending time with him. She would tell us she couldn’t afford to pay our school fees on her own and that we had to stay with him. She would say things like that and then turn around and buy herself a new car.

I don’t know what type of lifestyle she wanted to lead so badly that she couldn’t take care of her children and protect them from this man who was so evil, she couldn’t stay married to him.

And living with my dad was hard. He was angry that she had left him. Violently angry.

I don’t know what it was about me—maybe the fact that I look exactly like my mom—but he channelled most of his anger towards me. He barely touched my brother, but if I saw him heading towards my baby sister, I would get between them and take the beating in her place.

During that period, he insisted that we have family prayers most days. At one of these prayers, he was giving us a sermon about the prevalence of evil people in the world and pointed out that my mom, for example, was a witch. He said she was in a cult and that she had marks on her body to prove it.

I may not be my mother’s biggest fan, but when it comes to him, I’m very protective of her. When he called her a witch, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I said something. So he stood up and slapped me into a wall. It was crazy. 

My dad had always been physically abusive, but during that period it was horrible, even by his standards. I don’t think I will ever forgive my mom for leaving us with him. At one point, he even sent me to her, and she sent me right back.

It had been about two months since my mother left us, and my dad had brought a new woman into the house: my “stepmom.” 

My stepmom had this nail polish set that I loved, and one day I used it to paint my nails. I fell asleep on the living room couch, and the next thing I knew, my dad was slapping me awake. I woke up in confusion. He was screaming, and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying. He was accusing me of being a prostitute and trying to find men to seduce. I was ten years old.

He beat me so badly that I was coughing blood. Afterwards, he said he was disowning me and shipped me off to my mother. When she saw me, she was so furious that she decided to go to court and fight for custody. That was how the actual divorce proceedings started.

Now, I think my dad is a psychopath. Genuinely, medically, I think there is something wrong with him. When my mom sent me back, he simply acted as though nothing had happened. He never brought the incident up again, and life went on as usual.

He did ban me from touching his food, though, because according to him, there was no telling what I might do.

In school, I don’t even think I ever spoke about my parents in detail, and until a few years ago, I never mentioned their divorce to anybody. It was so traumatic that the words couldn’t even leave my mouth. I wanted to forget, and school was my escape. I could be whoever I wanted to be there. These days, though, I talk about it a lot. Within an hour of meeting a new person, they will definitely know I have a bad relationship with my parents.

When they finally got divorced, all I remember thinking was that I was just happy I didn’t have to keep witnessing their disaster of a marriage.

For a long time, because of the way I grew up, I didn’t have a community. I didn’t have anybody I felt completely comfortable with, and interacting with people made me very anxious. I was too eager to please, and it made finding real friends very difficult. There was also a part of me that felt like everybody hated me.

I’ve had more than my fair share of difficult experiences, so this whole outing situation didn’t really faze me. Honestly, I always knew it was coming. I just thought I’d have another year to save enough money and sort out accommodation before it happened. It has taught me something I wasn’t expecting though; it has taught me how to accept help. 

I’ve always preferred doing things on my own because I often feel like a burden on others. I tend to overcompensate whenever I ask for help, to make up for the inconvenience but during this period, my friends have consistently reminded me that there is no world where they wouldn’t have me.

It’s still hard to accept, but I’ve been doing a lot better. I’m allowing myself to move through life with fewer worries. I’m meeting more people organically and building the community I’ve always wanted. I want to be surrounded by people that love me, and I’m learning that if I open myself up to those things, they’ll find me naturally.

If this story feels familiar, you can share your own experience, drop a thought, or simply let off some steam through this form.