If you are capable (that is, nothing is wrong with your hands and legs) but your vulnerable parents are begging for food, you are a cursed fellow. And the only thing that will bring restoration into your life is doing the right thing towards your parents.
If you have a spouse who is enabling you to be ‘less’ to your parents, they are a curse in your life. Anybody who is not enabling positive energy in you is a curse in your life.
There’s a family I’ve known since my childhood. The widow had three daughters and a son.
Right from when I knew them, the daughters had always struggled to put food on the family’s table, selling roasted corn by the roadside and whatever fruit was in season.
The second daughter eventually set up a kiosk before her health nosedived due to what looked like an untreatable sore on her leg. She died some years later.
Before her sister died, the youngest daughter had joined the police force. She died of HIV/AIDS within a few years of joining… leaving their eldest sister (who was mentally unstable) and their only brother as the surviving children of their aged mother.
I heard when their eldest sister died.
However, it was in January this year that the family came to mind. It was because it suddenly occurred to me to ask about their mother from someone who is their neighbour.
What I heard was heartbreaking!
The woman (who should be in her late 20s) lives alone because her son got married and moved into his own house, located on the outskirts of town.
When I asked how the woman survives, I was told that every morning, she sits by the entrance of her house and neighbours buy her food and water.
It does not seem like her senses are still intact, but she remembers to ask whoever passes by if they’ve seen her son, whose name she calls all the time.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that his name was always on her lips, because it was the same when we were growing up. You would think he was her only child.
He was that child (an only son) she valued more than the rest, and it wasn’t a secret. But the irony of it all is that he was her most uncaring child.
It was even the girls who catered for their mother all their lives. But the woman’s suffering began the moment she lost all her daughters to death. Because, as soon as her dearest son found the means, he moved very far away from her, with his “church wife”.
What I have since realised is that when people are mean, they are just mean. But when they are mean church people, they are evil.
I tell parents to stop playing favouritism among their children. Experience has repeatedly shown that it’s even the favourite child who ends up not treating the parents well.
God help you if you’ve ingrained toxicity in your child!
When the chips are down, a parent becomes the victim of the child they taught the wrong values.
I have seen this play out in families countless times.
One of the earliest encounters I had on social media was with a man who told me how his son would often hit him whenever he was having issues with his wife. And how every quarrel between him and his wife seemed to embolden the boy to hit him (the father) harder.
Eventually, the couple separated, but today, that same boy is abusing hard drugs.
I also heard that the wife was trying to enlist the father’s help to rehabilitate the boy.
What people don’t understand about parenting is this: whether or not you are on good terms with your spouse, do not encourage the children to disrespect them. Because the moment you do that, you’ve diminished any significant authority they may have over the children.
They can’t even ‘draw the child’s ear’ in discipline anymore. And with time, the full impact of the monster you’ve raised will be your cross alone to bear.
No child who is easily used against the other parent is stable again. There is something you’ve damaged in them. And it’s often the many vices they manifest over time that reveal the extent of the emotional damage they are carrying around.
One of the young men, who was brutally murdered in my town recently, was someone I remembered as a lovely boy while growing up. But what I heard from those closest to the family is that he transmuted into a monster when his mother began encouraging him to keep malice with the father during their (husband and wife) disputes, followed by physical fights with the father, drug abuse, and keeping the company of cultists.
The next thing I heard about him was how he was brutally murdered.
Chukwuneta Oby
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