IN THE MIND OF A GROWING CHILD

Growing up was hard. My father was a Muslim and my mother a Christian, and they fought all the time, sometimes over financial issues and sometimes over which religion their children should be brought up with. Their fights made me wonder if they even made a plan regarding the family they would have before they got together.

Then the day came when my mother left us. I was six years old, and sick the day she left. My twin sister was the one who looked after me; even at that young age, she did the best she could and I eventually got better. Some weeks later, my father took us with him to beg my mother to come back to him, but she didn’t. This was primarily because, at the time, my father didn’t have a job and my mother, I suppose, was tired of being the breadwinner, a position in the family she hadn’t bargained for. I remember a time I was hungry and went to see my mother because she sold corn, and she told me to go to my father and get the money to buy it. She refused to give me corn.

After much persuasion that only yielded futility, we gave up on my mother coming back, and settled down to moving on with our lives as a family without her. my father eventually got a job and was barely at home, and so, we often stayed with my uncle and his daughters. I yearned for male company and got none, a situation that made me crave male figures more. Perhaps I was trying to fill the void my father’s absence created, I don’t know. But I remember wishing fervently that some of the male visitors who came to see my uncle’s daughters were there to see me. During some of those social calls, I would hang around them, trying to satisfy my loneliness by making it seem as though the guys also came to see me. they would often acknowledge me with a nod, a greeting or a few random questions, and I would feel some amount of indescribable pleasure. I craved attention and would do anything to get it.

Then after about nearly a year, my father remarried and in moved my stepmother. She was beautiful, light-skinned and tall. At the time when she first moved in, I didn’t know she was my stepmother. I thought she was some distant aunt who had come to see us. Soon however, I got to know that she was a part of our family. Soon after she moved in, my father’s success story started. He began climbing the ladder of promotion so fast. His first salary after he married my stepmother was twice what he’d been earning. It seemed as though my stepmother addition to the family was the turning point in our lives.

We moved out of the place we were staying to another much larger place in a face-me-I-face-you apartment in Agege. And one day, a neighbor’s young son took me to a dark corner of the compound and began fondling my penis. At first, I didn’t like it but I didn’t resist and he continued playing with my penis. Then he took his own penis out and began rubbing it against mine. This felt good. On another day, his brother did the same thing to me; we didn’t know anything about anal penetration, and so, all we did was rub penises together.

We did it a few more times, and then I began avoiding them because I was starting to feel bad about what we were doing.

During holidays, my sister and I were often taken to my aunt’s place to stay. There was a particular time during our stay there when I got bored and began dressing up in my aunt’s clothes and jewelry. I liked the way I looked in the clothes and wanted to wear them out, but resisted because I didn’t think it was proper. However, I preened all day long in front of her mirror, dressed as I was in her skirts and long neck chains.

I began to get more self-aware when I was in Junior Secondary School, when a very cute boy helped me knot my tie. I stood there oddly wishing very much that the tie wouldn’t get fixed and he would keep his hands on me for much longer. Every morning after that, I would refuse to knot my tie and take it to him, even though he taught me countless times how to do it. But my brain never seemed to pick up anything when his hands were on me. He looked so handsome.

And then, there was the phase when my sister and I would be watching TV and when good looking men came on, I would lean forward and kiss them through the TV screen. And my sister would just look at me with some curiosity. Even though we both didn’t understand what we were doing, we knew it was an improper thing for me to do, because the day my stepmother caught me at it and asked what I was doing, my sister interjected, saying I was just touching the TV screen. I concurred with her because I was not a good liar. And after that day, I stopped kissing people on the television.

Things got more difficult for me when I got a Hausa seatmate at school. He had a big ass and was good looking; I couldn’t help myself whenever I was around him, always staring at his ass and wondering why I found him irresistible. I used to teach him our school work and let him copy from me during exams, and for this, he would always buy me things. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling things for me, even though I couldn’t describe the things I was feeling.

I began to get withdrawn every time I developed these feelings for boys, especially when they acted sweet on me. I would stay away from them, preferring instead to mingle with girls, to stick with girls as my constant companions. And this was weird, considering how much I yearned for male company when I was 6, 7 years old.

Growing up was hard. And I often asked myself questions about why I was the way I was, wondering what made me the way I was: whether it was because of the times I fooled around with the neighbour’s sons in the dark, or because of my mother’s abandonment, or my father almost never being around. To the mind of a growing child, the alternative was too much of a horror – that it could simply be who I am.

Written by Kvng