COVENANT
Originally published on kalaharireview.com
I was seventeen when my mother found out I am gay. It did a lot of damage to our relationship. She felt like she didn’t know me anymore, that who she thought I’d been was a lie. This strained what used to be a tight friendship, a borderline obsession on my part. I no longer wanted to be alone around her because the conversation would turn to how I was faring with converting my sexuality to what was “normal” and I was running out of ways to give non-committal grunts.
The strain on our relationship weighed heavy on my mind and I wondered how I could fix it.
I was in an A-Level school in Abeokuta when I read a book by Max Lucado about telling the truth and how it could help heal relationships after trust has been broken. I wondered where I had lied to my mum and I realized I hadn’t told her the truth when she asked if I had had sex. That was it! That was the truth that would fix our relationship and prove that I could and would tell her anything, and then maybe we would be on our way to healing.
I met the teacher who had been put in charge of the A-level students on the evening of the following day after reading the Lucado book and asked to make a call to my mother with the phone provided for students. I went to an empty classroom, sat on one of the empty plastic desks and dialed her number. She picked on the second try.
“Mummy, I have something to tell you,” I said after pleasantries were exchanged, “and I am only telling you this because you think you can’t trust me and that I am lying too much and keeping too many secrets from you.”
“I’m listening,” she said.
Ignoring the voice in my head that had started to tell me it was a bad idea because my mother’s “I’m listening” means “I can’t promise you that I won’t get mad”, I said, “You know how you have asked me whether I have had sex before?”
“Mm-hmm…”
“Well, I have had sex before.”
The line was silent for a few seconds and I pressed the phone closer to my ear, fighting down the panic that had suddenly begun to well inside me.
“Okay, I have heard you,” she said after what seemed like the longest time.
“I’m sorry I lied and I am sorry I did it,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, “who was it with?”
I didn’t expect her to ask that and I knew I could not say the truth because she was unpredictable. She had called my boyfriend one time to plead with him to leave me alone. At another time, she called to curse at him. So I lied that the person I had sex with came out of town and I asked to see him and we did it in a hotel. I gave her a made-up name.
“Were you the giver or receiver?” she asked.
“Both, ma,” I lied. I hoped that the half-truth would make my confession easier to swallow.
“You used condoms?”
“Yes” I said, glad that I had insisted on it when I hooked up.
“Okay, thank you for telling me,” she said. Her voice hadn’t changed throughout the conversation so I took it as a good sign that things had gone well.
Nothing was said about the conversation whenever we talked on the phone for the next couple of months. Instead we made plans to get my visa so I could travel to the UK with her on holiday. My visa was approved and a few days after that, we were on a flight to London.
It wasn’t the best of times to travel on holiday. It was winter. However she wanted to make sure I traveled before I turned 18 because she believed it was easier for people below the legal adult age to get their visas approved. I would be alone with her for hours on a flight; what if she brought something up?
The journey was going smoothly. I got to see snow at the stopover at Istanbul where they had issues with the engine of the plane that was to take us to London. We had wasted an hour at Istanbul. By the time we got to Heathrow, the flight to Newcastle where my uncle stayed had left. We had to book another one, which meant dipping into the money we’d planned to spend during our stay here. And this began to stress my mum.
In a bid to send good vibes, I sat next to her and put my head on her shoulder and she started to play with my hair. We were talking about nothing in particular and I was feeling pretty warm inside when I noticed a white man with tattoos all over his arm and I said to her, “Those tattoos look nice.”
“Are you okay?” she said sharply, pulling away from me. “How can you think that is cool? Next thing, you will go and tattoo your arm!”
“I would never get a tattoo,” I said with righteous indignation.
“How can I know what you can do if you can let another man put his penis inside you?” she snapped.
In that instant, whatever good vibes I had in me that I was trying to transmit to her vanished.
“You were the only one I could trust in the house to be a good boy,” she continued, “but now, I have no one!”
If I had deflated the first time we had a confrontation, I was absolutely crushed now. My grand plan hadn’t worked- it seemed to have made the distrust deepen.
“Ehn, James?” she continued. “How could you do that? I’ve always talked to you and your brothers about it and showed you bible passages. You loved God. You were in the choir and you were chapel prefect. And you even shared the word whenever we had family devotion. You want the devil to useless your life now, abi?”
I sat still. I felt cold, the kind of iciness that wasn’t coming from the air conditioning, but from inside my bones. I watched her remind me how much of a disappointment I was.
My mother was saying a lot but I must have tuned her out because hearing anymore would have left me broken. We sat beside each other stiffly and in silence long after she had finished, mother and son. Her eyes were misty and my neck hurt from resting it on the back of the wooden bench.
She didn’t bring the issue up again. I think she realized that her using something I told her in a bid to mend our relationship against me had widened the rift between us, and that I would probably never share anything with her again. I became quiet and only spoke when I was spoken to. In a bid to at least salvage the fun I was supposed to have on the trip, she started to act like an overbearing mother hen. She’d coddle me and urge me to take pictures in front of shops and would act overexcited as if on my behalf. I found it very annoying but I endured and even indulged her. My pictures of the trip became all me, tightlipped in front of shops we never entered.
We returned to Nigeria and we never spoke of the disaster for many years, until one day when she dreamt I was tied up or that I had died or something. She called me and asked me to come back home from school. She said we needed to talk. She told me of her dream and how she had shared it with her sister who had also shared it with a man of God. The man had asked to meet with us. She also told me that in the course of talking to him, she had revealed my sexuality to him.
I took all this in with mixed feelings. She had once again told someone of my sexuality without my consent, and now she wanted me to go meet some utter stranger who didn’t know half my life’s story to have me delivered from a demon I didn’t have. I didn’t want to go meet any man of God. I didn’t need any deliverance. I stood up from where I was seated and went to meet her in the kitchen where she was slicing plantains with that grave look on her face that I had come to associate with when she was worried about me.
“I don’t want to go,” I told her.
The grave look turned to anger and she sneered at me: “Is it me you think you are doing with this thing? You are doing yourself. If you don’t know people die from it. The anus was meant to pass things out, not take things in and because of that, you have a higher chance of contracting HIV. If you want to let the devil ruin your life how does it concern me? After all I have tried my best to bring you children up right.”
When I was sure she was done I left the kitchen and went to my room to cry myself to sleep.
The next day, I was on the road with her to Ijebu-Ode. She sang praise and worship songs as she drove and muttered prayers under her breath. I was starving. We didn’t have any breakfast because we were to go and meet the man of God fasting.
In-between the singing and muttering, she said things like the devil had lost because God was going to bring me out of the realm of darkness, and that this was why God reveals things to his children. I was silent all through. I wondered what would happen to me at the man of God’s church. Would I be asked to bathe naked or be beaten with brooms or would I fall to the ground under anointing? If I did fall under an anointing, would it hurt because from the things I had seen on television, some people often reported that they felt like they were burning. I also wondered if the deliverance would work, and if it did work, what next for me?
We arrived at the church. It was no surprise to me that it was celestial. The man of God wasn’t around yet but my aunt was. She and my mother went into the chapel to pray while I sat in the car and played Candy Crush.
When the man of God finally arrived, I was dozing off in the afternoon heat. I was called into the chapel by my aunt. A few white plastic chairs had been arranged in a circle and I was asked to sit on one of them facing the man of God — a stocky man wearing an assortment of rings on his sausage fingers. I wondered what kind of man of God wore rings that were not marriage bands
He started to pray in Yoruba and I said Amen whenever necessary. After the prayer, he said in English, “The Lord has revealed to me that your son is in bondage.”
Bloody hell?! I thought. I looked up my mother to see her eyes red, with tears filling the rims. I ducked my head back down. I wished I was brave enough to tell my mum not to listen to the load of crap the man was saying and insist we go home. But I listened as he continued to prey on her fears.
“The enemy has set up altars against him. We will need intense fasting and prayers to break him free.” And like a doctor prescribing medicine, he put me on a dry fast that I must break only with fruits after 6pm every day for a month. He also gave me a bunch of bible passages to read and meditate on during prayers.
My mum thanked him and gave him lots of fruits she had brought along with her in appreciation. I thanked him too because I had home training. On the drive back home, she bought Gala for me.
I did fast. It was terrible. I couldn’t believe people do it for days on end. By the time I was ready to eat each day of the fast I’d feel so faint with the world moving around me like a ship being rocked by heavy waves. I spent a lot of the fasting periods sleeping, and it was one of those naps that was interrupted when I felt someone shake me gently awake.
I opened my eyes to see my mum sitting on the edge of the bed. She was crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. I was too weak to be upset by her tears but I still felt dread.
“Who did you make a covenant with?” she asked me.
Say what now?!
“James, answer me! Who did you make a covenant with?”
“No one!” I groaned.
“You must have, otherwise why else haven’t you given up this thing?”
I didn’t say anything. What was I going to say? I didn’t know how to get into a lecture on how sexuality works, especially since every time I’d tried to explain to her that I had ALWAYS been gay, she refused to believe me.
However, I tried.
“I didn’t make a covenant with anyone, mummy. I have always been like this,” I said with a weariness that had nothing to do with my hunger-battered body.
“Don’t say that!” she admonished. “You haven’t always been like this. It was when you had sex that you became this way. Or don’t you know sex has a spiritual side to it? You made a covenant with the first man you slept with!”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Actually, I did. I was supposed to say: That is utter bullshit. And please go back to that man that is parading himself as a pastor and preying off your fears and tell him that he should leave you alone and stop telling you lies.
I was supposed to say a lot of things about the things I was truly feeling. But I stayed quiet.
When she realized she wouldn’t be getting anything out of me she told me it was time for prayers and then left me. I picked up the bible but I couldn’t read a word from it because my eyes were clouded with tears.
Written by IBK
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33 Comments
Zemocrush
September 03, 07:26Sighs heavily
Pink Panther
September 03, 07:28What is it? What weighs heavily on your mind?
Zemocrush
September 03, 07:58Reading pieces like this just give me only one resolution, I don’t think I can ever come out to my family. …..
Pink Panther
September 03, 08:19Really? You don’t think the chance to live your truth and have them see you for who you truly are is worth coming out to them?
WhoIsUgo
September 03, 08:30Nah. With a religious family you’re better off lying to them and pretending because that’s what they really want. You think you’re coming out? Our parents know these things. They just ignore and hope it will go away. They tell you things like ” this is for kids, you’re grown up now. “
Pink Panther
September 03, 08:35I dunno… Maybe it’s my mindset these days… But I don’t think I’ll go through life to the end of my days without coming out to my family. It would feel like cheating. Like I’m cheating them out of an opportunity to actually know me, the real me. I’ve come to see coming out as something I owe myself, it’s not even for the benefit of these loved ones. It’s for my own benefit. That you see ME and not the person you think I am.
Omiete
September 03, 22:37You know not every family is accepting or calm. There is a high probability that one might get assaulted by the parents or something much worse
Ojukwu Jeff
September 04, 08:18I think no one knows us best than our family…I don’t really concur to coming out to your family because they know what you are but they can’t just tell you just so they won’t hurt you. It cut both ways….
Rehoboth
September 03, 07:44The events after a coming out/outing is exhausting that I sometimes wonder if it’s worth it. In the long run though, they will make their version of peace with it.
IBK
September 03, 14:51Is it worth it?
Well I feel like the worst of it is over. That fear that my family will know is ninexistent. Now I know whether or not they’d kick me out. You dint know how much that fear weighs you down until it’s gone. I feel freer to live authentically. No kito person will use threatening to tell my parents to extort me. My brothers are less homophobic. Etc.
The bad side is really just my mum being sad about it and that’s only cause I care what she thinks.
theres also planning to ensure that your coming out doesn’t stress you as much as you being dragged out of the closet. I wish I had had time to plan things.
Tobby
September 03, 07:44I can imagine that it’s as difficult for her as it is for you. To be honest, I’d hope that my own mum would love me regardless (I’m sure yours does), but she probably needs time to come to terms with all that.
It’s difficult, a part of you wants them to understand that love and acceptance should be unconditional, another part just wants to put up with their homophobia because, well, they’re still our mums
trystham
September 03, 08:05I just kept thinking, if the oluso had asked that ur mom make u stay, would she have been desperate to allow it? Geez!!!
Pink Panther
September 03, 08:20?????????? I swear, the way you think eh.
Zemocrush
September 03, 08:48You had to use the word ‘oluso’. Lol
Brian Collins
September 04, 06:46I think they are called Shepherds.
Johnny
September 03, 08:10Life is hard .
WhoIsUgo
September 03, 08:32IBK all you need in your life is peace. If distance from your mother will give you peace, there’s nothing wrong with that.
IBK
September 03, 14:05I’m taking that distance and you are right. It has been peaceful but I also terribly miss her because asides all of these she is a wonderful mother who I love very much. So it’s just bittersweet
IBK
September 03, 14:06Was this before or after graduation.
Mitch
September 03, 08:37Mom has been taking this route in our relationship for years now. The whole hot and cold treatment could break anyone. But me, I’ve already told her to her face that I’m a gay man, bottom for that matter and that I most definitely will not be getting married to a woman.
Her new tack is an everyday Thanksgiving prayer during our prayer time for my deliverance from homosexuality.
And I’m like, “Dream on, lady. Dream on.”
beejay
September 03, 13:11Personally, I abhor the term ‘coming out’ (sounds too much like ‘seeking validation’ for comfort). Regardless, it makes one wonder if it’s worth any of the emotional torture, constant discomfort and fears of possible fallout.
Still, it takes a mountain’s worth of courage to have been so honest, and even remain resolute despite the ensuing fiasco.
IBK
September 03, 14:03Coming out isn’t necessarily about seeking validation. It’s about letting people she there it’s your close friends or the world know who you are. If you want to live authentically then coming out us necessary. It doesn’t even need to be with fan fare. You don’t need to dramatically sit your parents down or hold a press conference. The only reason it seems special is because lgbt are still marginalized people. And if it makes you feel differently straight people come out all the time too.
Let’s say as a gay man you kissed your bf at your work dinner party. You’ve come out? Yes? Or you slip into your conversation with a friend who didn’t know if your sexuality that you’re having dinner with your boyfriend, you have also come out, right?
Straight people do that all the time but no one labels it coming out. why? Cause the assumed default is that you are straight. The above things mentioned in the last paragraph isn’t seeking validation. It’s just you living your life and the people around you being aware that that’s what your life is.
So this idea that coming out is unnecessary or seeking validation from straight people is flawed. Maybe in the distant future you can say that but right now it is not (always) the case.
You made it to the end of this long story. Have a cookie as a reward.
beejay
September 04, 11:53*I’ll have that cookie with milk please?* Maybe it’s a perspective thing? I don’t see it like you do. Way I see it is, my business is mine alone + it’s called ‘personal’ business for a reason. I don’t need to be ‘understood’ or ‘accepted’, just left alone…. But then again, that’s just me.
OroboHunter
September 03, 14:03I hear you don’t come out once.. It’s a lifelong thing.. The more people you meet, the more you come out to them. So here’s my plan.. I become a big ass superstar and I come out on live television with millions watching… Yeah? No.
IBK
September 03, 14:05Sounds legit. Invite me to the after party please!
Jason
September 03, 22:45Please don’t withdraw from your Mum. It’s extremely difficult and I’m going through the same issue with mine but withdrawing from her just puts her in the pits of her emotions . It’s not exactly that easy but it’s not exactly that difficult to just go with the flow , I’ve learnt to just ignore that part of her that wants me to straight and love the othe beautiful part of her . What she’s doing is typical of a mother who ” loves ” her son in her own way so don’t withdraw man
That would kill her even more 🙂
Be strong , someday we shall overcome
FJ
September 05, 23:31You spoke my mind
Foxydevil
September 03, 16:21This is so sad.
To the poor woman her intention seems genuine enough, not knowing how much psychological damage she is putting you through.
This is a rare case of being between the devil and the deep blue sea….distance yourself from the person you possibly love the most in this world or bend to her whim and live out the rest of your life as a caricature of who you are.
Choices are hard and tedious ,but they are necessary route to which we must take. Life will give you a choice and it’s up to you to make it and when you don’t, it will pick one for you and most often than not, they are mostly unfavorable.
Sweetie ,it is time you withdrew emotionally from your mum. Just like” cersai lannister “so wisely said “love makes us weak “the more people we love and the more vehemently we delve into that capricious emotion ,the weaker we get and weakness brings pain and hurt .
Your mum should and will always be a part of your life…. but you are the one who has to live in your body for the rest of your days.
Pick wisely beautiful. ?
Michael
September 03, 22:11Will I ever cone out to my parents? No.
Why? Because they probably ask me what it means to be gay.
ogb
September 04, 22:46I don’t think I’ll ever tell anyone from my family about my sexuality…they’ll never understand.
CHUCK
September 05, 04:03What happens when a Shepherd/ religion professional tells the mother to burn her son’s private part to keep him away from gay sex? A few quotes from the Old Testament and a youth will just get boiling ring in the butt or starved to coma.
Jay Carter
September 05, 13:19Who did you too make a convenant with?
Lorde
September 12, 18:47Jesus H Christ!!!