Life Happens!

The second instalment in Victoria Perma’s column

Why is it that women have to work four times extra hard just to live their lives? And it’s like if you relax a bit everything falls to pieces.

Anyways, sometimes you are done being the house-help, the mummy (comforter), the nurse, the cook, the tailor—and then on top of all these, you got to figure out how to pay the bills in case of shortfalls—you got to figure out a way of making extra cash. Another responsibility on top of what you have going. Aaaargh. It’s a tough life.

Some little appreciation, some acknowledgement, recognition of what it takes to just get everybody’s everyday life organised would be great!

Yet for most mamas this is the unspoken agreement of married life—especially for the African woman. Here marriage is a sentence of a lifetime of servitude.

I was a bright student and was poised to join college after the birth of my first-born. I did join, but my second-born came soon after, so I never completed my course. I stayed home for practically four years—babysitting.

When the time came, I wanted to join a distance learning university. It was a referral from a psychologist friend I was referred to by a counsellor. We met the gentleman in one of the upmarket hotels in the city. We drove there with his royal highness and a friend of his. We sat down, discussed, and left with the details of the school, payment and stuff. You could actually pay for a module and after completion pay for another. There was no rush.

I went back home and tried to initiate discussion on my schooling. I was told ‘there was no money’. Meanwhile I was doing all these odd jobs just to make an extra shilling.

Being a young couple, we had no post office box number and were actually using my dad’s. One day, after quite a bit of time, I walked into my dad’s office and Dad hands me a letter addressed to maharaja. Being that we were so close—or so I thought—I opened the letter—and shock on me!

The skunk had actually gone behind my back and paid for his own first module while I, who was jobless at the time, was to continue playing house-help. This betrayal was unfathomable. It showed me a side of maharaja I never knew. He was a selfish, egoistic person who was not interested in the development of my person but was satisfied with the status quo. Heartbreak!!!!

I was working so hard to improve our lives that we were living better than his colleagues who were a job group or two above him—they had worked ten years more. He was even able to buy a car before his colleagues. And now I felt I needed to equip myself for the job market, for self-improvement.

But apparently maharaja was okay with the situation as it was.

Maximum tears.

I cried a river—and a piece of me died.

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