Every week, Zikoko spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
Nkem*, 24, grew up in a room and parlour in Bariga with eight children, a father who drank and fought and a mother who stayed and suffered. She thought she understood her family. Then, in January this year, she uncovered the truth about all 8 siblings’ parentage. Now she is in the best relationship of her life, with a man who keeps bringing up marriage, and she cannot bring herself to say yes. This is what she said.
Can you tell us about yourself?
My name is Nkem, I’m 24. I’m the lastborn of eight children. I grew up in Bariga and still live in Lagos. I work as a customer care rep and do some content creation on the side, as well as occasional hostess jobs when they come up. Whatever keeps things moving.
My relationship with my parents is complicated, to say the least. I have a wonderful boyfriend who keeps talking about marriage, and I genuinely do not know what to do about that. My life on the outside looks fine. Normal even. But there is a lot underneath it that most people around me, including him, don’t know. That’s actually part of why I’m here.
Okay, let’s get into it. What was growing up like?
We grew up in a room and parlour in Bariga, eight of us plus my parents, in a space that had no business fitting that many people. When it rained, which in Lagos is not a small thing, there was nowhere to go; you just sat in the cold, sometimes, in the slight flood that would get into the house and waited it out.
My earliest memories of my mum are of her being this light-skinned, full woman when I was very small. She was pretty, warm-looking and very full of life. At some point, that woman was just gone, and the person in her place was thinner, smaller, quieter, and sadder, like something had been slowly taken from her over the years.
She would tell us it was our fault, that carrying us and living with my father had done that to her. And maybe that was true. But it was hard to hear as a child.
What was your father like?
On days he wasn’t working, he would leave the house and drink all day. Then come back to the compound, talking nonsense, damaging things, throwing our belongings outside, beating my mum, telling us to pack out. I used to pray just to stay sane. I used to dream about what a home felt like because I genuinely didn’t know what it felt like. I had never experienced one.
The whole neighbourhood knew our family. He would beat his wife and children and then go outside and misbehave in the streets and fall into gutters. That was just life. That was just Tuesday.
How did growing up like that affect you around other people?
I became a bully. Specifically to boys. My logic was simple: if I didn’t beat him first, something in my body assumed he would beat me. So I hit first, every time, unapologetically. It took me years to understand where that came from.
You mentioned eight children in that house. Walk me through who everyone was.
This is where it gets complicated, and I’m only now able to explain it properly because I didn’t truly understand it until January this year.
Growing up, I was told those seven other children were my siblings. I assumed some were cousins, and that was only because the way we related didn’t always feel like family. The older five had a different energy towards the younger three of us; there was a bullying that felt like more than just sibling nonsense, it felt like something else underneath it. Like resentment. Only one of the older five was genuinely kind to me. I loved her most.
I also noticed things. One of the girls was extremely fair. I am very dark, and at some point, I looked at my mum, who used to be light-skinned, and I thought, okay, maybe that explains it. I told myself we just came out in different colours. I genuinely believed we all had the same parents.
We didn’t.
So what is the actual family situation?
My mother had children with three different men.
Her first child, I’ll call her A, came from the first man she was with. She left that relationship because of domestic violence, sent A back to the village to live with that man, and moved to Lagos.
In Lagos, she met another man and had three children with him. When the last of those three was about two years old, my mother left. Just woke up one day, took her things, and left all three of them with their father.
Then she met my dad. She told him she had four children, and he told her he had one child from a previous relationship that he still supported. They moved in together, already carrying five children between them who were not living with them. Then they had my brother, their first child together. When my brother was about two, my mother brought the youngest child from her second relationship to live with them. Then she had my immediate senior sister. Then she had me.
So in that room and parlour in Bariga were: A, who came back at some point, the child my mother brought from her second relationship, my dad’s child from his previous relationship, my brother, my sister, me, and the remaining children from the second relationship who came to join at different points. Eight children. Three different fathers. One very small space. And nobody sat any of us down to explain any of it.
That must have been tough. When did you find out?
It was. I found out in January this year. And even now, nobody has given me a straight explanation. My mother refuses to properly account for any of it. The children she had for other men look at us like we are enemies. I have been asking questions, only to get silence and deflection. It is one of the most disorienting things I have ever experienced, finding out that the life you understood was not the life that actually existed.
How did your mother explain it when you pushed?
She cried. That’s her answer to everything. I’ll call her crying on the phone, trying to talk to her about how we are struggling. Sometimes, we would go two weeks without drinking anything but water before we could see money for noodles, and instead of answers, she would cry and say that if she had gone to school, she would have given us a better life. That is her response. Emotional blackmail, so she doesn’t have to explain herself. Her own child asks her how we became what we are, and she cannot give a reason.
Where is your father in all of this now?
The minute I finished secondary school, he quit his job, said he wanted to relocate to the village, and go and eat the fruit of his labour. His plan was that one of us, the one he thought had sense, would go to university and train the rest of the siblings. That one got pregnant before 300 level, wanted to marry, my mother agreed, and that was the plan finished. My brother moved to another state, couldn’t finish university, and started doing whatever jobs he could find to survive. I moved in with my immediate senior sister.
My father is now in the village in a halfway-built house. He used all the money that was supposed to complete it to drink. He is now pressuring us to send money to finish building it so he can move in properly with his new wife.
His new wife?
Yes. After everything, after all of it, he went and married another woman. My mum, who is almost 60, is crying like a child over this man who is now with someone else but still beats her when he sees her, still calls to curse himself and God and whoever else in the middle of the night. And he still expects us to send money. He wants that house completed so he can move his new family in.
My brother and my sister are the ones keeping both our parents alive right now. A man with nothing to his name, being fed by the children he never properly took care of.
I became an aunt twice before I turned 25.
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How are you surviving through all of this?
I just am. Some days are better than others. I try to control what I can control and let go of what I can’t. I’ve had to accept that no one is coming to explain anything to me or take responsibility for any of it. What I know now is what I’ll have to build from.
I am also living with someone, so my most basic needs are taken care of.
Ooh? Tell us about them.
Yes. Let’s call him Kolade*. We have been together about two years. He is Yoruba and very family-oriented. He is serious about the people he loves and shows it generously. He has a good relationship with his family, and when we are around them, I fall in line, greet properly, sit properly, and behave the way a woman is expected to behave in that setting. He doesn’t see anything wrong with that; it’s just how things are done as far as he’s concerned, and honestly, I have bigger things to worry about than that.
He is funny, though it takes some time to understand him. He will say something completely flat, and it takes you a second to realise he just made a joke. He pays attention, remembers things I mentioned once in passing, checks on me in ways I didn’t know I wanted or needed. He is also financially comfortable, has built something real for himself, and carries that without making it a whole personality.
He is a good man. That is the simplest way to say it.
Sounds like someone worth holding onto.
He is. That’s exactly the problem.
What do you mean?
He brought up marriage at our one-year mark. I laughed and changed the subject. He brought it up again a few months later, more casually, almost like a joke, but I know him well enough to know it wasn’t fully a joke. He’s been planting the conversation in little ways ever since. Recently, it’s started to feel less like a suggestion and more like something he’s actually moving towards. And I don’t know what to do with that.
Why not? You just described him as everything.
Because he doesn’t know. He knows surface things about my family, that it’s complicated, that I don’t talk about them much. He doesn’t know the actual shape of it. He doesn’t know about my father. He doesn’t know about my mother and her three men and the children she left behind and the children she brought together and the lie that all of us lived in. He doesn’t know that my parents are currently both being kept alive by my brother and sister, who are struggling themselves. He doesn’t know that the minute he becomes a more permanent fixture in my life, my family will find a way to make him a resource.
That last part especially. I have seen what my family does. I know how these things go. A comfortable man marrying their daughter or their sister is not just a wedding to them. It becomes access. It becomes requests. It becomes pressure. And Kolade has worked too hard for his life for me to be the door through which all of that walks in.
Have you told him any of this?
I don’t know where to start. That’s the honest answer. Every time I think about sitting him down, I imagine his face while I explain the family tree alone, and I just close it. How do I begin? Do I start with my mother’s first man? Do I start with January, and what do I find out? Do I start with the fact that my father just married another woman while my mother cries herself to sleep? There is no clean entry point into this story.
What are you most afraid of?
Two things that contradict each other. I’m afraid he’ll stay, and my family will slowly drain the good things we have. And I’m afraid that once he knows everything, once he sees the full picture, he’ll decide it’s too much. That I’m too much. That what comes with me is more than he signed up for.
I find homes in the people I love. I always have, because I never had one growing up. Kolade is the most home I have ever felt. The thought of losing that because of people who couldn’t even be honest with me about who we were to each other, it makes me so angry that I don’t know what to do with it.
It’s why I lied to him and his family. I told them my parents are dead and that I have only three siblings. I needed the questions to stop, and that was the easiest way to stop them.
You told his family that your parents are dead? Why?
I did. Because the alternative was trying to explain something I didn’t even fully understand myself. And because once his family knows you come from something messy, they look at you differently. I have seen it happen. I didn’t want that.
And Kolade himself? You lied to him to?
Not in so many words, but he knows what I told his parents, and I believe he’s taken that as fact.
Don’t you think this lie will drive you further apart? What happens if he finds out?
He can never. I don’t think the relationship will survive it, but I am not too worried. I live in a completely different world from my family now. I do not even visit them. I will speak to my brother and sister. The two directly above me, my full-blood siblings. We will make this lie work.
Kolade knows I don’t talk about my family. He has not pushed too hard. But marriage means his family becomes my family officially, and the lie has to hold forever, or it doesn’t hold at all. One visit, one phone call, one moment where something doesn’t add up, and the whole thing falls apart.
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Hmm. Do you want to marry him?
Yes. I think about it, and I want it. That’s what makes all of this so hard. It’s not that I don’t want the life he’s pointing at. It’s that I don’t know how to bring my life into it without breaking something.
So what are your next steps?
I wish I knew. For now, I need to solidify the lie with my immediate siblings and hold Kolade off a little longer. Maybe
What would you tell someone else in your position?
You can only control what is yours. The dysfunction is not your fault, and it is not your identity, even when it feels like it is. And cutting off people who do nothing but curse you and take from you is not a betrayal of family. Sometimes it is the only way to actually build one.
What do you want for yourself, not for anyone else, just for you?
Peace. Just peace.
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*Names have been changed.
