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.
The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Ufuoma*, a 52-year-old civil servant based in Port Harcourt. She talks about becoming her family’s provider at 25, a promise she made to her dying twin, and what happened when her 26-year-old daughter told the relatives living off her to find work and leave.
Can you tell me about yourself?
My name is Ufuoma. I am 52, and I live in Port Harcourt. I work in the public sector. I have one daughter, and I am the eldest daughter of five from Warri. I have one older brother and three younger sisters. I also had an older twin sister who passed away. If you ask anyone in my family who sorts out problems, they will say my name. I did not choose that role. It was handed to me early, and I carried it for so long that I forgot it was ever optional.
What was your family like growing up?
We were six children, from a very ordinary Warri home. My father was the main provider, and my mother had a small shop, so we had enough to get by. My brother was the firstborn, then my twin and I, then the younger ones. Nobody was rich, but we went to school, and we ate.
Then my father died, and everything changed. My twin and I were around eighteen. My mother sold some of her wrappers to buy books for the younger ones. By the time we were old enough to work, the whole family was looking at the two of us to survive.
What was your twin like?
My twin was the strong one. She got a job first and became the person the family leaned on, almost like the man of the house, if I can put it that way. She paid the school fees and settled the problems. I was a little softer, and I think she knew I would be the one to fall apart without her.
We were inseparable. Anything I had, she had a share in. That is why what happened next still sits so heavily on me.
How did you become involved in providing for the family?
I met my daughter’s father in Port Harcourt when I was in my twenties. He was a contractor with a big company. People like to say I was only after his money, and I will not lie, there was money. But there was also love. We dated, and he sent me money, and I used it to start my own business.
I started with frozen food and then rentals, and eventually I owned trucks and four shops in Amadi. By the early 2000s, I was doing very well for a young woman. My twin was already the family’s provider, and because I was doing well too, I brought most of the family to live with me. I did not think twice about it.
What happened to your twin?
She died in 1999. She was on her way to the bank with money in her bag, and a car hit her. Everything scattered on the road. She died there.
I was already pregnant with my daughter. Before she died, she told me something I have never forgotten. She said I should keep the baby for him, so that when he finally went back to his country, we would share something that would remain. She asked me to have the child for both of us.
You said, “keep the baby.” Why did she have to ask you that?
Because I had been pregnant before and had aborted it. A boy. My daughter calls him the older brother she never met. I was very young, frightened, and not ready. My twin was the only person who knew how much that had stayed with me.
When this second pregnancy came, I wavered. She sat me down and said, “Keep this one.” After she died, I made up my mind. I would honour that. My daughter was born in 2000, months after her aunt was buried. I have never regretted it for a single day.
What became of your daughter’s father?
His contract ended when my daughter was between three and five. He went back to his country, and that was that. We lost contact, and he never looked back. I still have his documents in a file. I have never tried to find him.
I have asked myself why many times. Part of it is pride. I did not want to come to him with my hand out. Part of it is that I told myself that if he wanted to know his child, he knew where we lived. And part of me was afraid of what I would find. So I kept the documents, and I kept working, and my daughter grew up without him.
What did providing for everyone look like after he left?
Heavy. I was already providing for the extended family, and now I had a child of my own. I had the shops, the frozen food business, and the rentals. At my busiest, I was feeding about ten people. Some were my siblings. Others were relatives my mother brought into the house, people I could barely place on the family tree.
There were days there was no food in that house, and I would stand there with more mouths than I could feed. And still I did not say no. I never learned how.
What eventually happened to your businesses?
They collapsed, one by one. Debt, mostly. When you are supporting that many people, business capital is the first thing to go. I would take money out of the shop to pay somebody’s school fees, then take stock on credit to refill the shelf, and slowly the debt grew bigger than the business.
I closed the four shops in Amadi, one after another. We left the big house and moved into a room in a three-bedroom flat. I lost the trucks as well. It was a very humbling time.
Next Read: Stigma Kills, Not The Abortions
Where did your mother stand on all of this?
She advised me to sell everything I had left and move to the village. She wanted me to bring the family back to Warri and live in her house. I refused. I looked at her and thought, why would I sell land and properties and become landless, just so everyone can sit in one place?
My mother was a landlady. She had tenants. She made money from her house, and I sent money home regularly, yet when it came to the children she raised, she did not provide for them. I think she was comfortable watching me carry what she did not want to carry.
It sounds like you have mixed feelings about your mother. Did that ever change?
I do, and no, it didn’t. Not even when she died on the way to the hospital in an ambulance, after she fell ill. I buried her properly, because that is what you do. But there are things people in my family say about my mother and about our family’s money that I do not like to repeat out loud. I will only say that I have watched how every one of my siblings struggles with money and with marriage, and I have wondered more than once whether we are carrying something we cannot see.
I do not know what to believe. I only know what I have seen with my own eyes.
What have you seen?
I have seen a family of grown women with not one stable marriage among us, except one sister whose husband died. I have seen siblings with good jobs who cannot afford three square meals. And I have seen my own money disappear as fast as it comes in.
I will also say this, because it would be dishonest not to. Some of it is just decisions. My youngest sister has children with a man who was already married, and for years I paid his bills while he kept his wife comfortable. The sister after me failed the bar exam four times, and each time I paid again. People can blame the spiritual, but sometimes people simply need to be told no. I did not tell them no.
Why was saying no so difficult for you?
Because I was raised to be the one who carries. My twin was the one who carried before me, and when she died, I picked up her load and never put it down. If I said no, I felt like I was betraying her.
I told myself that as long as I could still stand, I would stand for all of them. I did not realise that I was teaching them they never had to stand for themselves.
What was it like for your daughter growing up in a house where everyone depended on you?
She went without. I will say it plainly. She never had a birthday party. She wore her cousins’ old clothes and sometimes got new ones only at Christmas. She shared a mattress on the floor with two other girls for years. When there was no food, she ate last, and sometimes there was nothing left. She did not complain. She watched, and she remembered.
I told her I did not want her doing anything for the family. I did not want them taking from her. So I put myself in front of her, and I paid for everything, including the cost of keeping her from becoming me. But I could not protect her from the feeling of growing up in a house where everyone else’s needs came first.
If you’d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid, fill this form.
Did things ever change?
Yes. When my daughter finished university, then NYSC this year and came home. She is 26 now, has a good job and is more ambitious than I’ve ever been. When she initially returned home, she sat in that house for a few weeks, looked around, then looked at me and said, “Mummy, this is not normal.” She said I was drowning and nobody in the house could see it, because they were all standing on my head.
I had no answer. She was right. She has always been the one who sees clearly.
What did she do after that?
She made a plan. A real one, with dates. She sat the adults in the house down and told them there was a timeline. Each person must either have a job or be in the process of learning a skill that earns money, within a set number of months. Then they must start paying rent, and eventually they must leave.
She stopped the open food supply for those who were not contributing. She wrote everything down so nobody could say they did not understand. She was calm about it, and not cruel. But she was very firm.
How did the family react to her decision?
Badly, at first. They said she was disrespectful. They said she had brought strange ways into the house and that she was turning her mother against her own blood. Some of them cried, and some of them did not speak to me for weeks. They tried to guilt me, and they still try.
But a few have started working. Two have already left and found their feet. The rest are working through the timeline, some grumbling, others quietly relieved.
How did you feel watching your daughter do something you had struggled to do for years?
Relief and fear together. I was relieved because I had been tired for decades and did not know how to stop. I was afraid because I did not want to be the woman who chased her family out. In our culture, that is the unforgivable thing.
I felt guilty too. I kept thinking, my daughter should not have to be the one doing this. I am her mother. I should have done it years ago. But I did not know how. She did.
What do you want for yourself now?
I am going back to school to improve my qualifications at work, so I can rise in rank. I want to finally rest and build a life that is not about feeding everyone else. I still love my family. I will always help in an emergency. But I am done being the plan.
What would you say to other eldest daughters carrying their families?
Learn to say no, and learn it early. Helping is good, but helping so much that nobody has to grow is not love. It is a slow way of destroying the people you are trying to protect.
And if you have a child watching you, remember that she is learning what a woman’s life looks like from you. I taught my daughter that a woman gives until she has nothing left. She had to unlearn it, and then teach me. I am grateful, and I am sorry it took this long.
You’ll Like: 6 Women on Whether Menstrual Cups Are Worth It
