“I am the second child of my parents. My mother died when I was just 10 years old, and so I had to go and stay with a relative. The experience was not good for me; I’d do everything that I was supposed to do, but it was never enough. I tried to make sure that I lived to their expectations, but because I wasn’t their biological child, they didn’t treat me as a human being.
They maltreated me, used things like electric iron, spoon and so many other things to beat me. At times they stopped me from going to school, so I had to run away and came back to my father.
When I came back to my father things got even worse for me; he had remarried, and his wife was treating me worse than the place I left. It wasn’t easy for me at all.
So my elder sister took me to go and stay with her and her husband at Abuja. She was away in school, so I had to stay at home with her husband and his brothers. It wasn’t really a comfortable environment; they were all boys, and I was the only girl. As you can imagine, being a young girl growing up, I wasn’t really comfortable staying with strangers in the house and boys at that.
I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I decided to stay until I reached SS1. So after my SS1, my elder sister brought me back to Gboko from Abuja, to stay with her there. Still, that did not go well; she was very harsh on me and accused me wrongly of many things.These things really disturbed me, so much that I started thinking that maybe I was cursed. Still, I stayed with her until I finished my secondary school. I needed love. I hadn’t had a boyfriend or brought a guy home until SS3. Before any boyfriend/girlfriend thing, I brought him home to introduce him to my sister. She was not happy about that, and when I told her of our serious intentions to marry, she threatened to disown and even throw me out of her house. After secondary school, I insisted on getting married, so my sister threw me out of her house. That didn’t change my intentions; the man was showing me more love than I was getting from my family members.
So I went to my village with the man to introduce him to my father, and my father told him to go and bring his people to complete the traditional marriage requirements. He did, and we got married. I was 21 years old, and though I wanted to go to school, but because of the horrible treatment I received from family members I stayed with, I decided to marry and start my own home with my husband.
It was in a marriage that I felt loved, and it was my husband that sponsored me through university to where I am today. If not because of my husband, I probably would have been in the village giving birth to children annually. But because of love, he has for me, and what he knows I went through, he treats me like a sister, and not just as a wife. He tells me that I am his, mother, sister and everything to him. I am enjoying my marriage now with four children, and all boys.
Every young girl needs that fatherly love, that brother or sister’s love, and if you don’t show that love to them, you’ll push them away to seek that love in the wrong places. If not for God, and the man He sent my way, my life would have been entirely different, and maybe even in misery. I thank God I married well; to a man that cared for me, and my goals and dreams. Thank God.”
