How do I explain what I don’t understand?
I didn’t understand it, but I found myself acting as I agreed I would. This was my first encounter with the power of (wrong) programming.
I was about 12 years old when Odochi left. She was our househelp. I was told she came to stay with us when I was only eight months old.
Odochi was devilish.
I don’t say this because she did some voodoo stuff; no, she was just plain wicked. I don’t know if she practised voodoo, though. I just know that she was evidently wicked.
Let me break it down.
I have a scar on my scalp from her using a cooking spoon to hit my head. Yes, I bled.
I was sexually abused by an uncle; she was sleeping with the said uncle, and she ‘fought’ (more like beat) me as a rival would.
But we are talking about agreements, right?
One might wonder why I didn’t tell my parents about her abuse. Well, there was the unmentioned and unwritten agreement that if I told them, she would kill me. This was easy for me to believe because the interesting thing was that my parents believed she was the best thing that happened to me. They called me her child and trusted me with her care. She was the perfect, doting lady when they were around, but...
Have I told you that Odochi was devilish?
There was one last agreement she had with me before she left, which stuck for as long as it could. I honoured it for as long as I could. Of course, it took my father’s cane to reconstruct my brain.
Before the descent of the cane, they—my mum and dad—tried to understand why I acted the way I did, but...
How do I explain what I didn’t understand?
I didn’t understand it, but I found myself acting as I agreed I would.
This was the agreement. Apparently angry that she was about to be returned to her village after finishing her secondary education, she wanted my mother to regret sending her back. She called me to the side and warned me not to help my mother with house chores in any way. I was not to do laundry, clean, or cook. If I must cook, it should just be boiling rice and maybe making eba, but no stews, soups, or other things that need some know-how in the kitchen.
I agreed.
For a good while after she left, I was an almost useless first daughter. Imagine a teenage girl, the first daughter, in an African home who doesn’t cook, clean, or help around the house. It was as if there was an unseen force stopping me from being productive.
There was. There were.
Yes, there was the fear that she ingrained in me for over a decade that blinded me from seeing that she was gone and couldn’t harm me again. But there was also the training I had received from her over the years.
You see, one of the reasons my father wanted her to leave was that he believed I wouldn’t learn to do anything as long as she remained with us. He was right, but not in the way he thought.
While he thought that I didn’t help around the house because she did all the chores, I actually didn’t help because she made sure I didn’t do anything. She’d stop me from doing anything, then do all the chores and bask in the praise when called a hardworking househelp. Thinking back now, I realize that not only was she wicked, but she probably also had an undiagnosed mental disorder.
So having trained me not to do anything, the agreement I had with her was the proverbial nail in the coffin. Sticking to the agreement with her was the easier thing to do; it was the status quo, but my father would have none of it. He wielded his cane and forced me into the kitchen, and my mother had less to do when it came to cooking. By the time he died, when I was 16, I thankfully knew my way around a kitchen and the house.
I saw her at my mother’s burial, and she acted like I owed her some form of attention. I avoided her. I don’t know if it was because I feared she could still activate the power of her programming and our agreement or because I didn’t want to wring her neck.
To this day, I tend to stick to what I agree to, no matter how bad it is for me. But that agreement is one of the scariest and most damaging things I agreed to.
Odochi was devilish.
Phew!