I was 16 when my father left. My mother, in her grief, found her way back to the church she'd drifted from years earlier — and she never really left it again.
At first I was grateful. The church people brought food, prayed with us, helped pay my WAEC fees. But slowly, "church" stopped being a place she went and became the lens she saw everything through — including me.
The Year I Stopped Trying
When I got into a relationship she disapproved of, she didn't argue with me. She fasted. When I struggled with depression in my second year of university, she told me it was a spirit I needed to pray away, not a doctor I needed to see.
"I felt like I was competing with God for my own mother's attention," I told her once, years later. She didn't understand what I meant — and in some ways, she still doesn't.
"Forgiveness isn't pretending it didn't happen. It's deciding the relationship is still worth having, even with the scar tissue."
Where We Are Now
We don't talk about that period much. But last year, when I finally went to see a therapist on my own terms, she paid half the bill — without being asked, and without a single Bible verse attached. It wasn't an apology. But it felt like one.
