NOPE, WE WON'T REASON WITH OUR POOR PARENTS

Nigerian parents will have kids when they are poor, depressed, frustrated, angry and fucked up and expect their kids to understand.

- Understand that we are poor;

- Understand that life is hard for us;

- Understand that this country does not favour us;

- Etc.

News flash: your children do not owe you anything. They don't owe you gratitude for birthing them. They do not owe you understanding for the terrible conditions in which you birthed them. 

They have the right to be angry and to want more from life.

The astonishing number of criminals we have in Nigeria is not related to spiritual causes. It is the result of generations of poverty, lack and deprivation. 

You understood your parents, who at their own time understood your grandparents. But your own children have refused to understand you, so now you want to play the victim. 

Why were you so quick to forget the hardship you suffered when you were young? Why did you decide to subject your own children to the same hardship? You made the conscious decision to repeat the same mistakes that your parents made and you think that this time things will be different?

Bro, you are not special. There are special people in this world, but all together they don't even make up 0.1% of the world population. 

The majority of us will die exactly in the same conditions in which we were born, or worse. The poor will die poor. The rich will die rich.

The universe will not help you to raise your kids right just becuase you are poor and you have to spend your whole time hustling.

We must stop expecting so much from our children. Perhaps we should stop having children altogether. Like, who sent you?

Enough with the "you know we are poor. You were poor before that child was born. You knew what you were doing.

Wicked soul.

MEAN GIRLS ARE DYSFUNCTIONAL PEOPLE

I'd like to reprise the topic of people who like to recruit other people into their circle of toxicity and hate, and delve into the matter to expatiate why this kind of behaviour should not be disregarded or brushed off as an act of immaturity. 

To do that, I'd love to repropose an event that happened years ago which I have often referenced in my posts.

In 2007, a girl arrived from Nigeria. In that same 2007, she saw a second girl for the first time. After that first non relatable and distant encounter, the first girl gathered the second girl's friends and asked them to stay away from her because she had deduced that the girl was a slut from her looks.

The first girl was 18, while the second girl was 14.

One will look at this scenario and brush it off as something minor. "Na small pikin dey worry am". Because in Nigeria, we don't pay much attention to the emotional components of people, as we are too busy thinking of our physical needs. Our comfort comes before our minds, so most times we do not pick up toxic behaviours at their early stage, leaving them to eventually morphe into full blown personality disorders.

If we consider that we can start identifying children's character and personality from as early as the age of 7, it means that at 18, that girl has had 11 years to consolidate that behaviour. A behaviour that shouldn't have been overlooked.

First of all, this was a group of friends who had known each other since they were kids. They met and spoke regularly. Even though they were just "kids", they knew each other to some extent. Then a disruptive element came into their midst, picked out one of them and encouraged the rest to ostracize her and emotionally abuse her.

Because it doesn't end with their not talking to her because she's a slut. It's also about their telling people, friends, acquaintances, social groups that they no longer speak to her or interact with her because she's a slut.

This 18 year old girl had deliberate plans to cause that much emotional damage to a 15 year old girl due to her own warped sense of morality.

The 18 year old girl was a church freak. She sang in the choir, dressed shabby and wore this garment of superior morality, as people commonly do in Nigeria - the country she had lived for 18 years. 

The 14 year old girl didn't. She went to church when she could. She sat among the congregation. She dressed like a teenager in Italy would dress - shirts, vests, trousers, jeans, dresses - and she never felt the need to act as if she was better than anybody else. She was not different from any other kid of her age.

One the one hand, we had this group of teenagers who lived in a controlled environment. If their parents weren't keeping them in check, their neighbours, church members, relatives, pastors and even strangers of the same nationality were doing so. They hadn't yet formed the ability to discern evil. They lived in a very small world.

On the other hand, there was this 18 year old girl who had seen more than the average girl and boy of her age who lived in Italy hadn't. She could tell what evil was as she had explored and experienced the harsh Nigerian reality. Behind the facade of a church girl, lay this viciously wicked and manipulative person.

Her father had died when she was little and her mother was the third wife. After her father's death, her mother was left to cater to 4 children on her own. At the age 15-16 she started wilding out and began her series of abusive and exploitative relationships with men. When she arrived in Italy, she was far from the naive, God fearing and well meaning person she had wanted to portray. It wouldn't take long before this image of "perfection" started to crack, until it shattered completely.

Violence, assault, betrayal, theft, fraud, near fatal self harm, are just a few of the actions she'd commit over the years, after that first episode of personal and social disruption. 

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When I say that we need to do better at being parents, I mean it. Because it's either your children will end up being like that 18 year old girl, become her enablers, or worse, become her victims.

By raising your child to be a good and empathetic person, you are not just doing a good job as a parent, you are also safeguarding every other child that will interact with them outside the house. You are protecting people from the future pain they would cause otherwise. 

Once your child is old enough to effectively harm people and they do not harm people, then you can say that you have done a good job as a parent. But if your child is the cause of pain to most people who come in contact with them, then you need to look into yourself and the way you have raised them.

There is no hope for people like that girl. She is set on that path and will tread it for as long as she lives. She will always be disruptive no matter where she goes.

But you have the chance to avoid making that same mistake now. You have the chance to love your children and be attentive to their emotional needs.

If we raise our kids to be empathetic, we won't have to live in a world where we fight for equality.

A WOMAN CANNOT USE A MAN IN A PATRIARCHY

You always brag about how you can make a man do anything you want.

But you come from a society where:

1. A man can have all the sex he wants, while you are expected to get married as a virgin and forgo sex forever if your husband dies prematurely;

2. You are called a prostitute for simply existing as a woman;

3. It's expected of a man to spend his money on women. Who else otherwise?

There are countries where women use men, but Nigeria is not one of them. Nigeria is a country where women "use" men to make their money then publicly deny that it happened like that. Because they know that it won't do well to their reputation. They know that they will be seen as the ones who were used by these men instead. 

Nigerian women who engage in any form of sex work do not want to be associated with that line of business. Sex workers are not even considered humans.

Meanwhile In other countries, the West for example, women wear that gold digging badge with honour. Why? Because, women enjoy sex as much as men and men are not expected to spend their money on women.

For a man to use his money as a bargaining chip for sex, it means that he's a loser. 

I'm not saying that women do not date or marry men for their money in these countries, but no man will openly admit it. Are you saying that his charm is not enough to attract such a beautiful woman?

That's the difference between countries where women are liberated and countries where women are not.

You can't use a man if he's doing what he's expected to do. 

MUMMY AND DADDY ISSUES

If she were my friend, I'd tell her to not look for a man like her father. And instead look for a man who is nothing like her father.

There is a big difference between a man who sees his child as an extension of himself, and therefore, gives her all that she wants as long as she does everything he wants, and a man who has no ties with that daughter and is only interested in getting what he wants from her. He could take everything and give her nothing in return.

We have heard of girls having daddy issues, but I don't think we fully understand what it means for a girl to have daddy issues.

We think daddy issues is when a girl lacks a father figure while growing up, and she ends up seeking male partners who can take that spot. So, she seeks out older men and form a childlike bond with them. She may also act out in the hope that the man will punish her, just like a father would. We like to think of every woman who does not conform to societal norms as a woman who lacked a good father figure. Because if her daddy loved her, she would be better behaved.

Well, I think the whole issue is more than that. I think that even girls who grew up with a father can still have daddy issues. Because the problem is not whether the father was present or absent. It's whether he was a healthy presence or a toxic one. Most children fail to see their parents' toxicity. They idolize them and eventually seek out partners that remind them of these toxic parental figures. 

Since this can happen to both boys and girls, to balance things out, as we talk about daddy issues, we should also talk about mummy issues.

Your parent is nice to you but horrible to every other person. You only get to do certain things or get away with certain behaviours just because you are their child. Many times you have watched them as they castigated and judged another person's child who wanted the same things as you or who did something you got away with.

Many women who end up in abusive relationships do so because they erroneously idolize their fathers. And many men who end up being abusive do so because they erroneously idolized their mothers.

We need to be more critical of these two human beings that bore us. They are not perfect. They are not beyond reproach. It could happen that they are just vessels. We come out of them, but we are nothing like them.

I wish I could sit every little girl down and tell her "No matter how great you think your father is, if you want a man, seek a man who is greater than him".

We need to break the cycle of abuse. 

We need to admit that our parents are flawed.