Before I Learned the Law, I Learned to Tell Stories

Before there was the lawyer, there was a girl. Before there was the advocate, there was a storyteller.

And before I understood the law, I was already learning what it meant to live inside the stories of women.

I remember moving to Douala and watching cartoons I could not understand. We had moved from my parents’ hometown to a much bigger city because my father had gotten a job there. Everything felt different. Even the language sounded different. The cartoons on television were in French.I didn’t understand a word. But whenever the characters laughed, I laughed too. My mother would look at me and say, “You don’t even understand what they’re saying. Why are you laughing?” I didn’t know what to say and we just laughed. I suppose I was learning to laugh before I learned to understand.

Eventually, I learned the language and from there grow an obsession about learning different languages. At the time, I didn’t know that this would become something of a pattern in my childhood: learning to understand a world whose language I did not yet speak.

In those early years, home felt ordinary there were five of us living together my parents, my cousins and me. I remember my father leaving for work in his suit every morning. I remember my mother preparing his breakfast. I remember them kissing before he left. I remember being allowed to serve my father’s food when he came home. He had a particular pan that he liked his food served in. I would carry it to him, and he would look at me with this little proud smile.

I remember my mother asking me what I wanted to eat before leaving for school, I would always say bread and eggs or sometimes sardines and potatoes. I remember the woven chair we had in the house, the first chair I remember loving. I remember sitting in it simply because I liked it.

There was a time when I thought this was what home was SIMPLY, STABLE and SAFE. I did not know that a home could slowly become a place you learned to listen too.

My bedroom was directly opposite my parents’ room.At first, I heard ordinary sounds.Then there were arguments shouting, sometimes laughter and sometimes a misunderstanding I was too young to understand. I began noticing changes I could not name maybe that’s why i easily notice patterns and shifts in mood. My mother, who had once seemed soft, became increasingly tense. Even when she was helping me with mathematics because from an early I knew figures and I won’t work together , her patience seemed to disappear more quickly. She would shout when I struggled. She would become angry when I was late for school.

Then the money began disappearing. My father stopped giving my mother the same financial support. My mother had a law degree, but she had been a full-time housewife. Now she was looking for work and not finding it. She began doing whatever she could to survive.

She sold seasonal fruits, particularly bananas and mangoes. Later, she sold puff-puff, beans, dodo and fried fish in front of the house.I watched a woman who had once stayed at home begin inventing ways to keep a household alive.

One afternoon, she went to help a neighbour prepare for a celebration. The woman was one of those people everyone seemed to admire. She had a job. Her husband had a job. Their children were doing well and lived in a very big compound. There was a celebration because one of her daughters was graduating from university. My mother went to help cook and I followed her later because I didn’t want to stay home alone.

When my father came to take me home, everything seemed normal. Until it wasn’t, later that night , my mother returned home and knocked on the door, my father refused to open it. He told her to go back where she had come from. She reminded him that he had seen her helping with the cooking. She reminded him that it was getting late. He still wouldn’t open the door.Then he began throwing her things outside. I remember standing near the window. My mother told me to go and beg my father to open the door. So I did I was a child and I didn’t understand marriage,I didn’t understand resentment,

I didn’t understand whatever had happened between two adults that could make one of them leave the other standing outside their own home.I only knew that my mother was outside.And she wanted me to get my father to let her in. Eventually, things were repaired, at least temporarily.but the house had changed.

My father stopped sleeping at home, the bills went unpaid and my mother struggled to pay rent. Sometimes she would ask for money and be told that she should leave and return to her father’s house. There was even a woman my father took my younger brother and me to visit one weekend. We ate rice, groundnut stew and chicken. Chicken felt special, It was the kind of food I associated with celebrations. We came home happy, telling my mother about our visit. She listened then she understood who the woman was and another argument followed.

I was beginning to learn that adults could say things without explaining them to children, while children still had to live with the consequences.Eventually, my mother left with my younger brother leaving me with my dad and my oldest cousin I was still very young. My father wasn’t around much, and the people who had once filled the house were no longer always there. I remember relying on neighbours for food. Once, a neighbour caught me picking at the remains of food on the grill. She realized there was barely anything to eat at home and i looked unkempt and skinny she called my mother.

My mother came back and she tried again. For a while, there were attempts at reconciliation. Family meetings were held in an attempt to repair what had been breaking.Then my younger sister was born and my mother named her Peace,She said that when she became pregnant, there had been peace in her marriage for eight months.I have always found that beautiful and sad. A child carrying the name of something her mother had been desperately trying to find.

TO BE CONTINUE…..