Twenty-One Days Before Christmas

Twenty One Days Before Christmas

Three weeks before the christmas of '58 my mother announced that the whole family was going to spent christmas at her parent's rural home, somewhere in Dotito. I was ten then, too young to go to school but old enough to help my parents with house chore and field work, so any journey that promised to take me away from Seke was an exciting life opportunity. From the way my father scorned at my mother it became apparent he wasn't in love with the idea at all.

"I am sure grandfather and grandmother will be happy to finally meet their grandchildren after all this time." My mother said with a weird smile on her face. My sister Mirriam was usually baffled by such unexplained phenomenas. Although she was nine, she was the smartest and the most talkative in our family. "So we have another pair of grandparents in Dotito?" Mirriam asked,"Why is it you never told us about them or let us visit them?" My mother didn't have to answer. Even I was smart enough to realise that it was not just a simple error of forgetting to mention the existence of her parents to any of her children. Maybe the trip was expensive or my mother's family was involved in witchcraft or my father hadn't paid the brideprice yet and was embarrassed to show his face or my father just didn't like my mother's family, the truth is I don't know. What I know is my father's mood soured during the course of days that followed. He even started to drink beer again, so did my mother. When both parents come home late and drunk it haunts children castles' in their dreams. Trust me on that one. Fortunately we were poor and my parents could not afford to drink everyday without starving us or themselves to death.

Back then fathers didn't have to be around or smile and kiss their children's foreheads to show that they loved them. All they had to do was beat them less and not to overwork them. Remembering their names and birthdays was also a great quality for a good father (if had many wives and a whole lot of other children). My father was a nice man but those three weeks turned him into a brute and a soulless creature I feared and hated for the rest of its life. "We are poor. We have already planted but the rains are not doing well. Someone has to stay behind to tend the fields or else they won't be nothing to come back to." My father said before he volunteered himself to stay behind. Mirriam and I were relived with the promise of getting rid of him, even for a few days. In a way he was right. Our fields needed the greatest care in order to yield anything at all. We lived in the reserves where the weather wasn't bad but the soils weren't good enough for farming anything.

We now had and extra ticket we didn't need. My mother nearly choked as she swallowed a lump of her own pride asking Virginia and her baby to go with us. Virginia was an older step sister of mine. Her mother was our father's first wife, who died giving birth to Virginia and her twin sister. The twin sister had drowned when I was still five. It was almost a year since I had seen Virginia. She had eloped with a man thrice her age and had left home after she told my mother what she actual thought of her. She was now fourteen and already with a baby playing on her lap. What would happen to her when she turned twenty? My mother and Virginia didn't like each other, now I am old and wise I understand why. Back then it was a mystery even Mirriam could not solve. Fellow villagers blamed my mother for being the heartless stepmother whilst my mother told us how our step sisters had been ungrateful for being raised and taken well care of by her. Why she would want to show her step daughter to her relatives was something I never understood. They were suspiciously nice to each other for three weeks! It was surely a burden to their souls.

Sometimes I wonder if those twenty one days prior christmas turned me in to a man I became. What I am sure is they turned Mirriam into a mother she later became; independent, hardworking and successful but also selfish. With everyone try to get out of everyone's way all the chores were all left to Mirriam. Rising very early every single morning for three weeks wasn't easy for a nine year old. She did all the cleaning, cooking and washing single handed. She fetched water, collected firewood even joined us work in the fields. Not a single day did she find time to spent with her friends or rest.

Three weeks passed and christmas day arrived. I celebrated it alone in our cold empty house. Virginia and my mother had finally dispersed the tension between them, they had finally fought and made each other bleed and sore. Virginia's husband came and took her back to their home. My father was too drunk to notice or do anything. Probably the same thing happened to him on christmas day, I never found him on that day. In less than a month he had turned from being a modest respected man to the village's notorious drunkard. Mirriam spent her christmas in hospital, she had worked herself almost to death. Back then there were no social service people who could have done something about. Parents owned their children.

Three weeks before christmas of 1958 my mother announced that we were visiting her relatives in Dotito. None of us made it there, well except for her. She left alone and came back a decade later when she heard I was now working for the government. It only took one announcement and twenty one days to ruin what we called a family. An irreparable damage that tore them into weird and awkward strangers who were just polite to each other because they shared the same surname.

written by

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Matthew Chikono follow him on facebook here

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