My mother was beautiful once. I know this only because of the picture frames hanging on our bare walls. The gorgeous woman with smiling eyes, carefully manicured hands and glowing skin was a stark contrast to the withered, sinewy person before me. The smile of the woman in the picture was contagious. It was real. They say that whenever Anu walked into a room, the room smiled too.

But that was before she got married to my father - Franklin. 

My mother was going to be a quantum physicist, in fact, she had already enrolled into a university when she met my father. It was like a story from a fairy tale. A story of forbidden love, because that's what it was. Their parents were against the union but the disapproval only convinced the lovebirds that it was meant to be. Suffice it to say that they married anyway.

My mother was in her second year when she had her first child. That was when things started to go downhill. 

The baby was a girl. 

The day my elder sister was born, my mother was so happy. She couldn't wait to share the news with her loving husband. When Franklin did hear the news, he was furious. My poor mother couldn't understand why. If their love was so strong, why did a mere thing like the gender of her child matter? 

 Franklin started drinking more and coming home less. He would be out for hours, days, weeks and once he was back, he would throw a fit.

He was like a raging tornado that destroyed everything in its path. Soon after that, he told my mother she couldn't continue studying anymore.

“If you're not going to give me a son, at least take care of my house!” He had screamed one day. 

With tears in her eyes and a heavy heart, my mother dropped out of the university. She would do anything for her husband - including abandoning her lifelong dream.

Months passed and she was pregnant again. They were both hopeful. In fact, my father's violent episodes had ceased for a time and with my elder sister just a year old, no one was more grateful than Anu.

But it was another girl. I was welcomed into the world with much sorrow. Had I known that I would make so many lives miserable, I would have begged the Almighty to not let me be born. If things were bad before, they definitely became worse now.

My father hated us all, we were a burden to him, a disgrace. Slowly, all the money my parents had earned together disappeared into the pockets of bartenders and the slick fingers of women of the night. 

My mother did everything in her power to care for my sister and I. It wasn't much. We had to move from our grand house in the city on account of my father losing his job. It was a good job too. His work as a sales rep meant we could afford a lot of fine things…things that had now vanished as if they never existed. 

Everything we had now was a result of my mother's hard labour. 

There was no one else to run to anyway. Her parents disowned her for marrying an Igbo man and Franklin's parents refused to speak to him for breaking customs and marrying a Yoruba woman. Anu was entirely alone. 

Years passed and her once beautiful face became rough and wrinkled. The contagious smile she was so known for had long disappeared and was replaced with a sort of weary pout. 

She was a shell of herself. Anu was barely thirty, but looked like she'd been through all of the world's trials.

Right now, we three sat outside our shabby bungalow in the hot August sun, separating Egusi seeds from the casks. I looked at my mother's hands, bruised and cut in several places, fingers crooked and calloused. I looked at her weary face and frail body and made a silent vow to myself.

I vowed to free her of this prison of a home someday, give her a better life, and I vowed to never love a man like my father.