When they got there the mother was not around, Joash's father told him that her mother went for the Morning Prayer in the church; it was only his father who was at home. They waited for an hour before she returned. The father did not say much when he saw Susan but as an elderly man he sensed the reason why Joash came in company of a lady.

When the mother returned she was very happy to see them; she welcomed Susan as if she had seen her before. She wasn't surprised because mothers always do their things in a unique way. When Joash later unveiled the purpose of the visit they were happy. The mother got up from her seat and welcomed Susan again. Susan was a bit relieved but her mind had not settled because she was still wrestling with a thought, the reason behind her uncle's silence when he asked Joash where he came from.

Susan was still imagining what that could be when his father asked Joash where she came from as if he read her mind to see what was going on. When Joash mentioned the name of Susan's village, the father did not say anything again but quietly went inside. There were some moments of silence because everybody was surprised including the mother. Susan was trying to find out from Joash what the action denote but Joash too was also as confused as she was and so there was no need for a toad to be asking a dog for a seat because he too, is squatting.

Both Joash and the mother went inside to enquire of the father the reason behind his sudden action. They stayed up to ten minutes and while they were inside and Susan was left alone, she was restless. She knew something had gone wrong and nothing was new for her again under the sun. Susan believed there was nothing the human eyes will see and would begin to shed blood, the least it can shed is tears and nothing more.

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She was so surprised when Joash came out highly infuriated. She tried to find out why he was boiling but he did not talk to her. Susan had never seen him in that mood before. After a while, the mother came out looking pale. "Hmm, is there something they knew which I did not know?" she asked herself. She believed history must have an answer to it.

Susan allowed Joash to calm down for a while and she demanded an explanation to that 'drama' and that was when he told her that his father said he must not marry her. "According to my father, there was a time they had community war with one village and your own village allied with the other village they were fighting with and ma.s.sacred their people and since then, there had been enmity between the villages involved in that war.

My father said that your village was known to be the strongest and whenever any town or village had war, they would run to them for help. So as a result of the incident, they swore that they would never give their daughters to their men, and their men would never marry any of your village's girls." Joash said.

Susan watched as tears streamed down Joash's cheek; Joash mumbled, "Several decades after the war, the new generations are still paying for it. Why all these tribal, religious, and cultural sentiment and differences? Can't one freely marry whomever he or she wants to marry? When you manage to escape the issue of tribal or religious differences, you will then face community and cultural sentiments. We are not talking about racism because it's a different big issue on its own. One cannot genuinely be accepted by another due to one sentiment or the other.''

Joash expected Susan to burst into tears but she did not cry. She believed that n.o.body should expect a woman to keep crying for the same reason, but when a woman ceased to cry it then meant she had been hurt so badly to the extent she could let go of anything, and when a woman hardened her heart she could do an unimaginable thing.

Joash's mother was not in support of her husband's decision. Joash tried to disobey his father but Susan knew what it would result at the end. If he insisted on marrying her she would be the one to suffer it. The father would make things too difficult for her and no matter how she tried to please him, he must surely see fault and even if she killed herself for him, he would still not be satisfied because the hatred had been there for ages. And above all, he would not give Joash his fatherly blessing.

Joash's father threatened to disown him if he goes on to marry her. Susan knew it was not an empty threat so she asked Joash to go his way while she goes her own separate way. She picked her bag to leave when his mother rushed her and apologized for her husband's harsh att.i.tude and decision. She left them there and went back to the city that same day.

When Susan left, Joash' mother told him, "Women are always vulnerable to everything. Whenever there are unfavorable laws about marriage, they are the one to bear the consequences because whenever they love, they love with everything in them. When they truly love, they will give their best to keep relations.h.i.+p and marriage; on the other hand when a relations.h.i.+p falls, men may easily recover from it but it will take women time to fully recover. Men have time on their side but women have no time to waste. A man can marry at any age but a woman may not marry at any age because of the challenges of menopause and some other factors" she held Joash at the shoulder and said, "Don't keep her waiting, since your father is not in support of the marriage let her go."

When Susan was in the bus back to the city, she started thinking about how she was going to cope when Madam Teresa leaves. She got to the city very late and she pa.s.sed night with them. Her two kids were growing and doing well especially in academics. They were her joy. She told Madam Teresa how they travelled home and the things that happened. It hurt Teresa so much; she wondered how Susan would survive the pain but she did not know that she had made up her mind never to be disturbed by the issue of marriage anymore.

Susan did not see the disappointment as a big problem the way Teresa thought; what she pa.s.sed through before made her a strong woman. She had experienced such things in the past. And so if she had swim ocean and it did not drown her, there was no way the ordinary stream or puddle would drown her. If that incident happened to be a mountain, she knew she had climbed the mountain that was higher than it. In fact, it looked like a hill to her.

When Madam Teresa was expecting it to wear her down, she did not know Susan had moved on. The only problem Susan had then was her two lovely kids. She was still thinking of how to handle the situation when Teresa finally leaves. That same night Teresa reminded her of her departure which was fast approaching. She told her how she was working on it.

The following day she left them to resume work. Two days later she got a call from Joash that he had arrived. He asked to see her that same day but she told him how busy she was, that it would not be possible because she had a lot of piled work to do at the office. Susan apologized for it and asked Joash to see her over the weekend to enable her tidy up her work.

Joash thought Susan never wanted to see him again as a result of what happened at home, but he did not know she had got over the issue; it was not bothering her anymore. Joash later went to see Susan; he told her how he argued with his father and how the issue wanted to bring a fight between the both of them when she left. Susan told him she would never be the reason why his family would tear apart.

He apologized on behalf of the father. He knew she was hurt, but he did not know that the Susan he was seeing was no longer the same Susan he used to know whom a little thing broke down easily. He thought she would stop talking to him, but he did not know that things had changed, she had matured. They only remained the best of friends.

Susan understood that every relations.h.i.+p must not end in marriage. She believed they were made to be friends; if she had insisted on getting married to Joash when it was obvious to her they were not made to be together, the marriage would collapse. Susan had seen a lot of people who were good friends but when they wanted to marry, they married different people. She believed her own case was like that.

She accepted the fate that they were made to be friends, and they were the best friends. One might be thinking that there was something serious between Joash and Susan, but there was nothing. The friends.h.i.+p was purely platonic. They were like siblings and they didn't hide secrets from each other no matter how it sounded.

It was the holidays' period and Susan went to pick her kids so as to be getting used to the challenges she would face when Madam Teresa would finally leave because her departure was at hand. Teresa spent the few weeks she had with them in Susan's apartment and when she was leaving they organized a colorful sendoff party for her with the help of Joash.

When Teresa finally left, Susan knew a part of her left; her two kids felt her absence. Madam Teresa was a good influence to all of them. Even when Kelvin and Susanna grew, they never stopped talking about her. They were only eight years old when she left and they were still in primary school.

Raising children in a society where moral decadence was in its apex was a difficult task especially for a single parent. It was never easy for Susan, but she asked G.o.d for the grace. She knew if she had succeeded in parenting her children well it meant she had secured the future for them, but if she had failed, it meant she had failed them in life. Because of her parental upbringing, Susan understood that even if she was successful in her career but failed in the area of parenting she was still a failure.

Susan needed no one to remind her how important it was to parent her children very well while still pursuing her career. In between her children and her career laid a great sacrifice; It's either she sacrifice her job for her children or she sacrifice the future of her children for her career. Those two things were very important to her but she was completely in dilemma not knowing what to do. If she sacrificed her job for her children, she was not sure how she was going to cope with the economic challenges since she wanted the best for them, and getting another job was never a guarantee. If she had sacrificed her children for her job, then she would not be happy having children who are failures.

She knew it would be selfish to sacrifice her children for her job. All of her life, she wanted to be a successful woman and she was seriously working towards it until she realized it would be at the expense of her children. She knew that living in a great mansion, riding the latest car, and travelling on the highway of success would definitely be on the expense of her lovely children, which is the perfect definition of foolishness and selfishness; But she needed both ends to meet.

Susan knew she was running away from the truth because in a situation like that, one must sacrifice one for another and there was no way that both ends would perfectly meet. Whenever she was with her children at home, she would keep thinking about her job while looking at the handsome and the beautiful faces of her children, and whenever she was at the office, she would be thinking about her lovely children while practicing her profession. At a point, a thought of using school as a dumping ground came to her mind, but she paused a while to think about the implications. Susan knew if one must be a successful parent, it would cost them something because parenting demands a lot of sacrifice.

To meet up in the office, Susan knew she must leave home early, and to meet up at home, she must leave the office on time. If she must finish her daily work in the office, it meant she must go home late and before she could reach home, her children must have slept. On the other hand, if she must finish the house ch.o.r.es, it meant she would get to office late. Using school as a dumping ground was a good idea but it still sounded foolish to her because if she dropped them at school in the morning and pick them up late in the evening or pay somebody to be dropping and picking them up in the evening, she might not be able to a.s.sess their homework and character. Even if she paid somebody to be having a private lesson for them, she knew she would not pay the person to be a.s.sessing their character and performance in school.

Susan would never forget the incident that made her give up her job. After taken a deep look at the progress she had made so far and it seemed she was almost there, she decided to make a toast with the bottle of chilled champagne to celebrate her success in advance when her daughter, Susanna displayed a very shocking act that left her thinking all night where she learnt it from, while dancing she removed her dress and asked his brother Kelvin to suck her breast (as little as she was then).

The incident made Susan have a sleepless night and that was when she knew she was getting it wrong, if such thing had continued, it would be a disaster to everyone and all her labor would be in vain. And that was when she made a decision that hurt her career to save her children. When she asked her daughter were she learnt it from, Susan told her that she learnt it from television.

Susan could not imagine herself celebrating her success in advance while her little daughter was peris.h.i.+ng. She resigned her job in order to save her children. She needed to come back home to save the future of her children. If her children were her hope, then greater sacrifice was needed to protect the hope.

Tears were rolling down her eyes as she was handing her resignation letter to the director; It was the greatest sacrifice she had ever made. When she went home early that day, her children were so happy to see her home early and her son, Kelvin asked, "Mom, have you come home to stay with us or you came to pick something up that you forgot?" because ever since they had been living with her they had not seen her returned office early.

She went closer to both of them and wrapped her hand around them and whispered to them, "I have come home to stay with you." she never forgot how happy they were that day, but deep down her heart she knew the sacrifice she made. Tears were streaming down her cheek as she was watching her years of labor in the office going down the drain when she saw her children feeling loved because she had never given them such attention before ever since Madam Teresa left.

But if her kids meant everything to her, then they were worth sacrificing everything for. She later secured another freelance job that didn't take much of her time to enable her spend enough time with them (though it wasn't that lucrative, but it allowed her to have time for her children). Few weeks of staying with them were not that easy and that was when she realized how important Madam Teresa was to her, but as time went by, she started learning how to be a good mother and that was when mother children relations.h.i.+p increased and she could tell there was a joy in being a great mother and here are the things she applied that made things easy for her.

1). She lived by example. Most of the parents are great leaders outside, but not great leader at home. Charity begins at home," you remember? Susan made sure she practiced what she thought them. She did not allow them to watch every TV program but she took time to select the educative ones they watched and once it was time to watch the ones she selected, they would drop whatever they were doing to watch it. Susan became their role model because they always like to learn from her. Whatever she told them not to do; she made sure not to do it behind them.

2). She did not only stated the family laws, she enforced them. Most of the parents are very good in stating laws, giving out rules and regulations but they don't enforce them. Keeping quiet in some of the things one's children do without disciplining them is a way of showing approval.

3). Susan made her house a home. She knew that a peaceful home did not just occur but it's created; also a broken home did not just happened, it was created. For Susan to have the type of home she

wanted to have, she made a sacrifice; She never regretted making the sacrifice because long after it was made, the benefits lived on. Making your house a home attracts your children home.

Given her childhood, she remembered how she used to go to the garden where she learned that it was not all the flowers in the garden attracted insect. Susan discovered that there was a reason why insects choose to hang on some flowers and ran away from others. She observed that what attracted insects to a particular flower was not the color of the flower, but there was something it produced others don't produce.

She inferred that the beauty of a flower did not attract insects; the color either did not, but what it produced─ scent. Susan believed that a flower looked beautiful was never a guarantee it must attract insects. From her experience, she understood that the beauty of one's house does not attract his children home but the way the parents treat them.

As a woman who was so observant, she observed that the last house in town might not be the only house or the best house. There might be other houses before it which was more beautiful than it, but it was a home everyone would love to stay. She knew that no matter where they lived, if she did not make it comfortable for her children they would not miss home when they leave. Susan had everything that would make her children live a comfortable life, but she discovered her relations.h.i.+p and love meant a lot to them; she also made her home a lovely place her children loved to stay.

Having a great time with them helped her to realize that character was like a perfume. Whenever one opens a clip of a perfume it would diffuse to different places, and so is character; once one displays his character, it goes out like a perfume to either attract people to him, or scare them away because n.o.body would like to stay where environment smells awful.

Whenever Susan hurt her children's feelings, she did not hesitate telling them, "I'm sorry," she found out it gave them a sense of belonging and made them feel honored. She never forgot using

''Please," whenever she needed their little help or attention. She realized it made them feel valued and respected.

And above all, she kept saying, 'Thank you,' whenever they did something for her: like given her a gla.s.s of water or helping her pick something. Being their parent did not mean common courtesy should not be observed. She knew she would not lose her reputation as their mother whenever she apologized to them where she was wrong.

When they graduated from primary school she sent them to a boarding school. She started looking for a more paying job but because of the cordial relations.h.i.+p that existed between her and Joash, when she informed him her plans of looking for a good job, Joash told her she could still come back and work for them.

Susan re-applied to the company and when she submitted her résumé, they employed her without conducting any interview; she was promoted to a higher level. She wondered what would have happened if she had treated Joash the way his father treated her or if she had transferred the anger of what his father did to her to him. She might not be able to secure that job again.

Immediately her children graduated from secondary school, she sent them abroad to study and it enabled her to concentrate on her work. Technology made things so easy that they communicated all the time, and so there was no need for them to be frequenting home.