My skin is not as light as my siblings. I am ugly my mother says and each time a pot is dirty it causes me to wash it because it is as black as my skin. This has been my fate and I have lived all my life like that until I know this. My name is Chigozie, and I'm the first child of a family of ten which consists of eight children four males and four females with our parents making it ten.
Despite being the first child that opened my mother's womb, my mother developed a deep-seated hatred towards me because of my dark skin. I don't know if I am the One Who created myself. from an early age, I could sense the disappointment and disdain in my mother's soul whenever I looked at her. I thought that lighter skin was a symbol of success while dark skin symbolized failure.
Unlike my siblings who were all light-skinned, I was dark skin black as charcoal, and I was nicknamed "Black Monkey" My mother always called me "charcoal pot" Am I even calling them family? They are the opposite of family as I always cried. It might be better if I gave up the ghost the day I was born rather than being born into a hell-on-earth family.
I am a child who yearns for my mother's affection and acceptance, craving the love of my mother as my sibling did, but everything seems abortive, my mother's animosity toward me seemed insurmountable and made me question my existence and see myself as less desirable.
I've found a solution to my dark skin which was to cover my body with cloth, wearing a long sleeve and long trousers that cover my skin even in the sweltering heat of the sun, and yet I can't cover my face even though I wear glasses but my black face still shows.
Until today when I heard my mother call me black like my ex, while in conversation with her friend Chioma, I was eavesdropping on their conversation, and I heard this story that shattered my heart. Indeed I deserved to be treated the way I was treated, I was a child born of sorrow. Andrew, my mother's boyfriend during her university days, shattered her dream of becoming an accountant.
Andrew and my mum started dating in year one, until my mother took in Andrew in the second semester of her second, when she broke the news to Andrew, he told my mother to abort the child and that he was not yet ready to be a father. My mother insisted on not aborting the baby, and Andrew ran away and blocked any means he could be contacted.
My mother came back home disappointed in herself and this is how her dream of becoming an accountant was shattered, and she became a nursing mother instead of a well-known accountant. To make matters worse, I was dark-skinned like my father, with bold brown eyes, so I don't blame my mother for hating and despising me because if it was me I would have done worse.
~A creative writing~
~Fictional storyline~
