. THE SHAME THAT REFUSES TO GO
When I was fourteen years old, I was sent from my village to live with my sister who had just got married. My sister had complained about the need to have a house help after having her first born. With the permission of my parents, I went to live with my sister and her husband in Lagos.
Immediately I got to Lagos, I was registered in a school very near our house. My sister was a business woman who sold ladies shoes and bags while her husband was a civil servant. My sister regularly traveled to the eastern part of the country to buy her wares. In most times, I would be alone in the house with her husband and their baby.
After living with them for four years, I noticed a change in the attitude of my sister's husband towards me. He was unnecessarily lavishing his care on me; buying me dresses and gifts. Several times, he bought new clothes for me and whenever he did this, he would instruct me not to tell my sister.
One day, while my sister was away to Onitsha on a business trip, her husband called me and instructed me to cook rice and 'dodo' in the evening and that I should not go to bed until he came back at night. I did as he instructed me and I struggled to stay awake until he came back around 10:30pm.
When he came back, he asked me to serve the rice and 'dodo' in one plate and that we were going to eat together. I told him that I had eaten but he insisted that I would eat with him on the same table. He further told me that. he loved me and that all the beautiful dresses and gifts he had bought for me were mine if I would allow him to make love to me. My excuse that he should realise that he was my sister's husband fell on deaf ears.
To cut a long story short, we made love that night and that was the beginning of the several love bouts we had. After a year of having this secret love affair with my sister's husband, I got pregnant. When I told him that I was pregnant for him, he told me to make it a secret forever if I could not agree to abort it.
I was afraid to commit abortion and it did not take long before I was found out by my sister. She forced me to tell her who was responsible for my pregnancy. In her annoyance, she sent me back to my parents in the village, divorced her husband and swore to renounce me as her sister.
I later got married and I had to live with my first child whom I had for my sister's husband, in my husband's house. My husband did not know that Ade was my first child until somebody told him the whole story of my life. He lost all confidence in me and since then things have not been the way it used to be He couldn't love me as he used to and so I have had to live with this stigma for the rest of my life.