Family Secret: An Ode To The Abandoned Child

Misskorang, I am a practicing psychiatrist, I am all too familiar how mental and emotional wounds manifest in behavior and choices. My sister has zero self-worth, which she drapes in excessive servitude and kindness. She has no boundaries, she would tolerate any and everything just to be accepted.

My sister is a classic case of abandoned child syndrome.

I am trying, God knows I’m trying to lift her up, to teach her how to show up for herself and believe in her own magic. But there is a void, the elephant in the room; she has a wound that has not healed. A motherless child, growing up with her mother right under her nose.

My mother sat Mensima and myself down years ago to explain and apologize. But that was it, an explanation justifying her actions and a meaningless apology. An apology that basically said, “I am sorry things are like this but I need things to remain as they are.”

What is an apology unaccompanied by changed behavior?

At age fifteen, a teenage girl went from house to house selling fresh bread made by her mother. A grown man, in the village to inspect cocoa beans, decided the little girl would do in the absence of his wife. When the teenager was discovered with child, that agricultural inspection officer was long gone. Her mother sent her away to have her child, all the while telling anyone who would listen that her daughter was away in school. When her granddaughter came, grandmother adopted her, with an elaborate lie that she was the unwanted baby of a distant relative.

My mother thus was given a second chance to live as a child. And then as a young woman, she met my father, a dashing young man, a computer whiz, well educated and well traveled. When he asked her to marry him, she asked her mother, “What do I do about my daughter?”

“Do nothing. Say nothing. Go live your life, she is not yours,” grandmother dug the foundation of the mess that has become Mensima’s life.

And go she did, and live she did. Free and unencumbered with the burdens of her fatherless daughter.

So while she held my hand and showed me how to trace letters and numbers, her firstborn kneaded dough and hawked bread just as her mother and grandmother before her had done. While our family took exotic vacations to Cancun, Zanzibar and New Zealand, Mensima stayed behind with Grandma to housesit.

Mother will never openly admit it, but the life my siblings and I have had was bought and paid for by Mensima’s abandonment.She has two medical doctors, a lawyer and a media guru for siblings and yet cannot properly read a full sentence.

The past does not hurt or annoy me as much as the present. I know we cannot change the past but we can change the present to impact the future. But not my mother, she is too concerned about society to disturb the waters. So her daughter remains on the outside looking in.

I rope my sister in, in every way I can. But it isn’t my heart she needs, it’s her mother’s, but, it appears that is one thing she has to accept she’ll never have. When she’s around our mother, she plays her assigned role, the grateful bastard, paying homage to the woman whose mother raised her. Mensima never talks about her parentage, never expresses any emotion or thoughts about it. She says she’s made peace, but my doctor’s instinct tells me that’s deflection, in order to avoid the pain. She still finds the grace to smile and have joy, for all she’s had to live with, that is a great feat.

I hope you heal, abandoned child, heal. Confront the truth and heal. Unsightly though she may be, this stark naked truth brings clarity and awareness. And how do you heal that which you’re not aware of? Stare her down, this truth, and acknowledge her, “I am an abandoned child and my heart is wounded.”

Heal dear child, abandoned by mother and by father, heal, you may just fly!

Editir’s Note:
Dear contributor, I hope you find closure. And I hope your sister heals and thrives. I believe that being a psychiatrist, you have explained the consequences of your mother’s actions on her daughter’s psyche to her. I once heard a famous doctor say, sometimes, be prepared for the fact that the outcome you desire may never happen, and learn to be okay with it. Don’t let your mother’s choices going forward hang over you forever. Let it go and live.

**Names and places have been removed or changed to protect the contributor’s and her family.