Daddy issues…Father’s day edition.

I know I have daddy issues. I’m not stupid. I am a daddy’s girl with a deep attachment to my father and today is Father’s day and I don’t want to go to his grave.

But something hit me today which I wasn’t prepared for.

My dad had 2 children from a previous relationship, which meant that he had 2 families.

My parents “adultified” me from adolescence to be each parent’s spouse from what they weren’t getting from the other spouse.

Both scenarios I was the “mistress” the one people go to to escape the main drama of the “wife.” So I wasn’t given full “wife love” because you don’t love your mistress the way you love your wife, you love her because she’s fun and when the fun stops, so does the relationship. This taught me love is transactional, conditional and that people pleasing is the only way to “keep” someone in your life. Very mistress energy. Trying to hold onto something because you have nothing.

Recently I had a revelation. A sad one.

I realised that because my mum was the second woman my dad had a relationship with that we had always lived in a sort of harem life.

My dad lived with him mother and his sisters in the family home until he married my mum aged 40. (red flag 1)

Which meant that his mother and sisters had quite the hard grip on him when he did marry. (red flag 2)

His older sister once slammed a pot over my elder brother’s head screaming “Charlie will never amount to anything in this life” (translating a creole curse) (red flag3)

So my mum was the 2nd fiddle to 3 women (possibly 4) i.e. my grandmother Annette, his eldest sister Annie and his elder sister Patricia. My grandmother died when I was 6 weeks old. My aunt Annie died when I was 3 and my aunt Patricia died 4 months after my dad. Not before making concerted efforts on his life and health.

The fourth possible woman was the mother of his children (I despise the term “Baby mama.”) who we all know cheated on him and broke his heart to the point where my dad never mentioned her name, when I realised that my brothers had a different mother to me, I immediately thought she was dead and that that hurt my dad because he’d never mentioned her, no pictures I didn’t even know her name or that she was alive until I was 27. I never asked him about her.

So my parents may have been soul mates but it only worked out because my aunts were 6000 miles away. If my parents hadn’t left Sierra Leone, I’d have never been born because they wouldn’t have even gotten married. Such was the strength of the “Other women” in the relationship.

And it wasn’t even just women. My dad was as attached to his nephews as he was his sons. So at one point he was responsible for the 8 members of his family in Freetown, and then my mother and then me. My mum always as I have said on many occasion, looked after me. I was her primary concern and she made sure that the lights were on, the rent was paid and that there was food for the table and clothes for my back. Dad would swoop in with the niceites. But it was mum I financially depended on. It was this unspoken acknowledgement that my father wasn’t responsible for me financially that gave me trust issues and “mistress energy” because I was his little girl, but only in his harem. When I was exposed to the main woman in his life (his sister) I realised, with terrible clarity the true meaning of “conditionality” meant. This woman wanted to have her granddaughter torn from her mother (her father, my cousin was never financially responsible for her, his mother was) to be raised by her great uncle who would become financially responsible for her when she wanted to access the UK system illegally (NO RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS) but the fact that his sister was terrible and was in the wrong was inconsequential. I was either for or against his sister. Which was a proxy for, pro or against him. I saw the outer limits of my parents love in Hedge end. No child should discover that. Everyone should live oblivious truly believing that it shouldn’t matter who you are or what you do, your parents would love you regardless.

Instead I learnt extreme people pleasing and to not be vulnerable or show weakness. I had to be the “ride or die” kid because that was the only way I was going anywhere. I had to be “up for whatever” as opposed to what I actually wanted because no one actually cares what I actually want. They cared about what they wanted from me. Hence my desperate desire to be seen and heard and understood.

What I actually want, is the picture below. It’s the closest representation of a picture in my head. I have a picture in my head where I am holding my youngest daughter she is a baby and I am pregnant. The second youngest, a toddler is being held by her father, the eldest is in front of her father and the next one down is in front of me. We’re all together in a family picture, loving each other. Happy, smiling and being right rather than looking right. Love is not just on our faces but in our hearts. We have “deep joy” I love my husband, he loves me and we are independent beings who are wholeheartedly committed to each other. My children will grow up in a stable home, be given opportunities that I never was, including the opportunity to grow up in peace, cultivate themselves and self-actualise. They will also have each other (yes you did count 5 kids, that number is important.) I don’t want my children to grow up in a harem, I want them to grow up in a home. However, what I have come to realise is that the picture in my head is no longer realistic. I’m 30, single AF and this picture depicts me as a 40-year-old woman, I need time to find a man in a world where I am going on 1 date per annum (Dear God, you’d think I was ugly) and have encountered nothing but Beta men. I have learnt to survive not thrive because that is what my parents taught me. What my community taught me. So many negative stories told. Basically survive your husband and the wrongs he will do you, your joy and success comes from your children, pressure them. Do the most to compensate for the fact that your man will be doing the least. And he'll be doing that least with Becky, Hannah and Stacy. It felt like I broke when I gave up my dream, and in a way I have. I literally can’t even imagine it anymore. Before I could tell you I was wearing a white shirt and an Africana skirt as that was the everyday wear of this woman. She was a mother and a wife first, everything else second and contentment emanated from her core. Her womb was full of life and she was full of peace. She attracted peace, love, gentleness, tenderness, care, respect, and strength in her husband. She was financially well off, but her husband made more than she did and she respects him greatly. There was visceral feeling towards that image and I’m sad its gone. I realised it when I went to my dad’s grave on Father’s day via means of coercion that this was it. I was no longer going to have that life. A massive whole has been shot through the picture as if someone has taken a gun to it. That whole is in my soul. So much of my life I imagined myself as a mum. Why? Because in order to be a mother, I’d need to be a wife. I’d have found my husband. A man who I’d feel safe enough to bear children for. You have no idea the insecurity I have witnessed. Women who were pregnant and their men were dangling the relationship like a carrot over their heads, conditional on point A or point B being fulfilled. Eventually even when point ZZZ was fulfilled there was still no relationship. Women financially providing for their children as if they have no father’s. Women overcompensating for the abuse father’s have wrought. Or just compensating. I didn’t want that. I don’t want that. There is no point in playing a game if the odds are stacked against me and it is an all or nothing success strategy. I want the odds staked in my favour. E.g.

1.      Married to my husband. The children’s father. Throughout their childhood and for the rest of my life.

2.      He is a loving and present father.

3.      He is head of the household.

4.      He financially and emotionally provides for his children,

5.      He is not addicted to anything (including money)

6.      He is born of 2 present and loving parents. (generational stability)

7.      He is a man of faith. Someone who can humble himself, because I really despise arrogance.

8.      He reserves his ruthlessness for those who threaten his family. We are number 1 priority. Friends, mothers, sisters, fathers all come next.

9.      He is faithful and teaches his children what fidelity is in all things.

10.   He is an honest man. No lies in our relationship nor anywhere else. I am his beloved, who he respects deeply. He can communicate like a man if he has something to say. I’m ripping neither his balls nor his tongue out. I’m not that kind of gal.

My dears, if you are settling for less, you are settling in for suffering. So get comfortable and accept your L. I however refuse to let the messed up parts  of the past dictate what future my kids have. The sad thing is that we all know what is right, we all know that nothing about my list is unreasonable. Yet we see so often time and time again people stray so far away from what is right and optimal and shrug it off with “Life happens.” No honey, you are a walking disaster and YOU happened.

I love the law. English Law is predicated on what is known as “the reasonable man” i.e. what would a reasonable man do? If you see a man with 4 “baby mama’s” do you go around putting yourself in harms way to be the fifth? No, its not what “the reasonable man” would do. If you are providing for an “grown boy” who is 30 years old and has nothing to offer you but excuses do you plan a future with him (a future with you carrying him?) No, it isn’t what “the reasonable man” would do. I don’t believe in love being an excuse for doing “wild shit” Love changes everything, is a song that my mum used to sing as a soloist when I was little. It doesn’t. Love changes neither seasons, gravity or death. Love, as Tina Turner once put it is a “sweet old fashioned notion” and that is closer to the truth. Its not the whole truth though. We have lost the ability to love anything other than ourselves which is why its an old fashioned notion. Because no one is practising it anymore. Not truly. But now it is almost exclusively being used as an excuse.

We “fall in love” at an accelerated rate these days to “Justify cheap sex.” but it isn’t cheap. Its free. Except its not free. People have sex for free, but the negative externalities haven’t come to bear fruit. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. We’ve not done the “40 year, studies” on the female sexual revolution of the 60’s (well at least the millennials haven’t, Gen Z would do well to get some data. Are we as women especially, any happier now we are able to have multiple sexual partners? My great grandma on my mum’s side had 3 surviving children (my grandad was a twin who’s brother died in infancy) with 3 different men. The only one she didn’t marry was my great grandfather. Yet that was in the 30’s. My auntie Annie, my dad’s older sister had 3 kids with 3 men and only married the last one. That was in the 60’s and 70’s. before slavery when women lived in tribes, women would live in harems, with men having sex with multiple women. Slave women wouldn’t even get a choice what man they were “Mated off” with, it might be their masters’ raping them, or their fellow black men, who were sold like stud horses to “breed them” so the concept of having multiple sexual partners isn’t new. We just know in each case it breeds disfunction. My grandfather grew up a tyrant because his mother left him with his father so she’d have another chance at marriage. The entire Smith Family have been paying for the “sex before marriage” sins for the last 50 years. And neither harem women nor slave women enjoyed their situation, if they did it was serious Stockholm syndrome and those poor women needed help. The truth is we know free love isn’t free. But we do it anyway in the same way we ride rollercoasters. Cheap thrills.

 We’re all just participating in a massive experiment using our actual bodies and souls as lab rats. It has a cost. A high cost. And its being paraded as love. it isn’t. That my dears is hatred. People hate you so they tell you to settle. Settle for being a mistress instead of a daughter. A mistress instead of a wife. A “sneaky link” instead of a girlfriend. These people hate you and you are telling yourself its empowerment. Because anyone who loves you would give would want to give you peace, stability and time to grow. They don’t love you. They want to buy you and sell you so they can compartmentalise you, in a neat little box in their mind because they are afraid of what would happen if you were allowed to take over their world. They fear themselves and that breeds the hatred. Don’t settle. Don’t play their games, let them play yours.

But most importantly. Grow up.

Grace and Courage.

Annetta Mother Smith