The Stories That Made Her

PART II

Before there was the lawyer, there was a girl. Before there was the advocate, there was a storyteller.

And before I understood the law, I was already learning what it meant to live inside the stories of women.

Eventually, my parents separated for good when Peace was barely a year old

and my mother took us to my grandparents’ home. She had very little, but she worked hard she made fish rolls and meat pies. She smoked fish. She sold them at the junction and to people in the neighbourhood. She did that for about a year before leaving for law school.

I remember my grandfather being angry about the way my father had treated his daughter. But I also remember discovering that leaving one difficult situation did not automatically make everything easy at my grandparents’ house, I felt that I had to be perfect my handwriting had to be perfect, my socks had to be clean, my homework had to be correct. I remember being about eight years old and washing a huge basin of clothes of if I and my siblings

I remember my mother questioning me about my handwriting because it had changed. She thought something was wrong she thought perhaps I was distracted and letting my friends copy my notes .

She wanted me protected she taught me about HIV and other STDs when I was very young. She taught me how to use a sanitary pad because she worried she might not be around when I got my first period since she would be leaving for law school. When money was scarce, she sometimes had to use tissue or cloth instead of sanitary products. She taught me that nobody had the right to touch me inappropriately she taught me to speak up and to tell her if anything happens to me, she watched over me with the fear of a woman who knew that the world could be dangerous to girls.

I didn’t understand all of that then I only knew that I had to be careful. And somewhere inside all that carefulness, I began reading. I had always been curious, I learned quickly I loved complicated things I loved words. Even when I was sent to buy bread, I would sometimes find myself reading the old newspaper wrapped around it. I read whatever I could find, I don’t remember deciding that stories would become important to me.

They simply did.

By Class Five, when we were asked to write essays, I found myself doing something different I wrote stories, I wrote about families that found their way back to one another.Families that had happy endings, sometimes I wrote about food and recipes, sometimes I simply invented worlds.

Once, my teacher became concerned enough to ask whether everything was okay at home.She even tried speaking to my mother, my mother warned me not to tell my teacher about what was happening. At the time, I thought she was simply worried about me because I was writing stories. Now I wonder if some part of her knew that children sometimes write what they don’t yet know how to say.

By the time I became a teenager, I had entered a boarding school and discovered an entirely different world.

New people.

New lives.

New stories.

Then I discovered Wattpad, I began reading novels constantly and eventually, I started writing one and I called it Broken Ruby. I never finished it, I think I wrote about four chapters. It was about a girl trapped in an abusive relationship. At the time, I thought I was simply writing fiction.

Looking back now, I wonder whether I had been writing something I had not yet learned how to name. I had spent years watching adults struggle with love, money, marriage, separation and survival.

I had watched my mother rebuild her life like the powerful phoenix that she is, I had learned early that women could be strong and still be vulnerable, that homes could change, that silence could contain entire stories and perhaps, because I could not change the ending of my own childhood, I began changing endings on paper. I gave girls different lives, different families, different possibilities, different endings.

I did not know it then, but the storyteller in me had already begun to wake up.

Long before I learned the law, I learned to tell stories.