At first, everything seemed fine. I saw my gynecologist, and the procedures to induce labor were done. I was admitted. My water broke. I was placed in a separate room, and the door was shut behind me.

And then, everything changed.

The midwives left me. No one touched me. No one spoke to me. They walked in and out of the room like I was invisible. I was in excruciating pain, pleading, begging, screaming for help. But no one came. My gynecologist had vanished. My sister, young and terrified, didn’t know what to do. I made frantic calls to my doctor, my mother, anyone I thought could save me.

Hours passed. I told the nurses I could feel the baby’s head pressing down. They looked at me and walked out again.

I was alone. Scared. Frightened for my life.

When all hope seemed lost, and I had surrendered everything to my Creator, the doctor finally appeared. At the same moment, my mother walked in. I was told to push. My baby girl came out, but I was bleeding. Profusely.

The doctor shouted, “I need everyone now!” But the nurses moved slowly, as if unaware of the urgency. I remember him yelling, “I asked for help! Where is everybody?”

I was rushed onto another bed and wheeled into the theatre. The last words I heard were, “This is Doctor Paul. I’m going to put you to sleep. Can you hear me? I’m putting you to sleep right now.”

In that moment, I prayed. I told God I wasn’t ready to leave my baby girl. I still had so much to do in this world.

When I woke up, I found myself in the blur of intensive care, surrounded by the steady hum and beeping of machines. Through the haze, I caught Doctor Paul’s voice as he spoke to my gynecologist: “Oh, you’re still here. She’s very young, and her body mass index is good. Don’t worry, she’s going to pull through.”

I called out. The doctors and nurses came to my side. They looked at me like I was a miracle.

The first thing I asked was, “Is my baby okay?”
“Yes,” they said.
Then I asked, “What happened to me?”
“…you cheated death,” they told me. “You’re a near miss, only one in ten women survive what you went through.”

When they brought my baby to me, I broke down in tears.

Years have passed, but the memory of that day still grips me with the same pain.

Meanwhile, the woman who worked with my mother that day said she had practically screamed at her to come to the hospital. In her own words: “Bakuyise mu ddwaliro, omwana affa. Okyakola ki wano?” ("They’ve called you to the hospital. Your daughter is dying, what are you still doing here?")

Some say my mother may simply be incapable of love. But I know that isn’t true. When my sister recently gave birth, my mother was so anxious and attentive that she practically slept in the corridor just to get near her. For context, my stepsisters weren’t even told about the pregnancy and to this day, more than a year later, have never been allowed to see the baby. And when my close friend gave birth, the very first thing my mother asked, her voice bright with excitement was whether her parents were in the U.S. with her. That single question cut me deeply. It reminded me, with surgical precision, of every time she had withheld that same tenderness from me. Moments like these don’t just bruise old wounds; they scratch at scars I thought had already healed.

When I look at my daughter now, strong, beautiful, and full of life, I know I could never put her through what I went through. I’ve prayed every day to forgive my mother. I say the same prayer again today, and I ask God to help me.

I later discovered that my gynecologist had written in my report that he was present throughout my admission, and that my condition was caused by taking homemade herbal remedies to induce labor. That hurt deeply. I had promised myself never to forgive my gynecologist. But the anger became toxic. I had to let go.

I had no answer. My mother only ever mentions that I was born during a time of political instability in our country. Beyond that, there’s been no story, no explanation. Just silence. Still, it’s a question others have asked too, those who’ve witnessed my suffering and tried to make sense of the cruelty I endured.

I remember one of my paternal aunties calling me Mulato, a word that means “crossbreed.” When she didn’t use that, she would sneer muja nna nyina, implying, “come with your mother.” Her dislike for me was so visceral that she took every opportunity to humiliate me. Once, while I was playing hide-and-seek with my cousins at her home, she poured a basin of filthy water used to wash her newborn’s nappies over me, waste and all. She spat out, “Kino ekisirani kive wano”— “This curse should leave this place.”

Years later, when I earned my first bachelor’s degree, her response was simple: “No way, she was not supposed to graduate.” To her, it was impossible that I was worthy of such an achievement.

At home, things were no better. The insults were endless, and they were reserved for me alone.

“She has a big head.”
“She has bowlegs.”
“She has a bent upper back.”
“She can’t even dance.”

My nickname was Kibamo— “careless”, while my sister was Princess. Every flaw I had, real or imagined, became a source of amusement for them. They mocked me relentlessly, laughing at my humiliation as if it were entertainment, yet never offered correction, guidance, or encouragement. Even my academic achievements were twisted against me. “You’re not as intelligent as you think,” they’d say. I vividly remember the time my sister and mother said, “Kyewunyisa Katonda bawa”— “It is interesting who God blesses” directly in my face, as if my success interrupted one of their gossip sessions or highlighted the Universe’s apparent favoritism away from them. At the time, it felt as though the world itself was conspiring against them, and I was the reminder of their envy. My mother even once remarked, “If I hadn’t insulted you, how else would you have learned to choose clothes that flatter you?”. Turning my existence and growth into a justification for her cruelty.

Fast forward, and I can see how my parents’ treatment of me gave my siblings permission to do the same. My efforts, my belongings, my investments, nothing was safe.

There was a time I gave my mother money to hire men to plant yams on her land, part of a plan she suggested to improve the family’s income. Soon after, I returned home to find that my brother had slashed the yams to the ground. He said he needed the land, and my mother had approved of it. As I stood crying over my lost money, she looked at me with disdain, as though I were a drama queen exaggerating over nothing.

This pattern only repeated itself. My brother borrowed my car countless times, always returning it with dents or accident damage. Whenever I raised concerns, he brushed them off with a mocking, “It was just a small accident. You should be able to afford it.” My sister, on the other hand, persuaded me to invest heavily in a business with her, only to later send a message saying she could no longer continue working. Claiming she hadn’t expected me to participate actively in the business. Ironically, she wanted my money but not my involvement, as if my role was to fund her ventures and then sit back quietly. Years earlier, we had set up a shop that she managed, but it too drained me; time and again she claimed thieves had stolen money, until I eventually lost interest. After our last business collapsed, she announced in the family WhatsApp group that I now needed to “find ways of helping my brother.” To them, my place in the family was clear: I was the one meant to carry their burdens, no matter what it cost me.

Even as children, the entitlement was evident. My sister would leave her milk on the dining table and walk to my mother’s bed to ask her to call me to deliver it. The injustice delighted them. Now you see where the entitlement stems from.

My father, at one point, disowned me. Though he never said it directly, I was told he claimed I wasn’t his child. The irony? I resemble him more than any of his children, despite my lighter skin.

I once asked my mother directly why she doesn’t love me. I wanted to know what I had done wrong. She gave me no words, only a face hardened with bitterness. It’s the same expression she wears whenever I pass her in the house or encounter her at a family event, even as others exclaim how smart or good I look. Her eyes narrow into a silent sneer that seems to say, “You think you’re all that…”

When I was still living in her home, the performance began each morning as I set off for work. Her mean glare following me out the door. By the time I reached the compound, I would often catch her peering from the windows or doorway, watching, and measuring.

Translation: It has to be Darline who poured this water in the corridor; she walks around aimlessly.

Darline stayed silent, eyes glued to the television. I suddenly remembered placing shoes from the verandah in the corridor earlier. Water seeped from them, the very water my mother was raging about.

I stepped out and asked Darline, gently, if she wanted to take a walk. She walked beside me in silence for a long stretch, then finally whispered:
“Mum, how does it feel when someone keeps accusing you of things you haven’t done?”

My heart broke. I told her to speak up next time, to simply say, “It wasn’t me.” But I also knew the cultural wall she was up against. Children were never to “talk back” to adults.

In my culture, there are even sayings that protect toxic behavior:
“Omukulu tasobya”— “an elder never makes a mistake.”
“Maama tasobya”— “a mother never makes a mistake.”

Insight: When a culture silences children, it plants shame instead of teaching respect.

Her words carried me back to my own childhood. My mother had done the same to me. In her eyes, I could never do anything right.

There was a day I will never forget. At school, I had failed to complete an assignment with other children. When the teacher caned us, I didn’t cry. I had been beaten so often that pain no longer drew tears.

But my dry eyes enraged her. She called me back and caned me again, still no tears. Frustrated, she told my brother to report that I had insulted her.

My brother, my mother’s favorite, needed no convincing. He had been present, knew I hadn’t said a word, but relished the role.

When my mother heard the report, she didn’t ask questions. She pounced on me, fists and fury pounding me until I hid my face, praying her rage would subside.

When she noticed I still had no tears, her anger only grew darker. She gripped my braids and, with scissors in one hand, cut them off one by one at the root. It took the people at home to pull her off me. Later, they cut the rest of my hair clean.

Insight: When pain becomes normal, you stop crying. But the world punishes children who go silent.

The next day, sitting on the verandah, my mother finally asked if I had insulted the teacher. “No,” I told her. If I had, the school would have disciplined me.

But it didn’t matter. In every story she told, I was the villain.

So hearing her accuse my daughter, seeing her bias spill over to another generation, was unbearable. I had to stand up for my girl and protect her.

Yet in her defiance, my mother always said, “But I suffered for you people. I stayed in an abusive marriage so you could turn out right. And now you’re ungrateful.”

She even asked why Darline could not stand up for herself.

But how could Darline stand up to her grandmother? Expecting that was like asking a puppy to fight a wounded lion.

Insight: Growing up without a present father already weighed heavily on us as children. Add to that a mother’s misplaced anger, now expressed as a grandmother and the burden becomes crushing.

If I told my mother something today, by tomorrow it would be retold in a version that suites the “villain me” she carries in her mind. Especially if the story involved me standing up or speaking for myself, she would twist it until I looked like the offender. Many times, I wasn’t even allowed to finish. She would interrupt, take over, and complete the story on my behalf.

In her house, defending yourself was treated as defiance and defiance was unforgivable.

Insight: When your truth is constantly rewritten by others, you begin to question whether your voice has any right to exist.

This time, I refused to stay silent.
The cycle of bullying, of elders never being questioned, of love that felt more like fear had to stop with me.

Transitional Insight: The moment you choose to protect your child, even against your own family, is the moment you rewrite history.

Instinctively, he asked about my auntie first, the calm one. “Jajja Mirembe?” he clarified.

“Yes,” I nodded.

“She’s sleeping,” he said. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Jajja Mukulu has a big stick for beating people.”

That stick is infamous. It’s what she uses to threaten children in her home. His words instantly carried me back to when Darlene was about three. I’d just picked her up from my mother’s house. She sat in silence for a while, then blurted out, “Maama wo mukambwe”— “your mother is so fierce.”

I was stunned to hear that from such a small child, but at the same time, I felt a strange affirmation. Even a toddler could see her for who she truly is. When I didn’t respond, Darlene doubled down, “I said, maama wo mukambwe!” I couldn’t help but laugh.

Insight: Even children can sense when love feels like fear.

My mother has a habit of shouting at children over the smallest things. Her defense is always the same: “Omanyi abaana wotababogorera nna kubakuba, tebategera.”
Translation: “If you don’t shout at or beat children, they won’t understand.”

But here’s my favorite part, the version she shows to the world. Calm. Soft-spoken. Prayerful. It’s all a mask. My mother has mastered the art of driving people to madness, then standing off to the side, acting like the victim. She talks ill about people until they look like monsters, incapable of doing anything right.

This has been both my father’s and my experience. People think my dad is crazy because of the way she’s painted him. To be clear, my father has his faults like anyone else. But as children, all we ever heard was the bad. She made us hate him so much, yet she stayed in a dysfunctional relationship with him for years. At one point, she even planned to have her church leaders come home and wed her to this same man she publicly despised.

When they finally separated, he acted so erratically he even hid under a house that was being demolished. She pleaded with him to come with her. People had to tell her, “Let the man go.” It wasn’t love she was losing, it was control over her favorite “supply.”

Insight: Narcissistic love isn’t love. It is control dressed in affection.

My father is poor, sick, frustrated, and mentally exhausted. It doesn’t take much to make a man in that state look unstable. But as someone who has lived under my mother’s roof, her relentless criticism and the manipulative games she plays against the members of her household, I understand him now. Most of what he says about her is true. And just as she tried to make him look crazy, she is now branding me the same way. Was I born crazy?

Not long ago, within the span of a single month, I faced two major abdominal surgeries and a fetal accident that shook me to my core. The pain didn’t stop. The doctor quietly pulled me aside and said, “We will not operate you a third time. Your body is telling you something. You need to see a therapist.” He told me plainly that my body was struggling to survive in the environment I was living in.

And he was right. I was her second-favorite “supply,” and up to today, she is fighting to keep control. As I worked with my therapist and started building a plan for a safer, healthier life, my mother turned to my aunt and sneered in my presence: “Waliwo akakazi gyagenda, kekamuzukusa!”
Translation: “There’s a woman she visits who is waking her up.”

But here’s the question that burned in my heart: What exactly am I being woken up from?

Insight: When you start healing, the people who fed on your silence call it rebellion.

Growing up, my brother and I once got into trouble for being playful during coaching class. The teacher reported us to our mother, and what followed was a traumatic punishment. Ropes were tied to our hands, and we were hung from the ceiling poles. An act carried out by our father with our mother’s support. Coincidentally, Uncle Kisa and his wife, who were visiting from the UK, walked in on this scene. Their presence saved us. That day revealed the truth: two wounded individuals, unable to communicate or resolve conflict, had turned discipline into abuse.

My auntie, Jajja Mirembe, has been in and out of hospital for the past five years. Strangely, no one has ever questioned the root cause of her deteriorating health. She is another supply; someone my mother tactfully abuses while speaking fear into her life. This toxic environment has taken a toll on her immune system and overall well-being. It’s a silent erosion, masked by family dynamics and unspoken trauma.

And that’s when it became clear: this wasn’t just about my father, or me, or even my aunt. It is about a cycle. A pattern of silencing, controlling, and breaking down others until they no longer recognized themselves.

Closing Reflection:

Healing is not rebellion. It is the sacred act of reclaiming your truth in a world that taught you to silence it. For years, I mistook survival for peace, obedience for love, and fear for respect. But now I know better. I am learning that real love does not bruise, belittle, or blind, it liberates. And as I continue to unlearn the patterns of pain and choose wholeness over loyalty to dysfunction, I carry this truth with me: You are allowed to outgrow the people who kept you small, even if they raised you.

There was a time when education felt like a mountain I could see but not climb.
I needed 600,000 Uganda Shillings. A lifeline. A chance.
I asked my mother, hoping she’d see me. Not just as her child, but as a soul reaching for something more.

At the time, she was managing my late Uncle Robert’s properties in Uganda, and money was flowing.
She looked at me and said, “There’s no money.”
And just like that, the door closed.

The next morning, she told me to take a dead year.
Dead.
The word sat heavy in my chest.
But I wasn’t ready to bury my dreams.

I reached out to Uncle Robert in the U.S.
He listened. He understood.
He said, “My children are done with school. I’ll support you.”
And for a moment, light broke through.

But when I went home to pick up the money from Mum, the storm came.
My mother was furious.
“How dare you speak to my brother?” she demanded.
She had already told him not to give me anything.
“If anything,” she said, “you’ll get a loan.”

And so began the cycle.
Loans wrapped in love’s disguise.
Repayment came with rage, shouting, threats, commands.
You’d think I had defaulted on a national debt.

Two weeks later, my sister Jill called.
She asked how much I had requested.
I told her.
She sighed.
“That same amount was used to buy sofa sets for our brother. Mum didn’t like the furniture in his house.”

I remember the hunger.
The quiet ache of an empty stomach.
With just 2,000 Uganda Shillings, barely a dollar, I had to choose wisely.
Cassava or rolex?
Cassava won.
Split in two, it became dinner and breakfast.
I’d step into the day with faith as my fuel, hoping for a free lunch or a friend’s kindness.
This was my rhythm.
And through it all, I had a daughter to feed.
A future to protect.

I borrowed from banks.
I borrowed from hope.
I borrowed from tomorrow.

And still, I kept going.

Because resilience is not just enduring.
It’s rising.
It’s choosing peace when bitterness is easier.
It’s writing truth when silence is safer.
It’s believing that pain can be repurposed into healing.

Today, the same mother who once withheld support now demands upkeep.
Not with grace, but with entitlement.
Her tone is sharp, her words heavy.
And I stand there, stunned. Not by her demands, but by the irony.

Sometimes I look at my daughter and wonder:
If someone offered to support her education, how thrilled I’d be.
How fiercely I’d protect that gift.
How deeply I’d thank them.

But I wasn’t given that grace.
I was given loans, silence, and storms.

And still, I chose peace.

Closing Reflection

I write this not to accuse, but to illuminate.
Not to shame, but to share.
Because somewhere, someone is walking through a similar fire, and they need to know they’re not alone.

I believe in the power of transformation.
That wounds can become wisdom.
That stories can become bridges.
That healing is possible even when the past is heavy.

One day, I will clear these loans.
One day, I will build the books and resources I dreamed of.
One day, this pain will pay off. Not in money, but in meaning.

And until then, I will keep writing.
Keep rising.
Keep choosing peace.

This chapter is a letter to the little girl I once was. The girl who was told, again and again: “Muli banaku, mwe abalina okukolera bali emirimu.” or “Muli banaku, mumanye enaku yamwe" — "You are poor. It is your duty to serve the rich in the family." or "You are poor, know your place."

Those words came not only from relatives who looked down on us, but from the one person who was supposed to protect me, my mother. She repeated their mantra as if it were truth, grooming me as the eldest daughter to believe I am a servant, not a daughter. She told me it was our “place” to serve and bow, to fetch and carry, to dim our own light so that others could shine.

I see it clearly now. This was not humility. This was programming, deliberate, cruel, and designed to keep us small.

Humiliation at Every Turn

They never missed an opportunity to remind us how irrelevant and invisible we were. At family gatherings, while they warmly remembered everyone else, they would ask the same cutting question: “Ani akuzaala?” or “Mpozi gwe ani?” — "Who gave birth to you?" or "Who are you?" As if our existence was a mistake, as if our identity didn’t matter.

They arrived late at our functions as though our time didn’t count, carrying their own food as though what we had prepared was beneath them. And still, despite being older, they expect us, the so-called poor ones, to find them jobs, to use our opportunities to serve them once again.

I remember one day so vividly it still burns in me. I had just lost my dearest uncle and guardian, Uncle Robert. I was grieving, in tears, with a pounding headache and deep worry about how I would settle his pending funeral arrangement bill. In the midst of my sorrow, one of the “rich” family members summoned me, not to comfort me, not to help with expenses, but to fetch a tray for their mother. A tray they had passed by on the serving table. A tray they could have easily picked up themselves or sent one of her four children (all present) to get.

But no. It had to be me, the bereaved, the “poor relation,” the invisible servant. My pain didn’t matter. My tears didn’t matter. My humanity didn’t matter. In that moment, I wasn’t family. I was a tool.

To the Little Girl in Me

Little one, I am so angry for you, and you deserve my anger. You were not weak; you were conditioned. You were not invisible; they chose not to see you. You were not a servant; you were a child.

I will protect you now.
I will never let anyone tell you again that your bloodline is less than theirs.
I will never let anyone strip your dignity in the name of family.
I will never let those words “muli banaku” — "You are poor.” echo in your soul unchallenged.

They preyed on your self-esteem. They abused you, and worse, the person you trusted most helped them do it. But I am here now. I am grown, and I see it all clearly.

This ends with me.
The generational curse of servitude, silence, and false humility ends with me.
I will speak. I will shout. And if they call me disloyal, so be it. My loyalty is to your healing, not to their abuse.

Little one, you were always worthy. You were always enough. You do not have to serve to belong. You belong because you exist and that is enough.