Mary's Legacy

Mary’s Legacy

Late last night, as I relayed the stories to my mind, derogatory tales of drunken envoys, fraudulent Executives, promiscuous wives, and pervert priests. Now I realized the true contents of the world I lived in. Our minds have the same cravings; we are all enticed by the recurring deeds of the past. Humans have not changed much since creation. We commit the same sets of evil repeatedly, and then hand over the deeds for the next generation to continue.

I grew up under the guidance of Mary, she etched the values she valued as ideals into my entire life, dad had passed on earlier, but it was no deterrence for her determination to make men out of us. I grew up alongside three other siblings, riding the waves and being squashed by Mary’s restraints. I must confess I did not have an exciting childhood, she never let us become kids, and we were almost adults from birth. I remember the nights she would make me sit and plan how we would spend the cash she had earned. Since I was very little, we had to bear every consequence of my errors.

I developed insulation from the world we lived; we never knew what it was capable of giving. Mary’s ideals were perfect, everything around had an explanation, and I propagated everything down to my siblings. We imbibed her theories religiously, never pausing to question her views. Her perfect world eventually became ours, but we were unfortunately wrong.

Life opened its doors when I was ten, and I was able to stray from Mary’s grasp. The world began to get naked, and gradually reveal its underwear. Mary fought and strove, relentlessly preventing my eyes from opening. Reformatting my brains during vacation, but how would I agree that what I had seen was a lie.

Women were evil, disobedience was bad, stealing was unacceptable, drinking was abhorred, I only saw them in the holy book, and sometimes wondered why God kept reiterating what men did no more. Not that I wanted to partake, but I could not find it easy to assimilate the perverseness of men. In my first year of high school, I was entirely new to the world. I would try to prove that a colleague’s lost item was never stolen, and that nothing negative was intentional. I had grown up watching no Tv, attending very few parties, being the first and last to leave church on Sundays, and learning to love and share whatever was given to me. I had never imagined that man would intentionally plan and execute an action that would cause sadness to the mind of others. That was the error in her training syllabus.

By the time I got into senior high, I had been labeled as the man from Eden, and repeatedly mocked with the forbidden fruit. Still I kept Mary’s ideals as dear, not because they totally were, but by practicing her self-made religion I kept her memory alive in my heart. Deep within me, I knew someday I would have to modify what was left of her in other to integrate myself into reality. Not that I would embrace the world, but I would have to come to terms with the basic facts she had hidden from us.

We were given the privilege of choosing who to live with after Mary’s demise; it was the hardest decision I have had to make. None of her siblings could take in three of mine, so my family was painfully split into two. I decided to take the youngest with me, so I could complete his training, but I never will, for the arena on Mary’s stage was gone. Still I tried my best like she would, but now it was impossible to make Chris see the vagueness of Mary’s theories, now that the insulation was all gone.

At first I wanted to break free and loose when Mary left us, but soon found out that life was maze of karma, and revenge intricately laid out on a slate of conscience. The few hedges I broke resulted in instant retribution, and even worse effects on my saintly conscience. I needed no telling that Mary’s flawed ways were still the best to tread.

Eventually I saw the world as it lives, fully plain and bare; bullying youths, notorious kids, and ungrateful children, down to the madness that moves around in the dark, the full extent of our nature, and wickedness, now I have seen and read about the evil that we do, now I understand why her world had to be perfect, there is no joy or anything to be proud of in what we do. We are just a shameless and evil specie. It is better to believe that everything is perfect than realizing how we are.

I never regretted she was my mum, sometimes I wish I could feel how life would have been with my dad in the picture. It wouldn’t have been any different from how little Eddy feels now, though Chinwe is not like Mary but I am; and Dad probably wouldn’t have been like Mary so there’s a balance. I had wanted her to be here in my latter years, and watch me become the kind of man she had wanted. Or maybe long ago I had become what she planned, and she had seen it already. I still remember how she would look at me and a smile would creep up her face. It might just be that she missed nothing.