What it was like to be mum’s least favorite child

MILLICENT WANGARI grew up a sidelined child. Her mother mistreated and beat her. It’s only after she sought healing that she discovered generation trauma passed from her grandmother, mother and then to her.

Harriet James @harriet86jim 

Growing up as unfavourite child is tough. Millicent Wangari Ngugi, a public relations executive and an author knows this feeling too well. 

“I was convinced I was the bad one since the others enjoyed such a positive bond with my mum.  As a child, my goal was to work hard and be better to earn mum’s affection and approval,” she narrates 

A second born in a family of six, Millicent was born and raised in Kandara, Murang’a county.

When she was in primary school, she noticed that her mother insisted she does farmwork and fetch water, while her big sister did the cleaning and other soft duties around the home.

She also noticed that she got more beatings for small mistakes than her siblings.“I was an unhappy teenager.

My mum used to beat me a lot. I remember an incident where she beat me and choked me with a rope for being accosted by a boy when coming home from the shop,” Millicent recalls

She also remembers another time her mother hit her with a tree branch for cooking pancakes and she almost lost her eye.

“I was so scared of my mum that I once burned my hand cooking and hid the wound  for close to a week. The wound almost became full blown sepsis,” she recalls.

Harsh mother, distant father

By the time she was in Form Four in 2005, Millicent had stopped going home for school holidays.

“She’d threaten me that if I don’t pass my exams, I should find somewhere else to live. I was a bright girl— I was in Loreto High School Limuru, but the emotional turmoil hurt me academically,” she narrates 

She managed to get 65 points, but as an A student in primary school, she feels she  could have done better.

The rejection made her fill the void by getting into a relationship. She got pregnant at the age of 17. Sadly, she lost the child after a robbery incident where the thugs gang-raped her and her sister in 2006.

“I remember when my mum learned I was pregnant, she beat me with stick until it cut into small pieces. She told me I had loose morals.

I ran away from home and tried committing suicide by jumping in front of a train near Kenyatta University, but never succeeded,” she recalls.

Her father took a back seat. Millicent also felt that her father was out of reach emotionally.

“My mum had for a long time convinced all my siblings I was the bad child, so they didn’t offer any emotional support to me,” she says. 

Millicent suffered from low self-esteem. She got into an abusive relationship in 2007, which lasted three years. “I craved human connection. The man would beat me, but I’d stay.

I lost two molars from the beatings. I think I believed violence was part of love because my mum often told me she beat me because she loved me,” she says. 

Getting to the roots of the matter

Millicent  got married in 2015, but things didn’t work well because she hadn’t healed from previous relationship.

The man was controlling, insecure and abusive. In 2016, Millicent discovered she was expectant and when she consulted her gynaecologist, she opened up to her. 

She advised her to look for a therapist. But she didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t until she lost her first PR job in 2018 that she realised she had to find help.

Her relationship with the father of her child was also on and off and they finally separated in 2018.

 “I was angry and reactive. I fought everyone at work. I was a problematic employee and thought that I was cursed,” she says. 

In 2018, Millicent started therapy. “Sometime last year, we got talking with my big sister and she also realised that I had been treated unfairly.  My siblings started seeing my side of the story,” she says.

Millicent then stayed away from home for a year as she embarked on healing.

“When I had healed the pain, I faced mum on May this year. She confessed that she felt bitterness and resentment for her mum, the woman I was named after, and that made her a violent and angry mum to me,” she narrates. 

Millicent discovered her grandmother, too, was also violent. “So part of why my mum was projecting to me was because I was named after her abuser,” she explains. 

“I’ve been unravelling all my childhood trauma and how it led me down the path of teenage pregnancy, emotional instability, inability to keep a job, high-handedness, failed marriage and all other issues I’ve dealt with,” Millicent reveals.

She is now an author of Lisa, a book based on her experiences. She also leads a community support programme to help people heal their inner childhood wounds.

As for her family, Millicent is happy that they have managed to talk and are slowly healing. 

“We laugh about the fights. We hope to see my grandmother soon and have a similar sitting where mum will address their bad blood,” she reveals.

 As for her five-year-old-daughter, Millicent is glad that she is raising her having healed from all her pain.

“I named her after my mum and I love her to bits. I tell her I love her daily because I never want her to doubt her mum’s love like I did,” she shares.

She observes how Africans fear having an open talk about the hurts caused by parents, which results to generational trauma.

“We need to have honest dialogues on generational cycles of trauma with the aim of healing not hating or fighting  our parents because first, they were victims and then they unknowingly became abusers,” she says in conclusion.