If I am still the teenage girl I was years ago, I would have a whole lot more to share about this topic than I am going to share now. That is, because over time, I've come to live with what life has made me go through and accepted that it's part of all that made me who I am today.
Childhood is meant to be filled with dreams, excitement and happiness as there are no worries of responsibilities but somehow in my case, I had responsibilities laid on me much earlier than I felt they should because of incidents that played out as I approached my teen age.
Today, I think back and there are like a million things I wish I had for myself and did as a little girl. I'm not sure how they'd have made things a lot better for me now in my adulthood but I still wish I had or did them. I mean, it only makes sense that we have things we wished for but didn't get, we are humans after all.
Even mere thinking about some childhood past experiences, I kinda feel pity for myself. There were things we didn't get to enjoy as children and the one that tops them all was growing up without a mother in the home. I wish I didn't had to grow older with only dad playing all the roles.
I've fantasized a lot how different it would have been if mum was with me, the ease it would have been to play around knowing dad doesn't have to worry at work about me. I wouldn't have need to follow dad to his work place as often as I did if mum was around. I would learn a lot from mum too.
As an adult now, I wished I had more time being a kid than acting all grown up too early. It's not that dad didn't do his best for me while growing up, I just had to grow up faster to relieve him of his stress I thought everything had on him as a single dad. Having an elder brother would have changed a lot of things for me positively too, from the way I thought about it before.
I loved that I have a younger brother but I wish I also had an elder brother and that I am not the eldest child in the house. Here in Nigeria, we know what comes with being the eldest although I've been coming to accept my position now than before.
The main effect all that experience has on me now is the motivation to provide better opportunities for my siblings and my future kids as much as I can. I've also learned to not delay things I want to do that I really love to, I think I put off too much while growing up because I had responsibilities to take over. Taking care of my physical, mental and financial health are also part of what got influenced from my childhood.
Images are AI generated
