Oriental

"Today is the day I change." This is what one of my therapists, Dr. Mathai, tells me to say to myself when I wake up in the morning. And, "Today is the day I overcome my negative impulses. I will not go under. I will not."

"I can't remember a time," I start, "when I haven't felt anger lurking beneath the surface of everything. It's like... I don't even have any reason to be angry. I'm just-"

My voice wavers, the words don't want to come out. It is like I am choking. Tears threaten to spill out.

I pull myself together quickly. I cannot show weakness here, I think. Not in front of these people who don't really care about me.

"I'm sometimes confused with myself. I don't want to be this bad person who gets angry over nothing and hurts people. But I just... I find myself being like that."

I almost add, but do not, 'is it my fault?' Because, of course, it is my fault. Everything that's happened, I have brought upon myself.

"He was just five when the incident occurred. That day, I was busy with the oriental noodles I was making for him and so I could not be watching over him. I could only take quick backward glances at him. I was busy making plantain chips also.

"My anger is weird. There one moment, gone the next, leaving me feeling strange and abusive.

"Mummy, can I play outside?" He gave me this desperate look, and his eyelids were drooping slightly. I did not want him to start crying so I told him I would give him a biscuit if he stayed. So he did. But he was making a lot of noise.

"I don't remember now what it was that he did but it must have been something very major because I got very angry. I don't get that angry, or I didn't used to.

"I hit him with a knife. I wasn't thinking. I was blinded by this wrath, this unexplainable anger." I have said this before, I think. I should stop blaming my actions on this anger. But I do not. "I didn't know that I was still holding a knife. Maybe at the back of my mind, I actually did. Maybe, now that I think about it, I wanted it to happen.

He got injured badly. He was bleeding all over the floor and I just stood there, in shock. Looking at my hand in bewilderment, trying to calm down. Trying.

"He was screaming all over the place. Falling down, trying to stand up again. Suddenly, it was like something clicked in my mind. I stood straight, laid the knife in the sink, got my car keys from my room, picked up Joshua and rushed to the hospital.

"My brain was still confused. That was the reason I gave to Udeme for not calling him till late in the night when he got back home and found no one there. And found blood on the floor. And found burnt, blackened noodles, a slowly melting pot.

"I can't even begin to presume what he would have been feeling. I can't even.

"That night I dreamt, in the waiting room of the hospital, that I ate off Joshua's head. I remember very vividly that his neck in his beheaded body looked like a sausage roll.

"I don't know... I'm not sure if it is true but it felt like something changed after that day, in our marriage, Udeme and I. I knew that of course he blamed me for everything. I knew. For a while, he didn't, could not even look me in my eyes. But he didn't say anything about it, probably for the sake of my mental health."

A quick laugh bursts out but it dies seconds later, this is not something I should laugh about.

"I know what you are thinking, all of you. You are judging me. There is something *wrong* with me. That's what you're thinking."

Dr. Mathai, the prettiest one, interrupts here," We're trying not t-" I don't let her finish. "Shut up! Stop lying to me." A tear drop slides down my cheek and I quickly wipe it away. But then there are more. I am rocking, back and forth, back and forth in my chair. It's weird because they don't say much, my therapists in this place. They don't ask many questions like the therapists on television do. They just let me talk, and I don't know whether I like it better that way or not.

"My own child." My pikin, I almost say, remembering when my mother used to call me that, when she used to smooth out the creases on my face and tug the sides of my lips upward to make me smile. "I'm supposed to love him with everything I have." I've failed him.

"It happened again later. I don't want to talk about the second time. He remembers this time, too." He doesn't remember the first one.

A small bell rings. A smile crosses my face, or something like it. I stand up from the comfortable chair I sit on. The four of them send smiles my way. I walk out of the room, the change in temperature momentarily affecting me. Matthew, one of the many security guards in this place, escorts me back into my room, locks me in. So this is what my life has become. I'm in a mental clinic.

I am rocking back and forth, back and forth in my bed. My arms are around me, kind of like I am giving myself a hug.

I remember the headline: Woman Starves Child To Death, Almost. I remember the look on Udeme's face when he came back from a two-day work trip, frightened. He looked like he expected to find nothing there. Was he right to expect this? I don't know. I still don't know what I am capable of. There are a lot of things I did that I can't understand just now.

I sometimes think that maybe there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with me. Maybe at that point, the point before I began to hurt my child, I had had it up to here. Maybe this punishment of being alive was too much for me and I underwent a change. I became defunct. And that now, in the words of Dr. Mathai, I can undergo a change again, for the better this time. But then again, maybe this is just the hopeless optimist in me speaking. Maybe I'm lost.