The poorest children

With all the advancement in the world - technologically and otherwise - there are thousands and thousands of poor children suffering around the world. They are malnourished; sexually molested; exposed to diseases and war; being tossed around and used for malicious purposes.

Being born in a poor family, disease-ridden community, war-torn countries is a curse, but these kids can still run for their mother's comforting arms for their safety. But if their  mothers are abusive, where will these children go? These are the children I call the poorest of poor! 

Poor children are those whose parents use their own children to score their points with their spouse/partner. Poorest children are those whose egotistical parents put their own needs and wants ahead of their children. 

The most unfortunate children are not the ones whose parents are poor, but the ones born in a psychotic family or act like such (psychotic mothers are the worst!). Mothers who live with their monstrous boy-friend/husband, or fathers who live with their devilish wife is also the sad thing to watch. 

We don't want to believe that there are devilish parents, who "use" their own children for their benefits. But there are! Right now, right at this moment, some parents are doing just that, and the people surrounding these abuses aren’t even thinking about reporting to the authority!

Our family home

My husband and I decided to list our family home for sale. For that I have been cleaning the house non-stop for weeks. Even then the house is not as clean as it should be for marketing. It’s a big house with lots of French-doors and large windows.

We had built this house to stay and die in it, but our home became house without the children and I became the caretaker of it.

It was a hard decision to sale this house.  We’ll never have this kinds of house with a magnificent view of the river, again, I know. I also know that our children wouldn’t be happy with this news. But none of the three children care to keep the house, either. Moreover, when we suggested we may need to sale the house they have been telling us “It’s nice house, but it is your home. Do what you like”.

My husband and I discussed a lot about this transaction. We listed the pros and cons of selling the house and moving into a smaller house, requiring less maintenance. Even with our children’s indifferent views on the matter and both of us being clear about our decision, we’re experiencing an edgy feeling now and then. The feeling of sadness, which we really don’t think is logical, comes and goes out of our minds.  I was hiding this feeling from my husband. Apparently he had been doing the same from me, he told me yesterday.

It has been 25 years from the time we bought the lot to build this family house. That’s a long time to be in one place.  So much has happened during this time. So many memories of our children growing up, including my mother’s visit during the year 2006. I guess, it’s normal to feel the way we do.

Yesterday I tried cleaning the doors and windows inside the home and our elder daughter came before my eyes with a bottle of Windex in one of her hands and a rag in another. She spent hours Windexing these doors and windows and kept her bathroom spotless. I hardly appreciated her, thinking that she was taking too much of her time away from study. I wanted her to focus on her study and get all the marks there was to get. I never thought keeping the house spotless was this important!

I’ll be thinking this way about our two other children also—how they helped me do the lawn and garden, etc. By the time the house gets sale, I’ll be emotionally drained for sure.

My husband’s help

Christmas came and gone. Children came and left. The house is empty now, except for the leftover foods in the refrigerator, dust and mud on the floors, wrapping peppers in our living room and the hamperful of dirty laundry!


One of our children couldn’t make home on Christmas this year. We missed her terribly! However, we managed to do the “face-time” with her several times during the Christmas day. 


We did the face-time again on New Year Eve with her. We also chatted a few more times on phone and exchanged massages during the holidays. She knew her siblings left home yesterday and this morning I received this e-mail from her:


“Hi mom,

How are you doing? It must be a lot quieter now that the other kids are gone. You have your house back!

Love ya”


Well, I don’t want to sound like I didn’t enjoy our children’s visit. I enjoyed a lot! But I didn’t actually get the house “back” the way it was before the kids visited until about 4PM today.


I started my venture with the bathrooms yesterday. After I finished changing the bed sheets of the second bed, my husband became sympathetic to me. He told me that he would do the vacuuming for me when he comes for lunch today. So, I did all other things: picked up the things from floors, put the Christmas decorations away, dusted and started mopping. By then it was one in the afternoon. My husband came home. He was inspired by my work and started to vacuum before he reached for his lunch.


Two minutes after my husband started vacuuming, he called me “Bina, can you see if I’m doing the job properly?” I left my mop and ran upstairs to see my husband vacuuming. “This is perfect, Raja,” I said and thanked him with a big smile.


I was still mopping, my husband called me again “Bina, can you go downstairs and check if the sensor in the box is in its place?” I ran downstairs to the basement and check the dust-sensor if it was out of its place in our central vacuum box. The sensor was where it should have been. No problem there. I hollered my husband back “Its fine, Raja”.


I started mopping. My husband called me again “Bina, can you look at the brush?” “I think the brush is not spinning properly.” I was still mopping, but left the mop and went for his help with a pair of scissors. The roller bar of his sweeper was snuggly wrapped up with a massive hairball.


I cut the hair loose and pulled all out of the roller bar strand by strand. My husband’s vacuum cleaner now worked beautifully. But I’m too tired to go back to my mop!

Nonie’s story

Nonie isn't my real name but you can call me by this name. I’m nearly 60-year old woman who hasn’t had the experience of child-birth and, since I don’t remember if I had sex with my husband during the few months I was with him—rather, he was with me, because he was the one leaving home--you can call me the virgin-Nonie if you like.

I’m a fun-loving person. I can read and write a little. I’m still pretty, people say!


I was married only for a brief period of time, as I wrote earlier. I’ve no children of my own but I often forget this. You see, since my husband left, which was a long ago, I’ve been living with one of my brothers’ family. This brother of mine has a sweet wife. Together they have eleven children. I’m so involved in raising these children, I often forget the kids are not my own. You know what I mean?


I was with my sister-in-law when each of her eleven children descended one-by-one into this world. Sometimes holding her hands and other times putting a wet cloth on her forehead, I was there with her each time she gave birth to her children.


I feel like I had the pain my sister-in-law was enduring during her childbirth. I’ve felt heat in my forehead and sweated with exertion. I felt the urge to push every time my sister-in-law was asked to push. People say I even wailed with my sister-in-law in pain a few times!


I remember each of the little precious thing emerging from my sister-in-law’s narrow birth canal--their black head piping out first and then their tiny shoulders and finally little feet... Their body covered with bloody white slimy cheese like substance that felt so slippery to touch, but I didn't feel yucky the way other did. I was only afraid of losing the newborns from my arms when washing them. 

Seeing my nervous face, the sudunis (midwives) used to laugh at me. They used to tease me, “Sanu-bajai, you look more nervous, more distressed than your vauju”. Bajai is Brahmin -woman and sanu mean small. “Who is giving the birth here you or her?, they used to ask me.

But I was worried about my sister-in-law's health. I had lost my mother during her child-birth. I didn’t want to lose her, also, you know?


Anyhow, my brother’s children are grown up now; the youngest is 19 years old. However, the slightly lopsided head of this boy I still remember!


You may ask what happened to my husband, is he dead? Well, no. He is not dead, or even if he is dead, I’ve not heard of it. As I said, I was married only for a brief period. I was 16 when I was married. He was 18 or 19 years old, people say. I really don’t know, but he was tall and handsome. He was strong and his voice was deep. I also remember going to bed that night and him being in a deep sleep. He was snoring. But now that I think about it his snoring was fake, because when I woke up at mid-night he was gone. I didn’t hear any noise what so ever that he might have made when opening and closing the door of our bedroom.


You see, I was the youngest daughter-in-law in the house. In those days, the daughter-in-law massaged their mother-in-law’s feet and if there were sisters-in-law in the house, she massaged her feet, also. So, by the time I cleared the kitchen and finished all those chores it used to be mid-night. So, he must have left when I fell asleep deep, around 1AM in the morning.

Some people say he left the village with another lady in the neighbourhood. Some others said he left the country with a male friend of his, who was also missing around the same time he did. Anyhow, he never returned home and nobody knows if he is dead or still alive somewhere.


The point of going through my story is that I have been experiencing some discomfort in my body lately. Once in a while part of my body numbs, so I visited my doctor recently. My doctor asked me to take an MRI, thinking that I’ve a pinched nerve. But the test showed a few bubbles in my uterus. Then, I visited a gynecologist to ask what was going in my body.


The gynecologist asked me about my husband and children while preparing me for a test-- she said was “hysteroscopy”. But when I explained my situation to her, she just squeezed my lower abdomen and said since I didn’t sleep with my husband and never had a childbirth, she called me a “nulliparous woman” and explained that I’m more predisposed to the ovarian cancer than the married women with children.

This medical term was new to me. I don’t know what that meant, but she said that I should go for a hysteroscopy to remove my uterus right away. She added “The operation will have to be performed from your abdomen since you didn’t sleep with your husband and you never gave birth to a child”. This is troubling me a lot!


“Hysteroscopy is a major operation but there is no danger of dying from this,” my doctor says. But I’m worried and also embarrassed. I know it was not my fault that I don’t have a man in my life. But from the talks of the doctors and the people around me it almost sounded as if I created this condition for myself.


My doctor says that my problems are related to "psychosocial factors". She said it has something to do with my emotional and physical conditions. My physical body seem to have been affected from my marital status that the doctors cannot operate me the way married women are being operated. I consulted two gynecologists. Both of them say the same thing: “Your operation will have to be performed from your navel area.”

I’m a healthy woman, otherwise. I love music. I dance whenever I get a chance. I’m smart, I think. I would have liked to have a small family with one or two of my own kids. I would have built a small house and decorated it with all my handmade stuff. I would have a pretty garden with all my favorite fruits and flowers. If I had the chance every other woman had, you know?