Mum’s death guides children

By REBECCA KUKU
MALIA Thompson (not her real name), 28, is a beautiful and intelligent young woman who is also a strong women’s rights fighter and successful family lawyer.
She hails from the highlands of Papua New Guinea and says that she took up her profession as a family lawyer to fight against her cultural and society norms.
This is her story.
My mother is from the coast. When I was 15 years old, dad was posted back to his village in the highlands region and we moved back up.
Life was good and my dad’s family was always kind to us but whilst growing up, we realised that the kindness extended to us by dad’s family was not extended to our mother.
There were arguments that turned into fights. My father’s sisters would come to the house and attack our mother and they would beat her while our father would only watch.
Every time it was the same argument that our mother was eating all of our father’s money that he never gave his brothers and sisters any money.
But we were a big family, three girls and four boys and father was only a primary school teacher.
Every penny he made was used to care for us.
When I was in Grade 10, my father came home drunk one night and beat my mother up, after one of those regular arguments between my mother and my father’s sisters.
He told us the next morning that he just couldn’t stand watching his family insulting and beating mother anymore, so maybe if he beat her, his family would feel ashamed of what they were doing to our family and stop.
But things didn’t work out the way he hoped.
Instead of feeling ashamed that their constant arguments and fights with mother had led to our parents fighting for the first time, his sisters and mothers were very happy with him saying it was time he beat the woman up as she was destroying the family’s unity.
Mother was so angry she packed up her bags and left the very next day. She took my little brother with her as he was still breastfeeding.
Before she left, she pulled me into a hug and gave me her brother’s phone number and made me promise that I would take care of my younger siblings.
It was raining heavily that day they left, and it was two days later when we received word that the car they were traveling in had fallen off a cliff and they both died.
My father buried her in his village. My mother’s family came, all his family wept like she was a beloved in-law but only us, the children knew, their cries were fake.
They say blood is thicker and family should always stand by each other but from that day we buried our mother, in our hearts we knew we would never forgive our father’s family for the part they played in our mother’s death.”
After two years, I was accepted to study law at the University of Papua New Guinea, my father also applied for a transfer and was accepted at a school in Port Moresby so we all moved back to Port Moresby.
Dad started a small finance company that became successful and he eventually resigned and extended his businesses to Lae, Kokopo, Mt Hagen and Goroka.
When I was in second year, I remember it was during the semester break, my siblings and I, all six of us where gathered in the lounge room watching a movie when dad walked in and said that he wanted to talk to us about our mother’s death.
Dad told us that, every man must leave their homes and begin a new family with his wife. And that no one, not even his brother or sister had the right to interfere in his family or his marriage. And he regretted not standing up and stopping it when it first started. But he also urged us to understand his culture which was also our culture now.
He said that it was their cultural beliefs and customs that made woman seem little. Wives were never supposed to matter. They were just there to bear your children, raise them, and make a home for their husbands and children.
He told us that his society expected him to take the sides of his brothers and sisters, his mother’s (step mothers) and clansman and tribesman even when they were wrong.”
He was too stuck in his culture to realise that even the Bible says that a man must leave his father’s home and start his own family.
My father cried and asked us to forgive him for the death of our mother and baby brother, and I have never forgotten that day.
My father died while I was doing my fourth year, my three brothers and two sisters and I gathered around his sick bed, he divided all his businesses, his savings money and everything to all six of us equally.
He told us that when we grew up and got married and had our own families, we must all learn to respect each other.
He encouraged us to learn from what happened to his marriage and to work for our own money.
Every one of you will have your own families to look after and your family must come first, your siblings must work for their own money and food as well.
We are a Melanesian country and as is our culture, only during a festive, a death or a bride price, than you all must stand together as a family, but one sibling does not owe another one anything.
My father died the next day, he never remarried and died at a young age, I sometimes think guilt led him to his death, for he loved our mother very much. “And that is how I became a human rights fighter and now a young family lawyer.
Our country is a diverse and rich country; we have 800 languages and so many cultures. But the difference is so strong in the highlands and coastal cultures. I’ve seen many cases in the family courts of coastal woman filing for a divorce from their highlander husband and most times it’s one way or another related the huge cultural difference.
People talk about my career; they say I’m very successful at a very young age, but truth to tell, my heart still carries the scars from that day my mother and baby brother died.
My mind still remembers the day my father cried and asked for his children’s forgiveness, and every day I meet with my clients they remind me of my father, who carried the guilt to his early grave, simply because he never spoke up and he never stood up.
And that’s the reason why I decided to become a family lawyer. My mother had no one to speak up for her rights but I can speak up for the rights of all those other woman.
My father never stood up for her because it just wasn’t accepted in his culture and society but I will stand up for all these other woman and I will continue to fight for them.
My brother after me works for an NGO that fights against gender-based violence. The twins after him are both lawyers as well and my other little sister is a social worker and the last one is studying overseas to become a social worker.
So you see, what happened to our mother, affected us all, and motivated us to walk on this path.