My second favorite pastime is cleaning and reorganizing. Safe to say, I am a neat freak.
I cannot count the number of times I have “remodeled” and I’d like to think I’m really good at it. I am so good at it that I have a budding cleaning business.
Doesn’t matter that the business has been budding for four years now.
My “friends” try to water-down my skills by claiming they do not notice the difference but that’s only because they are jealous. Weirdly, cleaning calms me and I feel safest when I am in my house because it’s always neat.
Was I always like this?
Maybe not.
Growing up, I was the poster child for extremely annoying and lazy last-borns. I wouldn’t lift a finger to do anything and if you tried to make me, I would fake an injury or an illness so I wouldn’t have to do it.
The story is that I threw myself violently on the floor every now and again in protest of the chores assigned to me.
Don’t judge me, mother says my pregnancy was somewhat difficult.
I think my elder sister hated me because of it, or maybe she just hated me generally. (lol)
I mean, how else would you explain her punching me in the stomach and making me pass out when I was barely 3 years old?! She claims it didn’t happen but are we really going to believe an older sibling over the most adorable last born?
I think not.
Her anger towards me might have also stemmed from the fact that I was my parent’s favourite; or at least I think I was.
Of course, they never openly admitted I was the favorite, but my father always sang praises about my hardworking and diligent nature when we all knew I basically emphasized the “zee” in lazy.
While my mother always ran to my rescue screaming “I know what I went through” whenever my sister tried to beat me for being silly.
To be fair, she didn’t particularly scream it. But you get the point, they loved me most, I say!
I was spoiled and very annoying and I got on her nerves a lot.
Thinking about it, this might have been why she treated me the way she did when I got to Secondary School.
My sister was always three years ahead of me, in age and academically. So by the time I got into JSS1, she was a senior student in SSS1.
Ordinarily, the implication of this would be that while my sister was not “senior” enough to completely shield me from the terrors of all senior students in my school, she had no ability to significantly protect me from her classmates and some of her senior colleagues that she had bonded with over time while also providing me with a soft landing into the craziness that is Boarding School.
But did she?
Au contraire
She left me to my fate!
Imagine me, a spoiled 10-year-old girl, who had never done any chore or been tasked with any responsibility dropped in the deepest end of the ocean and asked to swim to shore.
As you may expect, I drowned!
The first few months were a nightmare. Asides from the fact that the rude shock of the change in environment affected my bladder’s ability to retain liquid, I had no idea how to do my laundry.
I made a few friends and tried to emulate what I saw when they attempted to do theirs, but considering chores were never my forte, I gave up almost immediately I started.
By the sixth week I think, I had completely run out of clean clothes and clean underwear. I looked unkempt and homeless. In retrospect, it made sense why my sister made it a point of duty to avoid me whenever we saw. (I probably would have avoided me to).
Secondary School was all about having and maintaining an enviable reputation (“rep” as it was called) and she was not about to let me ruin the rep she had built for over four years.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she even denied me to her friends every now and again. Luckily for her, Mom & Dad were not there to make her take care of me, she didn’t have to.
I’m not exactly sure who called in the cavalry, but I dare say it was my hostel mates. It was either my overall disorganization and tardiness or simply just the filth I exuded but they saw the need for an intervention and reported me to some senior students.
One glorious Saturday morning, two senior students walked into my dormitory and asked me to strip my bed and pack every piece of clothing I had (well, the ones I could find considering I had lost more than half of them).
Armed with bowls, buckets, and enough detergent to do laundry for a whole year, they matched me to tap behind Efunjoke dorm (those that went to Queens College, should know that tap) and together we washed all my clothes, including the one I was wearing at the time.
No! I wasn’t stripped naked. I was wearing my underwear; those white cotton-like vests.
At least, that’s how I remember it. It is not unlikely that the trauma of the whole situation has made me suppress some of the facts.
Where was my sister in all of this, you ask?
A question I would like answered as well!
Olorunteleola where were you???
Meanwhile, I know I say my stories are non-fiction. However, should I ever decided to run for any public office, let it be known that the story you just read is a figment of my imagination and should be discredited if used by my political opponents.
