That was when all attention was shifted to me. I was in the kitchen, looking for something while my grandmother sought to calm my cousin down. I couldn't hear the actual conversation but I soon heard my cousin roar, "What do you mean I don't have a right to this household? What about that that illegitimate girl? Does she have a right here?" .
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That little outburst shook me up a bit. Surely she couldn't have been talking about me. Could she? Unfortunately, I was to be proven wrong. Over the next few weeks, the fights seemed to escalate with each new encounter, and during the course of each verbal debacle, the topic of me and my legitimacy as my father's daughter would always be brought up. It even came to the point where I actually sat in my room crying over the entire scenario.
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That night, my mother talked to me and said, "I"m telling you the truth now because I"d rather that you hear it from me instead of anyone else." I listened intently for more than an hour, and found myself understanding the entire story. .
I am an illegitimate daughter. Or as my mother put it, I have an illegitimate father, since he is not my father legally. The reason that they had kept it from me was because they didn't want me to feel affected. My parents wanted me to grow up with an ordinary life and a complete family, even if my father couldn't be there one hundred percent of the time. They wanted me to be able to live a life that anyone else could've defined as at least somewhat normal, even with my father's constant absence. .
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Regrettably, I wasn't able to see the good in what they had done for me, not on that evening, at least. For the next few days, I became withdrawn from my immediate family and when my father called me up, the only thing that I could manage was a mere "Hmm" if not the traditional "yes" or "no". For some reason I felt betrayed. More than fifteen years of my life had turned out to be, if not in all then at least in some parts, a lie.
