💔 Part I: The Cost of Being the Eldest Daughter

Being the first girl isn’t a birthright to sell, and I refused to be the sacrifice.

My name is Amara, and I was born into a family defined by scarcity and the strict, suffocating weight of tradition. My mother, Blessing, had five children, all girls. This fact, in our culture, immediately placed an immense, invisible burden on me. Growing up, there was this fixed, unbreakable idea that the eldest sister—the Anya—was like a third parent to the younger ones. That was me. I was their second mother, their constant guardian, their unpaid, overworked nanny and tutor rolled into one.

.

.

.

My younger sisters—Nkechi, Ada, Ifeoma, and Chiamaka—were beautiful, vibrant, and entirely reliant on me. From the age of ten, my life was a cycle of chores: washing uniforms, stirring the fufu, queuing for water, and braiding four heads of demanding hair before dawn. My own dreams—simple ones, like reading a novel uninterrupted or staying after school for a science club—were luxuries I quickly learned I couldn’t afford.

The expectation wasn’t whispered; it was roared. It was the air we breathed. My success was not measured by my grades or my happiness, but by the comfort and progress of the four girls coming after me. I was the bridge, and bridges are meant to be walked upon.

The true confrontation came the year I was supposed to sit for the university entrance exams. I had quietly, secretly, saved the registration fee from money I earned tutoring neighbors’ children. I was a good student; my teachers said I was brilliant, capable of reaching high places. University wasn’t just an aspiration; it was the only ladder out of the perpetual poverty that defined our small, cramped rented rooms.

I approached my mother one sweltering evening, placing the tattered registration forms on the small wooden table while she counted her meager earnings from the market.

“Mama,” I began, my voice trembling slightly with hope. “I paid for the exams. If I pass, I can apply for scholarships, and I can send money home from my part-time job there.”

My mother didn’t even look up. Her hands, rough from years of manual work, continued meticulously stacking the naira notes.

“You can’t go to school,” she said, her voice flat, definitive, and colder than the harmattan wind.

I froze. “What do you mean, Mama? The teachers said I have a chance. If I get the degree, I can lift us all out—”

She finally looked up, her face devoid of pity, hardened by years of her own brutal survival. Her eyes held the same relentless logic that had governed our lives.

“You are the big sister. You need to pave the way for the younger ones by stepping aside and bringing money home. That is it.”

There was no further explanation. No apology. No discussion about sacrifices she had to make. The only reason given was that I was the first child. And I was. My birthright, my talent, my future—it was all inventory, meant to be liquidated for the collective survival of the five children still under her roof. My education was a financial risk; my immediate labor was a guaranteed dividend.

The mandate was clear: I was to take the cleaning job that paid cash, work long hours, and hand over every kobo so that Nkechi could attend the better secondary school, so that Ada could have new books, and so on. My future was canceled.

The injustice of it tasted like ash in my mouth. I tried to argue, to appeal to her sense of fairness, but she simply held up her hand, stopping me with an authority that was absolute.

“Your time will come later, after they finish. But your duty is now.”

What made this demand so profoundly agonizing was the hypocritical lens through which I viewed her own life. I had seen, with my own eyes, how my mother spoke to her own elder sister, Aunty Ngozi. Ngozi had made the sacrifice; she had worked years of thankless jobs to fund Blessing’s—my mother’s—initial steps into the city decades ago. Yet, whenever Ngozi visited, my mother spoke to her with shocking disdain. It was always criticism, always complaint. There was no respect, no regard for her sister’s sacrifice in any way. I saw the quiet, beaten look in Ngozi’s eyes. My mother had consumed her sister’s future, and in return, had given her only scorn.

I knew then, with a cold certainty that settled deep in my bones, that my sacrifice would not buy me respect or a turn later. It would buy me a lifetime of thankless servitude and the eventual, bitter scorn reserved for those who had nothing left to give.

Being the first girl isn’t a birthright to sell, and I refused to be the sacrifice.

The argument simmered for weeks. I took the job, I worked, and I brought money home. But I did not hand over every kobo. I began putting a small, desperate percentage aside, enough to dream again. My relationship with my mother became a silent, agonizing war of attrition. She accused me of being selfish, of lacking family spirit. I accused her, silently, of being a predator, ready to devour her own child’s future.

During this time, I met Emeka. He was kind, worked steadily, and had a small, decent apartment not far from my cleaning job. He became my refuge, the only person who saw me as Amara, the clever girl with the big dreams, and not just ‘The Eldest Daughter.’ We started dating quietly, secretly. He knew the bare bones of my situation, but not the depth of the desperation that was building inside me.

I worked an extra-long shift the following Tuesday, cleaning a massive office block downtown until 9 PM, thinking about how I could finally negotiate a slight increase in my secret savings. Exhausted but hopeful, I rode the keke back to our rented compound.

I unlocked the familiar, flimsy wooden door and stepped into the darkness.

The air was wrong.

It wasn’t just dark; it was empty. The usual faint smell of my mother’s cooking oil and the sound of my sisters’ low breathing were gone. I flipped the light switch.

The room was bare.

The cheap floral mattresses were gone. The rickety table we ate on was gone. The clotheslines holding my younger sisters’ drying clothes were gone. The faded picture of my father, which sat on the shelf, was gone.

My mother had moved.

My stomach seized, a profound, chilling realization settling over me. She hadn’t just moved; she had left my things behind. My small, canvas duffel bag containing my few possessions, my work uniform, and my carefully folded school books sat alone, abandoned in the center of the dusty, empty room.

I stood there, surrounded by the hollow echoes of my childhood, and understood the final, vicious brutality of her decision. She hadn’t just rejected my future; she had rejected me. I had become an obstacle to the narrative of sacrifice she needed, and her solution was total excision.

Tears did not come. The shock was too immense for grief. Only a cold, crystalline clarity remained. The bond of motherhood had been severed, not by my choice, but by hers.

I walked over to the duffel bag, zipped it up, and picked up my things. My entire life, all that I owned, was contained in that single, small bag. I had no key to the new place; I had no money for a hotel. I had no family waiting.

There was only one place I could go.

I pulled out my phone, my hand surprisingly steady, and called the one person who offered solace and escape.

“Emeka?” I said, my voice surprisingly flat. “I’m on my way. I need a place to stay tonight. Forever, maybe.”

“What happened, Amara?” he asked, his voice instantly concerned.

“My mother moved,” I said, looking around the empty room one last time. “And she forgot to leave me the forwarding address.”

I hung up, walked out of the empty room, and locked the door behind me, sealing that chapter of my life. I walked toward the main road, the small, heavy duffel bag slung over my shoulder, the weight of my abandoned past fueling my steps towards an uncertain, but necessary, future. The price of being the first daughter was separation, but the reward would be my freedom.

The sacrifice had been refused. Now, the battle for survival had truly begun.