The Period of sorrow

Julie POV Ever since I was young, I always wondered how life would be without financial stress. From the very beginning, my family never really had much money, my father married my mother in her senior year. He quit school in his form 1/ grade 8 and went to initiation school which one of our traditions . When he married my mother, he was not working and still living with his parents. Financially compared to other households they were faring pretty good. However, as the saying goes your father's riches are not your own. Thus father had to stop being a boy and being a man. His father gave him capital to start a small business wherein he started shopping from Durban and selling clothes back home in Lesotho. According to one of my aunts, he was pretty good at it, since his fashion sense was good. Nevertheless when they had their first baby (Me) they realized that they needed more than just money from selling clothes, as a result, mother went to work in the firms on Botshabelo, while father went to Gauteng to look for the job 8n the mines as he had no educational background. In the beginning, they left me with my martenal grandmother until the age of 3 when I was brought back to my paternal grandmother to attend pre-school. Mother however came to get me a year later because of some family drama and since I stayed with her and attended pre-school there until I graduated. My grandfather, soon after I graduated demanded that we came back home which we did. Honestly, my grandfather was good to my mother, which is why he wanted us back. The problem laid between my grandmother, my aunts and another cousin sister. They never were fond of my mother, which part of the reason she left. Fast foward to 2 years later since our return in 2007, my mother gave birth to my adorable little sister and simultaneously my father got his first good paying permanent job, though dangerous l. Life started to be good, my parents were very much in love, we started worrylesx about clothes, food and all the necessities. We were generally happy, oh and my grades were good, I was basically their little genius. Life was good. In my sixth grade, father ask mother to go back to school to complete her studies, which she did. However, things started going sideways around the period I was in high-school and mother was in college. Father started feeling the pressure of paying fees for two and on top of that, I left home which meant, they had to provide for two households. It started with father not paying for mother's college fees, to mother getting into debts and that's when the peace crumbled. In the first few years, it was not that bad, things turned really south when they started on building our home. It was expensive , very expensive and so father started being mean when mother asked for tuition fee. I remember mother was even unable to write her final year examinations because she had no money for tuition. They started fighting more and more but still they came back to each other. My father's relatives made things worse by always speaking badly about mother to father which intensified their fighting. Year 2017, I lost my maternal grandmother, the one woman I loved as much as my mother. He love was so special and sweet, she was literally the best human being. Losing her was terrible, at first I did not feel her departure but then I started feeling it later on and it hit me so hard I used to cry myself to sleep. The thought of never seeing her again was horrible, never hearing her beautiful laughter,voice and just her. I think that was about the time I samsara being really closed off. I still had friends but opening up became difficult because I felt they would never understand my pain. My mother was out of question because she was just as much hurting as I was, I did not to burden her. I started hiding behind humor and sacarsm. I stopped crying, considering I was such a crybaby it was surprising. Life went on though, went to university in 2019 and well there came Covid19 too. In the years I was in Unni, father started speaking about leaving work which of course I was against because was still not working eventhough she got her diploma,I guess the unemployment in my country was at fault. Also my little sister had just started high-school so leaving work was out of question. Still as years went by, father insisted until year 2021 when we relented because we felt stopping him was making him miserable .I was in my 3rd year of tertiary, my little sister was in grade 10. And so that's when the sorrow began. I hope you like it, I tried to make some sort of a summary about Jullie's background because from chapter 1 we are going to focus more on the period of Julie's sorrow. #vote# Love Prexy