BRICK BY BRICK

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN SCHOOL STOPPED

You can be born with a silver spoon in your mouth and still lose it.

I didn’t understand what that meant when I was ten.

At ten, I didn’t know what privilege was. I didn’t know what financial security meant. I didn’t understand how much work it took for a family to remain comfortable.

I only knew that before my father died, life felt different.

Then, in 2014, everything changed.

I lost my dad.

I was ten years old.

Ten.

I sometimes think about that number and wonder what a ten-year-old should really have to worry about.

Homework.

Football.

Cartoons.

Friends.

Maybe being punished for doing something stupid.

A ten-year-old shouldn’t have to think about losing a parent.

A ten-year-old shouldn’t have to wonder what happens to a family after the person holding everything together is suddenly gone.

But life doesn’t always care about what should happen.

It gives you what it gives you.

And you learn to live with it.

I didn’t immediately understand the permanence of death.

I knew my father was gone, but I don’t think I fully understood what “gone” meant.

Gone as in never coming back.

Gone as in there would be no future conversation.

No random advice.

No opportunity to ask questions later.

No chance to grow older and have the kind of relationship with him that I imagined I would have.

Death took all of those possibilities before I was old enough to appreciate them.

And then life continued.

That was strange.

The world continued as though nothing had happened.

People still went to work.

Markets still opened.

Cars still moved.

Children still went to school.

People still laughed.

People still complained about ordinary things.

But my world wasn’t ordinary anymore.

Inside our home, things had changed.

And eventually, the consequences of losing my father started becoming more than emotional.

They became practical.

The security he had built began disappearing.

The things he had worked for were no longer there in the way they were supposed to be.

My older brother, the first son, eventually squandered much of what my father had left behind.

And slowly, the life we knew began slipping away.

The silver spoon was gone.

I don’t say that to make my family sound perfect before my father’s death.

We weren’t.

No family is.

But there was a level of comfort and security that existed before.

Afterward, there wasn’t.

We had to adjust.

We had to start again.

And starting again is harder when you’re a child because you don’t have any control over the circumstances.

You can’t get a job.

You can’t make financial decisions.

You can’t fix everything.

You just watch.

You watch adults worry.

You watch things change.

You watch people make difficult decisions.

And you learn to adapt.

My sisters became part of that adjustment.

My uncle would eventually become one of the most important people in my story.

But at that point, I didn’t know how much his role would matter.

I was simply trying to understand my new reality.

As the years passed, the situation became harder.

I grew older.

The needs became bigger.

School became more expensive.

Life became more expensive.

And eventually, I reached a point where education became something I could no longer afford to take for granted.

In 2018, I was in SS1.

Then I stopped going to school.

I dropped out.

There is a particular kind of silence that comes with giving up on something you once believed was going to be yours.

I had dreams.

I wanted an education.

I wanted to finish secondary school.

I wanted to go to university.

I wanted to become something.

But sometimes dreams don’t disappear because you stop wanting them.

Sometimes they disappear because life convinces you that you cannot afford them.

That was what happened to me.

There was no dramatic movie scene.

No teacher standing outside the school begging me to stay.

No inspirational speech that suddenly fixed everything.

There was simply the reality that there wasn’t enough money to continue.

And when you’re young, you don’t always have the power to fight reality.

So I accepted it.

Or at least, I tried to.

I remember what it felt like to think that education was over for me.

Not paused.

Not delayed.

Over.

That distinction matters.

If you tell yourself something is delayed, there is still hope.

If you tell yourself it is over, you start grieving it.

And I grieved the future I thought I would have.

I had to give up on the idea of being a student.

I had to give up on the idea that I would follow the normal path.

Primary school.

Secondary school.

University.

Graduation.

Career.

Life.

That was the path I thought everyone followed.

I had already lost my father.

Now I felt like I was losing my future too.

So I started working.

I had to.

I was still young, but life wasn’t waiting for me to grow up.

I started doing whatever honest work I could find.

Labourer jobs.

Carrying blocks.

Sweeping floors in bookshops.

Stocking shelves in supermarkets.

Anything that could put some money in my hands.

Sometimes it was about ₦2,000 for the day’s work.

And at that point, ₦2,000 didn’t feel small.

It felt earned.

It represented sweat.

It represented exhaustion.

It represented another day survived.

There is something humbling about working with your hands when you’re young.

You begin to understand the value of things differently.

You understand that money doesn’t appear because you need it.

Somebody has to work for it.

You understand why adults look tired.

You understand why people become quiet when bills arrive.

You understand why some dreams have to wait.

And you understand why some people become desperate.

But work also taught me something else.

It taught me that there was dignity in trying.

I didn’t have the education I wanted.

I didn’t have the money I needed.

I didn’t have the future I had imagined.

But I still had my hands.

I still had my mind.

I still had the ability to wake up and try.

So I tried.

I worked.

I survived.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself when life would return me to the path I was supposed to be on.

I started believing that maybe this was my path.

Maybe this was just what my life was going to be.

Maybe I would never go back to school.

Maybe university wasn’t for me.

Maybe some dreams really did belong to other people.

That thought became comfortable.

Not because it made me happy.

Because it made disappointment easier.

If you stop expecting something, you stop being hurt when you don’t get it.

I didn’t know it then, but my story wasn’t over.

It wasn’t even close.

I just couldn’t see the next chapter.

Sometimes God hides the next chapter because you’re not ready to understand it yet.

For years, I thought I had lost my opportunity.

I didn’t know that someone was about to give me another one.

And that person was my uncle.