Chapter 3: CHAPTER THREE

In our community, a girl’s life is worth less than a whisper in the wind. Most never survive past birth. If they’re allowed to live, they’re treated as burdens. Forced to cook and clean from the moment they can stand. Traded off as brides before they even reach adulthood. My mother always tells me I should be grateful. That I was never killed. Never sold. That she, in her infinite kindness, let me go to school. She wants me to thank her for the life I have. But she’s forgotten something. She never wanted me at all. When I was two days old, she tried to kill me. She threw me to the ground like garbage. "If I kill this one," she had said, "my next child will be a boy." I almost died that night. Blood pooled from my skull. My body went cold. And she stood there, watching. It was my father who saved me. He carried me for ten miles across the mountains, racing against death, just to reach a clinic. It was my father who fought for me. Who worked day and night to send me to school. And when I got tired, when I lost hope, it was *his voice that kept me going. "Charlotte, don’t be afraid of hard work. Study well and see the world for me.” He wasn’t just fighting for me. He was fighting for himself, too. My father was young, ambitious, and full of dreams. He didn’t want to die in these mountains. He started a fruit business, selling to different towns, making more money than anyone expected. His dream was to leave. To take us with him. But my grandmother? She refused to let him go. She believed a son’s duty was to stay home and care for his mother. And my father was her only son. She had already killed three daughters before him, convinced that they were worthless. And now that she had him, she wouldn’t let him go. So she cried. Screamed. Threatened to kill herself if he dared to leave. And in the end, he caved. He stayed. Married my mother, a woman he never loved—all because my grandmother said she had wide hips and would give him sons. But the son never came. When my mother gave birth to me—a girl—my grandmother was furious. She turned on my mother, treating her like a slave. She forced her to drink strange herbs, bathe in boiling concoctions, anything to force her to conceive again. But the stress, the cruelty, the abuse—it broke her body. She never had another child. And my grandmother never forgave her. She tried to force my father to divorce her. To find a woman who could "give him a real child." But my father refused. He knelt before my grandmother and begged for mercy, bowing so many times that his forehead bled. In the end, she let my mother stay. But she never stopped trying. Even on her deathbed, she pointed a bony, trembling finger at my mother’s stomach and croaked— "Give birth to a son before I die." But she never got her wish. In the end, she lost everything. She never got her grandson. And her only son—the one she fought so hard to control— Died before she did. *************