Award winning dancer, Kafayat Oluwatoyin Shafau, popularly known as Kaffy, has opened up about the rejection she is facing as a single mother. The 45-year-old single mother said that men don’t want to marry her because of her single status.
Kaffy revealed this while answering questions on the latest edition of the Honest Bunch podcast.
She said, “I have had somebody tell me because I’m a single mother, he can’t even think of dating me because I have two children. What makes you think that a woman that has been divorced is not even the better candidate if she had worked on herself? What’s the guarantee that two single people today are not going to be divorced people tomorrow?
“Why are people insisting on marrying someone fresh? But both of you are going into the same data that the world has computed for you that over 70 per cent of marriages crash. You are part of the 70 per cent.”
According to her, “The stigmatisation of single mothers and divorcees is crazy.
“For the records, no one gets married with the intention of getting a divorce years after. The same people who advocate for the “Leave to Live” philosophy are still the ones pointing accusing fingers at these people.
“No girl or young woman maps out her life to be a single mother; circumstances make people choose the option of single parenting.
“For some, it is not even an option, life tossed that hard choice at them, and seeing they have no choice, they decide to live each day at a time with a trademark society has forced them to acquire.
The Guinness World Record holder also made startling revelation about her upbringing, how her mother once accused her of dating her boyfriend. While growing up, her mother dated different men after she divorced her father. So, she and her siblings were close to the men whom they sometimes called ‘daddies’.
According to Kaffy, an incident happened when she was 13 years. Her mother accused her of sleeping with one of her boyfriends. She was stripped naked and flogged in front of everyone in their seating room for allegedly sleeping with one of her boyfriends after her mother walked in on her, cleaning a blood stain off his shirt after he cut himself while shaving.
“I was 13 when my mother started suspecting me with her own men. Because of the divorce, she had different kinds of people. She will have different men she is dating and we will see those men as daddies because we were also missing that father [figure].
“The closer you are to the men, the more she is insecure. And there was a day that I was stripped naked in front of that man in the living room and punished for just trying to help ‘daddy’ clean a blood from his face because he was shaving and cut himself. My mother walked into the room when I was saying, ‘Daddy, see.’ And she misinterpreted what was happening and I was flogged naked in front of everyone.
“That had its own traumatising effect on the mind on its own. But, then, you are thinking, ‘But that’s my mother, would I do that to my mother? Why would my mother even think of that of me, the daughter?’ Are you seeing that transfer of insecurity from mother to child? It’s done subliminally but it’s going to have its own effect,” she stated.
The dance coach noted that the experience made her more determined to break free from the “emotional abuse and blackmail” of her parent to become who she is today.
