When you think that you have seen or heard everything in the form of an atrocity to question our humanity, you are confronted with yet another one to add to your dilemma.
Some people don’t have patience with children and are very strict with them, where even toddlers can’t play and run about in the house.
It is, however, unheard of for a father to be very angry with the crying of a baby to the extent of beating the baby for disturbing him from sleeping in the night!
Where is the love, the compassion for a father to his child, especially a two months old baby? That was the horror that confronted Nigeria last week that a 31-year-old man, Confidence Amatobi allegedly broke the arm of his two months old baby, Miracle, for disturbing his sleep in Imo State. It led to the amputation of the arm.
The pictures of the injured arm and the one after the amputation touched people’s hearts with some calling for the father’s arm to be amputated as well.
Narrating her ordeal, the mother of Miracle, Mrs Favour Chikwe, who is from Anambra State, disclosed that she had left Miracle with his father on Friday, October 7, 2022, to use the convenience when the incident happened.
The Imo State Chapter of the Nigeria Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ), and the National Human Right Commission (NHRC) have called on the state government and the police to immediately arrest and prosecute him.
It apparently happened for a while before these organisations broke the story to the public.
So what could have triggered such rage and even madness, if you like?
All the same, this brings out the issue of domestic harmony where some husbands help the wives to run the household either in the kitchen or dressing the children for school. This is because it doesn’t make sense for the husband to just sit down while the wife rushes from the kitchen to dress the children.
Though some men are not even aware that they are not helping or they are supposed to help because of their culture where the man as the lord of the manor, so to speak, is not supposed to lift a finger to help his wife. Where they do, they are mocked if they see that their wives are ‘dealing’ with them, that is why they are doing household chores for them.
But gradually those notions are fading, particularly for those that live abroad, where they are the sole helpers of their wives if they give birth, where there are no house helps to even help.
Also, for those that live in other places in the country, not in their hometowns or villages near their parents and relatives, it is like living abroad.
So, in such a situation the husband is expected to naturally help in taking care of the baby, or help in taking care of the house. Just anything to relieve the pressure on the wife.
Even where you have a house girl, she may decide to disappoint you by wanting to leave. In one such case, a woman with two little children gave birth through Cesarean Section (CS) and two days later while still at the hospital her house girl who spent only one month said she wanted to go and get married. And when she came she said she would spend a year.
Luckily for the woman her sister had come to stay with her, but where there is nobody to help and this happens the husband is expected to lend a hand.
I don’t know but it looks like the men are being begged to help which should not be, since marriage is a union and they should build their home together.
Anybody knows babies cry and prevent parents from sleeping, but it is all taken in good faith, part of the blessing of having that baby.
Even though parents, especially fathers, joke about newborn babies preventing them from sleeping because of crying in the night, it is not annoying.
Therefore, for a man to be so angry at a baby for crying in the night that he beat up the baby and injures it is very strange indeed.
This is very sad and many people are questioning his mental health. However, that is for experts to determine.
If the child grows and learns the truth, would it ever have an iota of love for the father that was the cause of its deformity?
And when other children are proud of their fathers, this victim may be saying in his mind; “I am the child whose father should love and protect, yet he was the one that inflicted an injury that led to the loss of my hand. He must have hated me very much; maybe he wanted me to die.”
Justice must take its course. The innocent baby Miracle that is maimed for life deserves it even if his arm would never come back. The father must answer for his (mis)deeds and not lightly.
