I MARRIED INTO A VENDA FAMILY AND THEY TURNED MY DAUGHTER INTO A TIKOLOSHI

I MARRIED INTO A VENDA FAMILY AND THEY TURNED MY DAUGHTER INTO A TIKOLOSHI 

A Mother Who Regrets Getting Married with Her Child

I carry a regret so heavy it has left me unable to breathe some nights. I thought marriage would bring stability, love, and family into my daughter’s life. I thought finding a man who had his own motherly roots, traditions, and ways would give us a home. But instead, I married into something I should never have touched.

I was a single mom before all this. My daughter was my everything — my light, my reason for pushing through life no matter how hard it got. I raised her with what little I had, and even if we didn’t have much, at least we had peace. At least I knew she was safe when she laid her head on my chest at night.

Then I met him. He was Venda, a man with charm, confidence, and a mother who carried herself like a queen. She welcomed me in at first, saying she was happy her son had chosen a “strong woman” like me. I didn’t know her strength was something else entirely.

It didn’t take long after I married him before I started noticing things I cannot explain in plain words. My daughter changed. Her eyes would glaze over at night, and sometimes I’d hear her whispering in her sleep in a voice that wasn’t hers. She began having fits, screaming as if something was tearing her from the inside.

At first, I thought it was trauma, maybe the adjustment of having a stepfather and his family. But then… the signs became undeniable. She would wake up with bruises, scratches, and mud on her feet as though she had been walking outside at night. I would catch her standing in the dark, staring at corners of the room where no one stood.

And my mother-in-law… she always brushed it off. “It’s nothing,” she’d say, or, “She’s strong, she’ll adjust.” Yet the more time my daughter spent in that house, the less human she became.

I found out too late. Too late to save her. They had changed my daughter into something else — into a tikoloshi. The word itself makes my stomach turn. She was no longer just my child but something trapped between worlds, enslaved to rituals I was too blind to see coming.

And me? I am the mother who allowed it. The mother who thought marriage would give her child a father, but instead delivered her to a family who swallowed her innocence whole.

I write this as a broken woman, confessing that I regret ever marrying while I still had my child by my side. If I had stayed single, maybe she would still be herself. Maybe she would still laugh the way she used to, free and pure. Maybe she wouldn’t look at me now with eyes that seem to belong to something else.

I regret every choice that brought me here. I regret the day I said “yes.” Most of all, I regret trusting people who wore love as a mask but were hiding teeth underneath.

If I could go back, I would choose loneliness over this nightmare. Because no marriage is worth the soul of your child. I have tried getting help and running away with my daughter but she always strangles me in my sleep demanding me to take her back home to my in-laws.