When I was a little girl, I watched my mama tear her wedding pictures into pieces. The pictures had been beautifully displayed on the wall in our house, depicting my mama and father looking crazy in love and happy. I couldn’t understand why my mother would tear up these pictures, the only evidence of beauty in my parents’ relationship. The real picture of life in my household was one of domestic violence and struggle. My father and some paternal relatives physically, verbally, and emotionally assaulted my mother every single day, openly in front of us three girls. I am the last born of my sisters. We grew up in a rural village in Kenya where Mama was beaten down and suffered so much stigma and discrimination for not bearing sons. The domestic violence affected not only my mother and us but also the very people who perpetrated it, especially my father. My father was a churchgoing career man who worked at the bank and also as a teacher. He, too, suffered societal norms of boy preference and was publicly insulted as the “sonless, unmanly, uncircumcised woman.” Without a son, a man was considered unworthy of community leadership or respect, unless he remarried and bore sons to carry on his name and inheritance. My father eventually drank himself to death—alcohol abuse, together with violence, addicted and intoxicated him like a deadly pandemic.