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Tenga

Tenga thought she was going to be a wonderful mother. After her own terrible parentage, she was determined to be, actually. However, that simply wasn't the way things turned out. The white lioness has always been of the mindset that a parent is a very important part of a child's development; after all, her father played a very large part in her original outlook on life, leading her to be anxious of the world and afraid to step out on her own two paws. It wasn't till she took her fate in her own two paws and fled the Coalition that she gained any momentum in life, and even then it still took her quite some time to full step into her paws as her own lion. The effects were long lasting, and Tenga had to wonder if she could have turned out differently had her mother been around. She's inclined to believe things would have turned out better had her mother actually been a part of her life, and that she would have been more confident in herself far sooner, but there's no way of actually knowing. Tenga can't even know that she would have still left the Coalition if her mother had been around; she has no idea whether or not her mother was any sort of moral superior to her father, and it is likely that she would not be where she is today if she had been around.

These notions about parenthood only continued to be proven false when Tenga herself became a mother. She was so certain that she would be wonderful, that she would never abandon her children the way her mother did or fail to help them grow into their own roles in life like her father. Everything changed the moment Akilia declared that Laani was cursed; the perfect, idealistic family Tenga had been envisioning came crashing down, shattered by that single revelation. Her daughter, who had only just come into the world, was known by the ancestors to be cursed. Tenga had been so excited to have a daughter of her own, one she would raise and guide the way her mother never had, and yet, in an instant, all of those possibilities had been snatched away. Laani would never be normal, and there was nothing the mother could do about it. Her mate, Jiwe, was relatively unaffected by the news; perhaps that is where the fissure in their mateship began. Laani was a constant disappointment to her mother, but not to her father, who showed her nothing but love no matter what she said or did. Tenga continued to distance herself from the daughter who had ruined everything, in the process isolating herself from the rest of her family as well. Instead, she favored her son, Sasa. He, unlike his sister, was normal; there was nothing wrong with him. She didn't have her perfect daughter, but she could at least raise the perfect son. She focused all of her attention on him.