Under Pressure.

I do not know now where I got the impression from, that Lawanson market was the market with highest priced goods in the whole of Surulere and Idi-Araba market which is barely 500meters away was the cheapest. I think the women who own stalls in the market are more serious than those in other markets with a wider variety of goods and that is why this morning, I took my body to Lawanson to buy the plantains and vegetables I needed to make the meal my spirit had been craving for nearly a month.

Beneath the Iroko

I’m watching cars snarl and drivers curse at Lawanson bus stop while I’m getting series loaded into my Iroko TV app. I’m the last customer of the day, well not a customer- I have an active subscription and it means Success the agent, will get no commission from me.

I am not Wife Material… And It’s ok.

This post has been sitting pretty in my drafts since June 30th, I wrote it at a time I found myself writing about marriage a whole lot. I decided to shelve it until another time and I guess that time is now…

 

Recently, I was having a conversation with a much older man about marriage and a woman’s place in the home. If you know me well- or at least read my blog regularly, you’d know that I do not believe in having specific gender roles in a marriage.

Don’t Kill Me For My Mother.

I had a funny dream and it reminded me of someone I lost and an incident that occurred when we just became friends.

 

During my second year at Uniben, I met a man at the faculty of pharmacy library and I was instantly fascinated by him. He had graduated from the faculty with a B.Pharm degree in the 1990s and he was enrolled in the three-year PharmD conversion programme at the time.

Man Vs Goldfish

December is my favourite month of the year, there’s no way it wouldn’t be my favourite month when it has both Christmas and my birthday. My next favourite month is August, it would have been my favourite month if my birthday wasn’t in December.

Don’t Choose Me, Please.

There’s a new show I already really love, it’s titled Bob hearts Abishola. Asides being groundbreaking in having a Nigerian immigrant as the principal character, it’s interesting, funny, quirky and it pulls at the heartstrings with great force. It was also created by Chuck Lorre and that tells you a lot.

Stop Asking for Fish.

Two Jacks are currently visiting Ethiopia after spending a few days in Nigeria. The first Jack is Jack Dorsey who is the founder of Twitter and current CEO while the second Jack is Jack Ma who has changed the game in online retail sales around the world with his massive creation Aliexpress. I’ll write about the second Jack tomorrow.

It’s Her Year.

She had always liked him. Well, at least from the first time she remembered him. At the time she was in primary school, she would see him on her way to school with her big sister and little brothers while he was wearing white shorts on a white shirt and heading to secondary school from Monday to Friday.

DNA Palava 2

If to say I know, I for no make that DNA post. Notifications wan run down my battery till now and I no even get power for all the conversations wey dem dey raise for there.

 

Anyway there was something very troubling TO ME about several related comments on the post, they all said the man must have seen something that made him go for the test.

 

I made the post from the point of view of a woman who hasn’t cheated on her marital vows. The post was about this young woman from Mbaise with seven names and her reaction to being blindsided like that.

 

However from the comments, I find it disturbing that a man would find something serious enough to doubt the paternity of his children and pay hundreds of thousands of naira to ensure they are his. Yet he keeps quiet about it and doesn’t confront his life partner. Na wetin una dey do inside una marriage? To dey hide that kind thing? Una fit kill person.

 

This August, I cut off from my closest friend outside my brothers, let’s call my friend XYZ. XYZ did something so terrible that I could no longer imagine being friends with this person, funny thing was that I didn’t even realise what had happened until nearly a year later when I passed “the scene of the crime”.

 

I woke up that morning and sent a voice note to XYZ detailing what went down and stating why that incident ended whatever bonds of friendship we had and while I cherished the years of friendship and love we had shared (XYZ is a fantastic person in very many ways). I could not even imagine being more than acquaintances. We have not spoken since.

 

I cannot even imagine being married to someone and we cannot be open to each other about the good and bad. That post was about ME and MY reaction to being blindsided like that. It was not about the generality of women and the terrible state of marriages.

 

If I cannot confront/call out my partner and vice versa on bad behaviour and we would resolve it together, why the fuck then are we married? I don’t understand this secrecy thing I kept seeing in the comments. You eat together – might even cook for each other, share a bed and are naked with each other literally. Yet you’re keeping major secrets like that from each other?

 

Maybe it’s because I come from a family where openness is supreme, maybe that’s why I don’t understand all this hiding theories I was seeing on the post. I grew up watching my parents being open to each other and to us, I grew up knowing that my house was the place I could be sure of the whole truth all the time. My marriage cannot be any different, God forbid.

 

The only thing I have missing in my life currently is a padded account and visas to foreign countries for vacation. Besides that, I have a fabulous life surrounded with love and laughter. Marriage should only enrich my life further like Deut 32:30 implies. If marriage is just about ticking a box to please society and to have children without a meaningful connection between us, why bother?

 

This morning, Celine *not real name* called after reading my post and reminded me of a story she had shared with me some years ago. Her cousin was arranging the house on a Saturday morning (something she rarely did) and came across a folder in her husband’s wardrobe that had copies of his emigration documents to the US.

 

Her husband had married a US citizen who even came down to Nigeria for the wedding at the time when he went on a ‘course’ at work earlier that year. After the wedding, they filed for him to join her in the US with his children. There were also DNA test results for the children that had been submitted at the embassy.

 

But how was he able to marry this US citizen legally while he was still married to her?

 

He got a death certificate for her and made himself a widower with a living wife. She packed the papers and her children and ‘disappeared’ after sending copies of the papers to family members. The man continued with his emigration plans and he’s living in the US today.

 

It made me pause and ponder, it might not even have been about the suspicion of cheating. After all, the test results do not prove she was not a cheat, they just prove that the children were his. What if there was something sinister going on?

 

May we never get married to our enemies.

DNA Test Palava

I saw a screenshot on Facebook and it disturbed me for a while today, it was supposedly made by a woman who had seen paternity tests results of her children paid for by her husband. The tests showed the man was their father and she is confused about her next step.

 

I found the reactions to the screenshot interesting though, with a number of people who think there is nothing to react to, that it is no big deal. Some of them quoted the trending headline of years ago that 30% of Nigerian women have children for other men and passed it off as their husband’s.

 

Others quoted the durex survey that ranked Nigerian women high on the unfaithfulness scale and said the man was only taking precautions. It would be beyond painful for a man to realise that the child he has been raising for decades is not his, they said.

 

I have never pretended to understand this marriage thing, this binding of lives and destinies and families, the dynamics of marital life or why anyone who doesn’t have a gun pointed to her head would venture into it in the first place. Maybe I should delete the last sentence, my mother will read this post.

 

While human beings are fickle and evil and there is no art (or science) to find the mind’s construction on the face. It takes a special level of wickedness to not only cheat on your husband without protection but allow a child take root and then foist it on a man who is not its father – even if that man is your husband.

 

I think anyone who can do it is capable of even cold-blooded murder, nobody can tell me different. It is a crime against the husband and the child and perhaps the biological father – if he is interested in knowing about all the fruits of his loins.

 

It is far more heinous than a man having a child with someone else and keeping it a secret, at least the wife is not invested in raising another woman’s child unknowingly. No one should be deceived like that.

 

I cannot imagine the kind of hurt I would feel if the man I am making a life with, the person whose snores are the soundtrack to my dreams, the person whose children I walked the treacherous battles of pregnancy and labour to bring to his arms and this cruel world doing this to me. That this same man considers me capable of doing such a thing to him.

 

It’s not even about the cheating, it is the grand scale deception. That I would lie to him and to my child most of all, about the paternity of the child. That I am such a monster.

 

And he is so convinced of my evil that he spends hundreds of thousands of naira to be sure that his suspicions are not true. I’m not sure if there is any DNA testing currently available in Nigeria for less than sixty thousand naira and he coughed out at least a hundred and twenty thousand for two children (they might even have had more than two children).

 

So he finds out I didn’t give him another man’s children to raise and he leaves the result in a place where I can find it. So I can do what? Rejoice that I was found virtuous? Continue the marriage?

 

While the story is very unlikely to be untrue, I do not understand how she can spend one more day with a man whose opinion of her is that low.

 

If that is what marriage is, I exclude myself from such a silly narrative.