Four years ago in December, I went to my dad with a heavy heart to tell him I wanted a divorce. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly or alone; it was one I made with my wife’s consent. She was as tired of me as I was of her, so we both agreed it was best for us to go our separate ways. Our only son, after four years of marriage, was just two years old.

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“You want to divorce your wife in December?” my dad asked with a grin. “Are you trying to run away from December responsibilities?”

My dad was like that. No problem was too big for him to laugh about. I was telling him the biggest decision of my life, and he made a joke: “If it’s Christmas clothes you don’t want to buy, then stay angry with her until Christmas is over. You don’t leave?”

Then he laughed and told me he knew the trick because he had used it when he and my mom were young in their marriage. He didn’t ask me why I was leaving. If he had, the reasons I would have given would have been incoherent at best and inconsistent at worst. I was speaking from a place of anger, not through clear thought. He told me to go back, think about it, and come again.

A week later, I was back. “My wife has already told her parents she wants a divorce, so there’s no turning back.”

He called my wife. While he hadn’t asked me why I wanted a divorce, he asked her. My wife recounted our problems: the fights, the suspicion of cheating, my irresponsibility, more fights, and yet more fights. I heard my dad tell her, “These are normal in marriages, and they shouldn’t call for a divorce. It’s December. Spend Christmas together in love, and let’s talk about this next year.”

While my dad was on the phone with my wife, I saw my father-in-law calling. It was as if the two in-laws had met and decided to tell us the same thing: “These are not reasons enough to leave a marriage. You’re a man. If your wife doesn’t suspect you of cheating, then she has failed as a wife. It’s a wife’s natural character to suspect. Let’s talk about this next year when the festivities are over.”

I went home angry. I saw my wife, and my anger shot up a hundred times. She was the first to speak: “This whole thing is like a curse, but wherever the curse was done, I will go there and break it.”

I didn’t spare her. I gave her a worthy response, calling her the curse I carry around my neck and the reason I wasn’t progressing in life. Somehow, we had accepted living through it, at least until after Christmas, but we didn’t know how we were going to manage. We didn’t say a word to each other, but one thing was certain: we both loved our son and wanted to be with him.

She would cook and not give me any. While my son was struggling to eat, I would try to feed him and steal a chunk of the food. Or I would wait until she was asleep, steal some food, and shake the rest back into shape so she wouldn’t notice. I would put money on the table for housekeeping and come back to find it still there.

Every song she sang felt like a subliminal attack on my personality and the curse of our marriage. I retaliated. She cooked a whole meal and put it in the fridge. I turned the fridge off until she found spoiled food the next morning. I walked around singing that I was the one who bought the fridge and could turn it off whenever I wanted.

If it wasn’t the fridge, I would turn off the lights so we slept in darkness because I paid the bill. I often slept on the sofa. The bed was for whoever slept first. But when I couldn’t sleep first, I took the mattress and left the wooden frame for her. She came home one day with a student mattress.

She started taking temporary measures against the wild things I did. She would say, “December will soon be over, and we shall see.” She would tell her dad everything I was doing, and her dad would call, and I would tell him what I was suffering from her. By December 31st, we had divided the house in two. The only place in contention was the bedroom. We fought for territory and supremacy whenever it came to that room.

Once December was over, we were waiting to see who would make the first move. I didn’t want to do it because I believed she would, and I would respond bitterly to her accusations and end the marriage. But something changed around the house. She fixed a broken pipe and called a mason to repair a broken part of the manhole. I thought, “Is this girl not leaving again? Why is she fixing things?”

One night, she asked, “When are you buying the air conditioner you said you were going to buy? I’ve started feeling warm.” I thought, “Does she know who she’s talking to? She’s asking a soon-to-be ex-husband for an air conditioner?” She repeated the question, and I responded, “You can go sleep in the ocean, and you wouldn’t feel hot again.”

She smiled mischievously and walked away. “I’ve started feeling hot again” was a code I didn’t decipher. She was pregnant. She had been pregnant since November and hadn’t noticed until after Christmas. Her calm was coming from the pregnancy. Later, she said, “I’m carrying your child again. I can’t leave here with it, so I’ll give birth and leave later.”

She was smiling while saying that. I was shocked, but not shocked. Or, let me say, I was surprised but not surprised. Our last fight happened after sex when she said I was forcing her to do what she wasn’t ready to do. We had always fought about it because she didn’t want it the way I did. Maybe that was one reason I thought divorce was best. When I learned of the pregnancy, I sobered up. I went out and bought things for her, though we weren’t on good terms. I said I was doing it for the child, but deep down, I missed her.

January, February, March… my dad called. He had learned through my wife’s dad that she was pregnant. He said, “December was three months ago, and I haven’t heard from you again. I even learned you’ve built a house on the land you wanted to abandon. What happened?” We both laughed. I said, “She’s just a witch. I won’t mind her.”

Today, I look back and ask myself why I wanted a divorce so badly. I asked her if she was really going to leave, and she told me, “I would have, and later regretted it.” I thought about her answer and said the same to myself: “I would have regretted it, but pride wouldn’t have let me go back for her.”

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So when we pray, we thank the fathers in our lives—the ones who made our problems look like what they were supposed to be: a joke. The ones who said the right things to keep us going. Through that, I’ve learned that time makes nonsense of everything: our anger, our disappointments, our pain, even our heartbreaks. Give time some time, and things will work out just fine. We only had one December, but look at us now: three kids and a love we didn’t know we’d find at the end of our problems.

—Martin

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