We dated for a year before I got to know he had a child. He said he wanted to be sure of where the relationship was going before telling me. I was angry that he didn’t tell me right from the word go, but I was invested. I had loved him deeply for who he was, and I’d started seeing light in his eyes. He apologized. Softly, he asked me to let go and rebuild. I agreed.

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The child was six years old then, a girl. The mother didn’t give him peace. They had an agreement on how much he was sending her every month. One day, this woman got up and said the money was too small, so my husband should increase the amount. He said no, and it turned into a fight.

Whenever they fought, I was the one who suffered. I had to manage his emotions and put him in a state of mind where he wouldn’t be angry. That aside, the woman could call him, insult him, and insult me, who hadn’t done anything to her. It was terrible. He was always apologizing to me because of how the woman insulted me.

Eventually, the woman sent the issue to DOVVSU. The officer called my boyfriend so they would resolve the issue amicably before it entered the books. After assessing his income and how much he was sending the woman, the officer said my boyfriend was already overpaying, so if the issue became official, the amount would be reduced to reflect his income.

That gave him relief, and it also put baby mama in a situation where she couldn’t ask for more. But she didn’t stop coming. One afternoon, we bumped into her in town, and immediately she saw us, she started laughing. She said, “I thought you would go for a woman whose beauty rivals that of angels. Wei? This woman is what you settled for?”

He held my hand and squeezed it a little. I got it. He was asking me not to talk, so I didn’t. When we didn’t engage her, she took her madness to town and left us alone. That day, to be honest, I nearly gave up. Ben is a special human; that is the reason I still stuck with him.

A few weeks before marriage, she called Ben for a meeting. I was in his car waiting. Ben came back holding the hand of his daughter. His eyes welled up when I asked what happened. He sat behind the steering wheel and placed his head on it. He said, “She left the child with me and took off. She says she’s done it for seven years, so I should take it from here.”

I went to the back seat with the girl and asked him to drive. I was happy. In my mind, that cut the cord between them, and that made me glad. His daughter lived with her mom while we went through preparations to get married. When we were finally done, I went with him to his mother’s place and brought the girl home to live with us.

Then the second part of the trouble started. I braided the girl’s hair. She went to school and came back without the braids. She said her mom came there right after closing to undo them. Later in the evening, she called my husband and was shouting on the phone, “Tell that your dirty wife to take her filthy hands off my daughter. She has a womb. She should give birth and braid her hair.”

I should have been angry or sad, or both, but for some strange reason, I laughed. I thought she was crazy. I asked him to give me the phone to tell her my mind, but he refused. It didn’t stop there. She would ask the girl who gave her the shoes or dress she was wearing. If the girl mentioned my name, she would react savagely toward the girl because she had warned her not to take anything from me and that I was a witch trying to kill her.

This girl became fed up and started avoiding her mom. She would see her and run, cry, or scream that she shouldn’t come close. The mother blamed me for her daughter’s new behavior. She said I had poisoned her child’s mind and caused her to run from her because I wanted to steal her daughter. “Don’t you have a womb? What is your vagina there for?”

Everything didn’t make sense to me, but aside from that, something looked off. Intuitively, I asked my husband, “Don’t you have an iota of doubt about the paternity of this girl? I don’t have any evidence or proof, but something tells me you should do a test to confirm.”

He brushed me aside as speaking nonsense, but anytime the baby mama struck, I reminded him to test the girl. One day, he threw a paper at me and quickly walked into the room. That was the DNA result. He wasn’t the father of the girl. He didn’t even tell me he was going to do it. I rushed in, thinking I would see him happy. He was sitting there with tears in his eyes.

“Tears of joy?”

He shook his head and buried his face in his palms. He said, “I wish I could hurt this woman in a way she would never recover. Why did she keep hurting me this way?”

According to him, the fact that the girl wasn’t his daughter hurt more than any pain he had experienced. I asked what we should do, and he said, “I’ll think about it.”

It’s been three good months. My husband gets angry anytime I bring it up. He asked me, “Do you hate her so much that you want to send her away?”

What Nobody Tells You About Divorce

How did it become me against the girl instead of him against everyone else? He says at the right time he will make a decision. His baby mama is still misbehaving, but he’s not taking any action to reveal the truth to her, and I’m here wondering, “What in the name of hell is going on here? Eiiiii!”

A few days from now, I’ll do the telling myself if he’s too scared to tell her.

—Nanaba 

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