We have a one-year-old daughter, my husband and I. She is everything that feels right in my life currently, but raising her has not been easy. My husband has been struggling for as long as I have known him. His job barely sustains him. Even before we got married, I knew I was in for a long ride, but I was ready and willing to put in my best to make the marriage work. From the beginning, I told myself we were a team. If he didn’t have enough, I would fill the gaps. That’s what a supportive wife does, but the problem was, he always didn’t have enough, so I became almost like the breadwinner while he became the supportive husband.

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I paid for most things we used in the house—diapers, baby food, hospital visits, groceries—you name them. Even things that should have come naturally from him, I took on without complaint. Whenever I asked him for money, even for something small, he would look at me with tired eyes and say, “Where do you expect me to get that money from?”

It became his anthem. I could finish that line for him in my head even before he started it, but each time he said it, I swallowed my frustration. I made excuses on his behalf. I told myself he was trying. I told myself this was temporary, and one day he would get better and take care of us fully. I was patient because true love meant patience.

When his behaviour changed from calm to frustration, I noticed it. I asked if something was eating him up. He would talk in his sleep, and each word felt like he was fighting battles with unseen hands. I would tap him to wake up and ask him to talk about whatever the issue was. “I’m fine,” he would say and go back to sleep. I prayed for him—another way a wife like me could support her husband.

Then one day, a woman I knew from his hometown reached out to me. She whispered on the phone as if she didn’t want the air to hear what she was about to tell me. She hesitated before speaking, like someone unsure whether to open a door that could never be closed again. Then she said, “The truth has to be told one day, no matter what.” I braced myself because of the many pauses in her speech and the uncertainty about whether to say it or not. She said, “Your husband has children with another woman I know from our hometown. They are babies—triplets.”

I remember laughing at first—not because it was funny, but because it sounded impossible. My husband? The same man who couldn’t afford diapers for his own daughter? The same man who asked me where money would come from? He didn’t know where money could come from, but he knew where to get triplets from? It didn’t add up, but I thanked her all the same and promised I was going to act on it.

I didn’t confront my husband immediately. Instead, I watched. I listened. I paid attention to things I had ignored before—the frequent calls he stepped outside to answer, the moments he guarded his phone more closely than usual, the unexplained tension that would come and go. Then one day, I did what I had never done before. I went through his phone. I wish I hadn’t. Or maybe I wish I had done it sooner.

There it was. Not rumours. Not hearsay. Conversations that told a story he had never told me. He had been sending money to this woman almost every week, and when he delayed, she would threaten him. Every request she made was urgent: “It’s very urgent. Send me GH₵500 before evening.” I don’t remember the last time my husband put GH₵500 on the table for us. I went through all his MoMo transactions, and every line struck my pain in a very hard way. This was the same man who told me he had nothing—the man I was struggling with, hoping the future would be brighter.

That wasn’t the worst thing I found. I scrolled further until I realised his parents knew. In fact, his mother was living with the woman, helping her take care of the triplets. Those children were born when my own daughter was just four months old. This broke me in a way I cannot fully explain. While I was at home, exhausted and struggling to hold our life together, he was building another one somewhere else.

I don’t remember how long I sat there, holding his phone and staring at the truth. Time felt like it had stopped. Or maybe it was me who had stopped. I was in tears when I finally confronted him. He couldn’t deny it because I knew too much. He said, almost casually, “My mom wanted to talk about it with you, but we didn’t know how to start.”

That was his explanation. He didn’t apologise or throw himself on the floor and wipe my feet with his tears. He said the plan to tell me had delayed, as if I were a stranger who needed to be briefed. I went cold. “Is that all you can say? After everything I’ve been through with you, is that all you can tell me? That you didn’t know how to tell me?”

He stood there motionless, as if he had learned to talk only yesterday and lacked the vocabulary to explain in words what he had done. His mom called me with fake humility, trying to explain why she couldn’t share the news with me and why she had to sneak and help the woman. His father didn’t bother, and I respect that, because what was he going to say?

For three years, I had endured. I had carried more than my share. I believed in a future we were supposed to be building together. Unbeknownst to me, while I was sacrificing, he was dividing himself. While I was struggling, he was choosing to be a father to children he couldn’t provide for.

Our rent is due soon. We had been sitting together, trying to figure out how to pay it when I discovered the truth. I had promised to raise over fifty percent of the money because he asked me where he was going to get one hundred percent of the rent from.

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When that rent is finally due, I will leave. I will go back to my parents with my daughter, and that will be the end of this marriage. I refuse to keep suffering so he can take care of another family in secret.

If he can have triplets with her, then he can go ahead and be with her. As for me, I am done measuring love by how much pain I can endure.

—Aku

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