He was my friend’s brother. She came to me one day and said, “he is looking for a wife and I think you are a good woman, come, let’s go see him.” He lived in the city and I had nursed that dream for a while, of building a life with someone who stayed in the city. The few months that followed, we were preparing for marriage. I liked him, he liked me, we were not children. He had been married before, so his anthem was, “I don’t have to waste time, I know what I want.”

It was after the marriage that I found out about the kids. I was a new wife, bent on obtaining favour from my husband, so I let it go. I welcomed those children into my home anytime they wanted. Not that he was very present in their lives. He strolled in and out whenever he deemed fit. And I told myself I didn’t have to worry when our children started coming because it was me he chose. Me.

Our first child came and she was a girl. I was excited. He was not. There is a particular joy that comes with having a child with someone you love and I had that. My husband did not. He didn’t care for the dresses and onesies I got. He just stared at my face like I was a clown.

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The second child was a girl too. I saw how his face turned when I gave him the news. By the third and fourth child who were girls, I was lost on him. I had lost my favor with my husband. It was subtle, quiet, but I am an attentive person so I knew it. Sometimes he did not mask it enough so he cussed out more often, created chaos. Other times when we were lucky he was calm about having to come home and see only females in the house and no male. No male to help pick up his bag, clean up the tank, basically do the heavy lifting in the house.

On the days he wasn’t calm, he beat me blue and black. No care for my eyes, no care for the pain he left in my body. “You will survive it,” he would say.

I endured it. He is my husband. He is a pastor. Nobody takes a woman’s word when she speaks against a man of God. Who was I going to report him to? The elders? Church members? The families who revere him like he is something sacred?

Then one day, he hit me in my left eye because the food wasn’t salty enough for his taste. He called me to the room and before I had a chance to answer him, I felt the blow. By the next morning, it was swollen, reddish, and weeping. I asked him for money for the hospital. He said, “don’t worry, you will heal.” I asked when. He said, “God will heal you. If you go to the hospital they will have me arrested and the ministry will collapse. If you love the work of God, let me take care of you.”

Foolishly, ignorantly, I agreed.

One month later, God hadn’t healed me. And that was how I slowly lost all vision in my left eye.

This same eye was now the reason he wanted a new secretary. He said my eyes were not good enough to work in the house of God, that I might see something that would cost them. So he has taken a young woman as his personal secretary and they do things together in that office. But he is a man of God, so it is fine, until it isn’t anymore. I had long accepted, twenty-six years ago, that I was never going to win with him. So I never drew a line, never thought of fighting.

But things have changed.

He is going to leave me penniless. Cast me away from the life I built alongside him. The secrets I kept for this pastor, the thankless things I did to keep the church running and the home afloat, none of it counts. He doesn’t believe I have added any value to his life. He has plans to take everything that should come to me and my girls and hand it to his other children, because my daughters are girls, and girls, according to him, will belong to some other man eventually. So he doesn’t owe them anything.

“You can leave if you want,” he told me.

It’s Not God’s Law For A Man To Apologize To A Woman

But I don’t want to leave with nothing. I have spent nearly three decades of my life with this man, poured everything I had into him, endured things that should have broken me. And now his other children who are men are going to inherit what I bled for while I go back to poverty with my girls?

Am I selfish for wanting to fight for what is ours? Am I too Christian to go out and find ways to hold him accountable for what he has done and what he plans to do? Is it wrong that I am tired of bowing my head and quietly absorbing a life full of pain?

I need to know how to end his career and the ministry he cherishes more than me. Not because I’m bitter, though God knows I am. But because if I don’t fight now, my girls will spend their lives watching their mother drown in regret. And I cannot let that happen. I will not.

Tell me what to do.

I don’t think it is.

—Patience Ozokwor

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