After my wife and I got married, everything I did infuriated her mother. She said she did not understand why, of all the men in the world, her daughter had chosen me to marry.
At the time, I was living in a town some distance away from her because of school and work. I was attending university and working at the same time. The salary I earned was barely enough to feed us for a whole month without us scraping by. Every penny I earned already had somewhere to go. School fees, my mother’s medical expenses, money to send home for feeding, and other responsibilities.
We did not have anything left for enjoyment. Whenever I could, especially on weekends, I travelled to see my wife and check on how she was faring with the pregnancy.
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I did not have much, but I had a vision. I knew where I wanted my life to go, and my wife knew those plans; I shared everything with her. As soon as money landed in my account, my wife was the first to know. I’d ask, “So, what should we use this for?” She respond, “Well, the groceries in the house are finished. Send me half of the money and save the rest for the next academic year. When your salary comes, you use that one for transport.”
We were an unbreakable team. We were building something together, even if that “something” had not yet become visible to everybody else.
Then my wife put to bed. In the hospital, in the recovery maternity ward, my mother-in-law looked me in the eyes. “I don’t even know what my daughter saw in a useless man like you that she can’t leave you alone. Did you do something to girls in her past? Because why would a working-class woman come for you?”
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My wife supported the household whenever I could not. Her mother argued that her daughter’s money was for her and her alone, not for me, a bottom-of-the-chain husband. The pressure did not stop there. It continued at home, on phone calls, and whenever I visited my wife and her mother was around. Even outsiders had something to say. “What did she see in you?”
On a Friday, I came home to meet an empty house. The sofas were gone. The television was gone. The carpet was gone. Even the doormat was gone. My wife did not leave me a letter. She left me an absence to read between the lines.
There were only a few picture portraits still hanging on the wall. I crawled onto the bare floor, curled myself up and cried myself to sleep.
I don’t know why, but I did not call for my family to intervene in the matter. I was patiently waiting for something, although even now, I don’t know what exactly I was waiting for. A month or so later, I went to visit a friend. We were talking about my wife when he brought out his phone and played a voice recording of her talking about me and our marriage.
She spoke about our marriage in a way that made everything sound as though I was the devil in the story, as if I had not sweated it out trying to be the best husband I could be for her.
It was a two-hour recording. Ten minutes into it, I stopped listening. I went home and cried again. It was the first time since she left that I cried that much. I needed to empty the pit in my stomach.
When she left, I was doing my national service. Around that same period, I was offered an opportunity to pursue my master’s degree through a scholarship.
Soon after that, I got a job. Within less than three years, my life had changed in ways that would have seemed impossible during those days when I was sitting alone in an empty room.
Today, one of the allowances attached to my work alone is more than what my wife earns as her monthly salary. I mean, not to brag, but yes. But I don’t enjoy seeing her the way she is now. Sometimes I just sit and think about how different things might have been if she had stood by me and resisted the pressure from her mother and strangers.
She could have been enjoying this life with me now. My wife was a good wife. She cared for me. She took care of the house. She loved me. But her mother sowed a seed of discontent in her, and that seed grew until it came back to haunt her. If only she had been able to withstand the pressure from her mother and outsiders, perhaps our lives would have been better.
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The same people who used to call me names and say my wife was the one taking care of me now see me and hail me. They were the same people trash talking me to my wife. They did not know what it felt like to be trying to study, work, pay bills, provide for a family and still be made to feel like I was failing because I could not provide everything immediately. They did not see a young man trying to build a future while people were judging him only by his present. My wife saw it; she encouraged me. She should have been at my right-hand side.
— Nunana
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