I have been married for twenty years. My husband and I have four children together. By the grace of God, our eldest son gained admission to the University. He reported to school only a few days ago. We are doing our best to raise these children to become responsible adults but I feel like I failed my son somehow.

Before I go into what happened, let me tell you a little about my marriage.

For all the years we’ve been married, I have never withheld myself from my husband. I am available to him whenever he is in the mood. I cook his meals. I do his laundry. I am the one who spends time with the kids the most. This means I do the majority of the work when it comes to parenting them.

I know I am a good wife. I take good care of him and our family. Everything society demands a woman does to fulfil a man’s needs, I do them for him. But I am never enough for him. He has been cheating on me for as long as I can remember.

In the earlier years of our marriage, I used to monitor him like a hawk. I thought if I paid close attention to him, it would help matters but it never did. I was the one who ended up suffering.

Imagine going through your husband’s phone only to end up crying. I would see photos of other women’s breasts and sometimes, their v-jays. It’s bad enough that he cheats but it hurt more than anything to know his women are many.

We fought about his behaviour several times. Sometimes when it became too much I would pack my things and tell him, “I am leaving. Now you have the freedom to be with your little girlfriends.” Whenever it came to this, he would sober up immediately. “Please don’t leave,” he would beg, “I promise I will change.” He would do anything possible to convince me that he was truly changed. I’d believe him and stay only for the cycle to repeat.

I knew I struggled to leave him because of the children. I also knew he was too far gone to be saved. So at some point, I stopped obsessing over his phone. I left him to his devices and focused on raising my kids.

Now this is where the drama began. We promised to buy my eldest son an iPhone if he did well in his WASSCE. He had always wanted one. So we used the promise of one as an incentive to get him to study hard. Thankfully, it worked. The boy did very well but we had to pay his school fees, and hostel fees, among other things. By the time we finished getting the most important of the way, we had no money left for a new phone.

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We didn’t want to break our promise to our son so my husband had to give his iPhone 11 to him to use. He logged out of the phone and gave it to him right before I drove the boy to school.

Later in the evening, I called my son and asked if he settled in well. He said yes. “What about the phone? Have you logged into it? Did you call your father to thank him for the phone?” He sounded so down. No matter what I said, he refused to call his father to say thank you.

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When we hung up I texted him and asked, “What’s the problem? You know you can tell me anything.” He responded with photos of women’s nudes with the caption, “This is what I found on your husband’s phone.” They were the same kind of photos we used to fight about. Now his son knows. He didn’t didn’t even refer to him as his father.

I know he is so disappointed in his father. I am very embarrassed to see the pictures myself. I don’t even know what to say to my son. I don’t want to confront my husband because he might harbour some hatred towards his son. My problem is how do I free my son’s mind from any trauma he might be going through right now?

— Ewuraama

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