For three years, my wife and I carried the same prayer to God every single day. We wanted a child. We watched friends announce pregnancies, attended naming ceremonies, and smiled through conversations that always ended with, “Your turn will come.” My wife almost lost her mind when her younger sister got married and got pregnant a few months later. She would ask me to travel with her to see one pastor or herbalist after another whom she believed would help us, but deep down, I believed it was just a matter of time since the doctors had told us we were both fine.

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Then, one day, our prayer was finally answered. My wife got pregnant. She announced it to me while I was in bed at dawn, snoring. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life. I jumped out of bed, and like kids in love, we jumped around for a few minutes, knelt, and thanked God for answering our prayer. We talked about names, imagined what our baby would look like, and even started making plans for the future. It felt as though God had finally remembered us after years of waiting.

Then everything fell apart. Just as she woke me up at dawn to announce the pregnancy, she woke me up at dawn again and said, “My abdomen. I’m bleeding. My baby. I hope it’s not my baby.”

She miscarried.

Losing the pregnancy was heartbreaking for both of us. We mourned it as though we had lost someone we both knew. But days later, just when I thought we were making headway toward healing, my wife started acting differently and making me feel as though I was responsible for the miscarriage. She became convinced that someone from my family was responsible for what had happened. She said it wasn’t natural. According to her, my father and my elder sister had a hand in it.

I knew she had a problem with my family. It went back to the time we were preparing to get married. My father raised concerns about her tribe. It wasn’t enough to stop the marriage, but it created tension that never completely disappeared.

Then there was the issue with my elder sister. One day, my sister came to visit me. At the time, my wife was still my girlfriend and had never met her before. She didn’t know the woman at my door was my sister. They had a misunderstanding that quickly turned into an argument. By the time I stepped in, the damage had already been done. Since that day, the relationship between them has never recovered.

To me, they were simply unfortunate family disagreements that many people experience. To my wife, they became evidence that my family had always been against her. After the miscarriage, that belief only grew stronger. She became convinced that my father and sister were behind our loss and that they were also the reason she hadn’t been able to conceive for so long.

I tried to reason with her, but nothing I said made any difference. I told her my family had let it go long ago and that she was still carrying the weight of something she should have dropped years ago. She said I was supporting them because they were family.

Eventually, she packed her things and left our home to stay with her parents.

Everyone said it was depression and the depth of her loss that were making her act that way, but I couldn’t just watch my marriage fall apart, so I went to bring her back. I pleaded with her. I reminded her that we had made vows to each other and that we needed to face this pain together instead of apart.

But she refused. She told me she would never return to our house because it was possessed. According to her, even our bed was possessed because my elder sister had once slept on it during a visit. She insisted that before she would return, I had to rent an entirely new house without telling either my father or my sister where we lived. I also had to buy a brand-new bed so that nothing from our old home would follow us.

I sat there wondering how grief had taken us from mourning a child to fearing furniture. The hardest part was that I was expected to make all these changes alone. She wasn’t offering to help financially. She simply said that if I truly loved her and wanted our marriage to survive, I should find a way.

The truth is, I don’t have the money. Renting another house isn’t something I can do overnight. Buying a new bed on top of that is beyond what I can currently afford. I’m already trying to keep myself together emotionally after losing our baby, and now I feel as though I’m carrying the entire burden of saving this marriage by myself.

I love my wife. I understand that losing a pregnancy can affect someone deeply. Everyone grieves differently, and I know the pain she carries is real. But I also don’t know how to fight accusations against people I don’t believe are guilty. My father and sister may not have had a perfect relationship with her, but I’ve never seen anything that would make me believe they caused this tragedy.

I feel trapped between the woman I married and the family that raised me. Every solution I offer is rejected. Every conversation circles back to the same demands.

Her parents have done their best to help the situation. Her mom is a very prayerful woman. She assured her that she would cover her in prayer and that nothing would happen.

My wife asked her, “What were your prayers doing before they killed my baby?”

It feels as though my marriage now depends on money I don’t have and beliefs I don’t share.

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I never thought that after praying for a child for three years, the greatest fear I’d be facing wouldn’t be childlessness but the possibility of losing my wife too.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself a lot of difficult questions. It’s scary, but should I let this marriage go before it completely destroys me and breaks the bond between me and my family?

My mom died long ago. It was my elder sister who stepped into my mother’s place and carried my father and me along. How do I live knowing they don’t even know where I live?

—Nana

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