I WRITE?FOR THREE REASONS: to make “the other woman” in any man’s life realize the wrong she does in not saying “no” to married men; maybe
to save some other wife from losing her husband as I did; and to let my husband know it’s not too late for us to try again.
J and I got married when I was 19 and he was 20. We owned our home and had a car by the time I was 22. I had a job then; J didn’t, so he returned to the land of his birth to pursue a career in his area of expertise.
I asked the regional company I was working here for to transfer me to where he was so we could be together. They did that about a year after my husband left.
The move was not an easy one. My salary fell by hundreds of dollars. A business we tried to set up there failed and we were back to square one.
We went to live in a relative’s half-finished house to cut costs and sent our son back here to be cared for by family.
Then I got pregnant with our daughter. We found a little place with a pit toilet and an outside bathroom we had to share with other tenants. But I didn’t care. I was with my husband and that was what mattered. Two years later I became pregnant with our third child.
Now I had three babies under the age of seven. I lost my job a year later and lost confidence in myself about the same time.
The following year we started another little business. At that time my husband got a job with a major multinational corporation.
Little did I know that what looked so promising for our family’s future would break our family apart.
Our little business began to fail and what little self-esteem I had left went too.
J started quarrelling about how I was running our little business. He said I did not listen to him; that I could do nothing right. I thought it was financial stress that was driving him to be so unkind.
It was around this time that I learned I was pregnant yet again – it would be our fourth. J was not pleased.
My daily routine was to get my husband ready for work and get the children ready for school – there was no time for me. I walked everywhere with a baby on my hip, one holding my hand, one in my belly and a heavy bag of documents for our business.
At night I had to help the children with schoolwork, cook, get them ready for bed and do the housework.
As my pregnancy progressed, it became too much for me and I begged J to help me with the housework. He told me to get a maid but we couldn’t afford that, so I continued like this until at night I fell asleep on myself and he would quarrel and send me to bed.
This is when he would sneak over to the telephone and call M, a much younger woman with whom he worked.
J started coming home later and later. He stopped going to lunch with me, saying he wanted to stay in the office and work over lunchtime.
In shock
Maybe if I had been from his country and had friends there, they would have told me how every day he was out having lunch with M.
I found out about it because I pressed redial one Saturday after he had gone out and his “lady” answered. I was shocked and put down the phone. I pressed it again and an older woman answered. I put down the phone again.
Instead I confronted J. “She is just someone I talk to at the office; it’s nothing more,” he told me.
M got bolder. She called at our home on a Saturday. J was not there; he was supposed to have been meeting with a client; but when I called the client, they knew nothing about any meeting.
Before coming home, he called to make an excuse for being late and I told him I knew he wasn’t at any meeting.
He admitted then that he had agreed to meet this girl from his office who wanted him to meet her son.
That night I gave him back his wedding ring. He said he did not want it; he had married me because he loved me and it was me he wanted and I was making too much of this girl who was “just a friend”.
Then M called our home again. I told J to tell her not to call at my home. He said he had told her this.
This is when I knew M was in control. He came home later and later and started washing for himself on weekends. We hardly talked now except for business and he hardly smiled. I saw myself as the problem – pregnant, no job, no self-esteem.
I suggested I come home to Barbados to cut down on costs. He agreed. I left and our fourth child was born three months after returning here.
Still, we talked on the phone regularly. He even called me in the hospital and since absence makes the heart grow fonder, I suggested we put our family back together.
This is the moment he chose to confess about his affair with M. He told me it had been going on six months before I returned to Barbados.
Our fourth child was three weeks old when J made his confession. This is when I found out her name and her phone number. I called her and she told me it was no wonder my man had left me.
She told me I was stupid, insecure, didn’t know how to dress to please a man, had too many children. Didn’t I see my man didn’t want me anymore? she asked.
M said she planned to fight for J.
J and I talked again. He said he had told me about M because he could not let me come back to his country when everybody there had seen him taking her into our home; that his workmates knew, too.
I cannot share my husband. But I still love him and he still calls me three and four times a week to say he feels the same about me. When he comes here to see his children, he shares my bed.
I want to go back to his country, where he is working and fight to save my family, but I have no job to guarantee my children’s welfare in what may be a long battle to reunite our family.
Wives, be careful, make sure you let your husband know you need him.
Young ladies, no matter how tempting it is, say “no” to distraught husbands who come to you for help; think about their children for it is the children who get hurt the most.
Please, have some morals in this immoral world.
And J, I hope you now know how much I want to again share the sunset with you.
