By Funke Egbemode
I caught a friend adding oil from a small bottle and water from another smaller bottle to her mouth-watering pot of ogbono soup. My first thought was: caught you, girl, so these are your secret ingredients. But she looked at me strangely and told me the soup was for her husband. She lifted the lid of another pot and lo and behold, it was another pot of ogbono. I was still processing my shock and confusion when her husband arrived. She dished the soup with the ‘special ingredients’ for her husband and the ‘plain’ soup for me. I told her I had a quick errand to run, trying to flee a developing crime scene, of course. My friend smiled and assured me there was nothing to fear. We all ate at the dining table and nobody died, contrary to my expectation. What just happened? My friend later explained.
“My marriage is not what it used to be. My husband is seeing another woman. This time it is serious. This new woman is unlike the other ones. He has been seeing her for close to a year. His secretary is my reliable source and she told me they have even taken a foreign trip together. What am I supposed to do, fold my arms and wait until he moves in with her or move her in with us? What you saw in the kitchen was part of my efforts to hold on to my man and retrieve him from the claws of another woman.”
Holy water, anointing oil in ogbono soup! Is she right or wrong? Perhaps the question should even be: is she doing enough?
A peaceful marriage can become toxic overnight and when it does, what is a woman supposed to do, quit or fight? The easiest solution is to take a walk, walk away if a marriage becomes life-threatening. Verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse are all toxic. They are also common, and over the years, different types of solutions and coping methods have been proffered. But there is a new one, a less-talked-about abuse and toxicity: spiritual abuse or diabolic toxicity. When juju, jazz shows up in marriage, what is a wife supposed to do?
There are side chicks or mistresses who deploy good food and irresistible sex to establish themselves in the lives of a man. They pamper him with both so much the man forgets the wife he ‘begged to marry’ at home. Those ones are still easy to deal with but when a husband and father of three meets the one that seizes his manhood, what is the wife supposed to do? I mean, if the man suddenly can no longer use his rod of authority to part his wife’s red sea but at his side chick’s place, he can move mountains, what is the way forward? Yeah, it has been known to happen. Did you just say it is erectile dysfunction? Should his erection malfunction in one place and not the other? Why should an erection rise to the occasion when it sees just the cleavage of one woman and refuse to wake up even when it is being pulled like a faulty Tiger I-pass-my-neighbour generator?
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Meranda
Romoke, who has been married for 20 years, noticed she could no longer start her husband’s generator. She put it down to the anti-hypertension drugs he was taking. Then she blamed it on the common culprit, erectile dysfunction. She tweaked his diet, made special herbal drinks for him but the third leg remained lame. She was about to resign herself to fate when she heard that her husband was not just having an affair but he had actually gone to pay the bride price of another woman! What? Without a functional manhood? She launched a comprehensive investigation. Don’t ask me for the details. What followed was an emergency extended family meeting where the new wife, Romoke’s husband and indeed everybody younger than Romoke knelt and prostrated to beg her to have mercy. Well, what Romoke found out sent her into a juju rage.
“I found out that the little witch my husband had gone and married was the one who seized my husband’s thing for her own exclusive use. That was the reason my husband could no longer make love to me and instead of the old fool to find a solution, he left me high and dry while he was getting all the sex he wanted from the second wife. Well, two can play the game. I also made sure he could not get an erection at all. If he would not have sex with me, then he would never have sex again. That was why they came to beg. I pretended that I did not know what they were accusing me of but later that night, he came to my bed, performed his duties vigorously and made up for lost time.”
I called that strategy by Romoke balance of terror. Dangerous, mean, sad and bad but what would you have done especially if you have the wherewithal to show the other woman that you could meet her half way?
However, where a ‘jazzed up’ atmosphere becomes more than a woman can cope with, I will advise that she puts herself first and forget all that bunkum about ‘what will people say’. White science may not be able to place or define black magic, it is a reality of our spiritual environment. If a woman feels like she is fortified enough to face marauders’ invasion of her marital territory, by all means, she should show the stuff she is made of. Where she feels that her life and that of her children are being endangered by dark stuff, she should run so that she can live to fight later. Some 30-year-old women have walked the dark edges of this earth and dined with ‘the owners of the world’ so intimately that even 55-year-old ‘owners of the house’ look like a mess of pottage when those ‘young side chicks’ come after their marriages. These are young ‘spirits’ who torment and threaten both at noon and in the dream. Forget their 22-inch Brazilian wigs and manicured nails, no ‘madam is too big for them to devour for breakfast or brunch. If those ones want your husband, lady, just retreat and let them. Open battles with them, unless a wife is kitted by a higher power, usually end up with Madam’s face on a gone-too-soon poster.
When Laide noticed that her husband had gone and brought a basket-load of cobwebs to the house with his head, she knew she had to ferry her children to safety. Her nightmares were not limited to night times. Domestic accidents became too regular to be called accidents. Laide’s husband became a stranger she could not recognize. The gentleman she married overnight became violent.
“It was not so much the beating that was frightening but this strange glazed look in his eyes, as if he was not in control of himself. This was a man who had never raised his voice, least of all his hands, against me in 10 years. He just suddenly became dangerous, not just violent. He would pin me down on the bed and hold my neck in a vice grip and then just as suddenly as he started, that glazed look would clear and he would apologise. Of course, I had the option of waiting around to figure it out and defend my home but I also knew he could kill me one day and plead insanity. One morning, I went to work and didn’t return. He brought home a new woman the following month. Three years later, his new ‘wife’ took off with everything he had to his name and relocated abroad. Now, he wants me back.”
If Laide had stayed to battle the enemy and defend her territory, there was a huge chance of her children becoming stepchildren of the ‘enemy’. Some marital battles are better fought later, not now. When the toxicity is laced with jazz, run. You may return later if the man you wanted to fight for had not ‘gone too soon’.
*Egbemode (egbemode3@gmail.com)
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