I actually almost passed out. It was as if the whole world was coming to an end. I never thought that my favourite stepmother could be part of a plot to ruin my lifetime happiness. She noticed that I was tensed and started teasing me that I could never have married a more beautiful woman. I thought of my fiancee, who I left in school just a few days before, and had promised to stand by her no matter the condition. But there I was, confronted with an agelong tradition, which many feared to contradict. It would not have been so painful if my family members had not urged me on by promising to go and ask for the hands of my chosen lifepartner in marriage. They even fixed a date only for them to disappoint both of us.
After a long journey into deep thoughts, I looked up to see the lady beside my stepmother. She was sobbing, saying she could never love me; and asking why the two families would not allow us to go our separate ways so that she could marry her own man.
I thought to myself, if only she knew that would have been the best thing to happen to me. But I stopped to think that we were actually both victims of our people’s ways, especially those of us, whose parents held very high Islamic posts or were much respected in our town.
My stepmother then reminded me that my father was an indisputable man of God, my new bride’s father too. She said both of them would not have sealed the union if they thought it would affect us. She sat down for a long time, advising us to accept the situation and condition our minds towards making the best of it.
She said, as things were, there was nothing anyone could do because the rites had been concluded. Doing anything to the contrary might invite our parents’ curses, which would not be worth it for anything in the world.
Surprisingly, my former fiancee heard the news and wrote a long letter congratulating me and telling me not to feel bad; that she had accepted everything that happened as the will of God. She said she would also try to come to terms with the fact that she could be married off at anytime, and prayed that when it happened, it should be to someone she would love. But she was not eventually married off. She got married to a lecturer in her school. How lucky she was to have chosen her life partner by herself!
However, to cut this long story short, I resigned to fate. The night of our wedding was the first time we slept together as man and wife. Taking your wife’s virginity or having sex was one of the rites that must be performed on the wedding day. Everyone outside was shouting at my stepmother to leave us alone so we could give them the good news.
It was a painful experience. But we managed to do what was expected of us. Somehow, I enjoyed it, though she was not the kind of picture I had painted for myself, when I was thinking about a future wife. She was a qualified nurse at the time, and was usually very neat in her uniform and her cute hijab. I realised soon that she was really pretty. Slowly, I began to let go of my feelings for the other lady, but could not bring myself to immediately love my forced partner.
I went back to school, while she stayed in our family house, in the apartment that I was given in preparation for the wedding. Even when my people were sending messages that I must allow her to come and see me; she never bothered me for once. I would go home once in a semester and we would try our best to be friends, but I was still a bit hostile. All through this, until I finished my education, she was very calm. I saw that she was determined to make the marriage work, having seen that she could actually spend the rest of her life with me. I went straight for my Masters after my first degree; still, she waited. When I finished and returned home, finally, she said she had been saving and would love us to get another apartment, outside the family house. I refused, saying I could not stay in a house rented by her; that if she could not stay where I could afford to live, then we could call it quits. She then told me that since her family had given her to me, whether dead or alive, everything she had was not for her, but for me. That touched me; and I agreed with her. All the while, she had not been able to conceive, and people thought it was because we were not really together.
I got a job as a lecturer in the federal university in my state and resolved to love my wife. She was so caring that I felt I might not have had it so good with my first choice after all. Soon, we became inseparable, and after five years of waiting, she became pregnant. That same year, she won a United States Visa Lottery, and begged that we should relocate; that I could do my PhD over there and we could begin a new life with our unborn child.
We thought deeply about it and later agreed to seize the opportunity. Everything went smoothly. She gave birth to our first set of twins in Nigeria before we left. On getting to the US, she enrolled for advanced nursing courses, and enhanced her pay package. I also started my PhD programme, and, luckily, got absorbed as a result of my outstanding performance. We had another set of twins in the US, and decided to put a stop to childbearing. Today, when I look back, I thank God for making my father look the way of a pleasant stranger.
If I have to come to this world over again, I would willingly choose to be trapped by my wife. That stranger that almost made me lose my head on my wedding night has now become a pillar that I can never do without. If my wife is reading this, and she knows this is our story, I want to tell her again that I could never have had a better wife.
Concluded..
