I listened to a radio caller describe his present life circumstance in these words with tears in his voice and I felt so sorry for him. Why would a person be so distraught and perplexed with life?
This is the kind situations that lead some to kill and others to be killed. Some have committed suicide or fallen into depression because of betrayal while others have ruined themselves by taking to drugs.
How seriously should you take this kind of situation if the same were to happen to you? Is it possible that you could find yourself in this kind of complicated situation?
I will try and recreate his story and invite you to learn some good lessons from the quagmire that straddles this 29 year old man.
What’s the story?
He met and fell in love with a 24 year lady who became pregnant in the course of their relationship. He wasn’t ready for parenting but the girl said she was.
A few weeks after being notified of the conception, she said she wanted an abortion. He agreed but a few days later, she reneged.
Then started the journey into the cruelest life trip for Uzoh. According to him, he worked hard, saved as much as he could and supported his girlfriend through out her pregnancy by attending ante natal with her.
Nine months later, a baby boy arrived. Uzoh thought he had every reason to be proud on the birth of his ‘son’. Unfortunately, he came to the naming of a child whose expenses he had borne all through with his family only to find another man playing the role of father.
One Son Two Fathers?
To his complete consternation, he saw a man lying on the bed with his ‘baby’. The same bed where he and Madé had made the baby? How was this possible?
Uzoh controlled himself half way through this provocative naming ceremony. He reflected how much he had paid as hospital expenses and wondered what benign spirit was being humoured by his discomfort. He wondered whether Madé’s initial desire for an abortion had something to do with this confusing spectacle. The more he wondered, the more he felt numb.
The other father was meanwhile having the fun of his life. He went about with a corky assuredness and extravagance that made Uzoh more miserable. He seemed to be enjoying the befuddlement of Uzoh and that made him very sick in the stomach. His guts twisted and and twitched. All this while he didn’t notice that Madé and this stranger wore the same colour of clothes and he almost fainted when his younger sister pointedly asked him: ‘Brother, did you bring us to witness another person’s child’s naming or are we still going somewhere else?’
Brother, did you bring us to witness another person’s child’s naming or are we still going somewhere else?’
He stammered, ‘this is my baby’. But when his attention was called to the uniform between those two, he stormed into the room and demanded to know what was happening.
Madé explained that the stranger was her ex boyfriend and was just being nice. Uzoh wanted to slap her so she could also experience the pounding in his head. ‘Ex-boyfriend!’ Uzoh screamed failing miserably to control the level of frustration. His consternation forced everyone to look askance at him.
Uzoh felt impotent in his pant and useless in speech. He stamped around and didn’t notice when Madé left him to continue her role as hostess of the day.
The confused boyfriend was dragged and was glad to follow his sister away from the room. His family insisted that they should leave the venue but Uzoh said he couldn’t leave the venue of the naming of his child. Neither did the second father.
Nothing they said would convince him. He waited. After the ceremony had whittled and most people had left, Uzoh burst like a dam. How and why did Madé make him come to another man’s baby’s naming? Why did she make him go through all the expenses, including bearing the full cost of this ceremony and be so shabbily treated?
He raved and pounded the floor demanding an explanation but the answers were not coming fast enough. He went and dragged his opponent up and asked him to leave the room.
No one was hearing the other’s excuses any more. The angry shouting panicked the baby and he started yelling.
Madé took away the distraught child to another part of the compound to breastfeed, leaving the two men howling insults at each other. Each man insisted the child belonged to him.
Uzoh threatened to kill this imposter. Their screaming brought the landlord and Madé’s cotenants to intervene. It seemed to worsen the situation. Uzoh butted his opponent with a wild header. The victim started bleeding. Then the unbelievable happened.
As he rushed outside, Madé followed him. Uzoh’s didn’t know which path to follow. Should he pursue them? He had no idea where they were headed. He sat down satisfied that he had exerted a small fraction of his bile.
In Police Mess
One hour and a half hours after they left together, they returned with a police man in tow.
Madé had gone with this stranger to invite the police to arrest me? His thoughts switched from panic to betrayal. He didn’t even notice them until they were in front of the room. He had been starring blankly into the ceiling not sure what he would do to this lady and the baby.
He wondered whether he could get his money refunded or whether he would become a killer. Everything was just filmy and his thoughts moved in a topsy turvy manner.
‘You are wanted at the station’ was the officer’s simple command that startled him to the present.
Now it didn’t matter that he had been the aggrieved. He had been scammed by Madé and now, they want to lock him up. He called his sister who had earlier left angrily. That one refused to pick. He spent the time between the house, which he called our house and the station to send text messages to some of his friendship whom he thought should know in case he never returned.
Uzoh’s conundrum
This was the confused state in which Uzoh phoned in to seek for help. He said, he had never envisaged a life of such high intensity drama and would have doubted if he was to watch any of those Nigerian movies with such a convoluted twist of fate as plot.
Unfortunately, in his very life is now perfectly etched the famous expression of Thomas Hardy that ‘happiness is an occasional episode in a general drama of pain.’ This is now his new reality.
He wakes up with a quake sometimes and at other times drenched in his own sweat. On another occasion he had felt like he was out of his mind. Are my going mad, he once thought and quickly made a sign of the cross.
For two weeks now, he had stopped calling Madé. He had not been to see the baby and did not know what to make of the police settlement. Had they been bribed to rope him into an endless spin of waste? How was to pay child support for a child another man was claiming?
How can they expect him to be making provisions for the baby, when he is not sure of its paternity? Isn’t this a case robbing salt on injury? Who does that?
Although it made him happy that Madé openly told the police that he, Uzoh, is the father of the child, he does not understand the body language that she went with the idiot to the police station. How can a woman who professes love do such an abomination?
Conclusion
Uzoh is desperate to resolve this matter. His family does not have a history of polygamy. He never planned to become a soul wreck but his family raising journey has just started with such quizzicality he does not think he will survive this puzzlement. He had always seen childbearing as a function of marriage. As a religious person, he had hoped to get married to the mother of his child. How was he to explain that what he loathed most in his friend’s life would now become his lot or that of his son? Tunde deprived of fatherly love had frequently gone into episodes of depression and Uzoh never seemed to understand his friend’s endlessly lamentations about his uncaring father. Yet, here was him, Uzoh Okwuchi, blossoming into a potential absentee father.
Uzoh is seeking your help. Have you got any related experience? Can you relate with his bewilderment? Were Uzoh your brother what would you ask him to do? Can he ever trust women again? Will he ever love this child? Is the baby truly his? Why is Madé playing with his sanity?
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Asoya Relationship Musings - ARM 