My fifth wedding anniversary

I have been packing our bags and we are ready to leave. Our flight is at 1.00 a.m. I have been looking forward to this day for a very long time. The sun in the Caribbean will do me good, it has been too cold lately in Kenya. All the suffering while toning my body will payoff - I will be a show stopper in a two piece bikini. My hair is well braided so I can swim as much as I want; visit the spa and sauna without a twitch. Haven’t I waited for this moment for a long time? Our second honey moon is here. Am bursting with excitement.

Actually, I had been warned how the first three years of marriage are full of turbulence. But we had conquered them with ease. I am not just celebrating our 3^rd anniversary, well we even had an extra two years to boot. This marks our 5th wedding anniversary and we are treating ourselves to a world class second honeymoon. I have really waited for this moment. Lingerie-check, sunscreen-check, shades-check, charger-check, tickets-check, visa card-check every single item we require check.”We will get late to get to the airport, please hurry.”I start dressing up for our departure.

As we get close to the airport…………….Wait if you are still reading this story anxious for the juicy second honeymoon updates you are totally lost and do not know me well. I am not celebrating any 5^th anniversary. I am seated here in my house writing this story. Other than in years, the rest of the story is false. Indeed if the marriage had lasted as envisioned then this would have been the 5^th anniversary. It didn’t so here I am writing about it.

Marriages are very interesting unions. Two individuals who are as different as night and day coming together, under the presumption that they have each other’s best interests and intentions at heart and moving towards a shared goal. And as we are often told, “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk with another.” Well all this was in my mind when I got into the union. I had many elaborate plans but they did not come to pass.

In my younger naïve days when I heard that a couple had irreconcilable differences I thought it meant that the two people didn’t speak the same language. And that they refused to listen to each other and were just plain selfish. Now I know that I was being selfish to even entertain such a thought. The intricacies of marriage can only be explained by those in the union, and every union has its own intricacies, none is ever the same. And sometimes something just doesn’t work. Whether it’s because in every subset of society there must be an outlier or wrong footing or just I don’t know what, the one I got into did not work.

For many reasons including that my child will soon enough read my online footprint and the other party involved cannot defend himself in this post and remains the former’s biological father I choose not to get into the details of what happened. But I’ll say this in certainty that life is such an experience. The course sometimes it takes leads to such immeasurable pain that sometimes you have to go back and start where you come from. So one rainy Sunday morning my daughter, her nanny and a few things that I owned and I started afresh. We were in the ashes and that is where our solemn sobering journey began.

I get asked a lot of queries for my decision. I choose to answer those that I can without disrespecting my daughters heritage. Yes, I am strong believer in marriage. Without a doubt in my mind I can say for sure it works. Indeed, I would get married again; a two chord tie is stronger. And I answer the next question with extreme clarity, walking out is not the simple way out. Ask any woman who walked out. Healing from this process is extremely difficult and with children involved the process becomes trickier and sometimes murkier. I thank God the child involved here was much younger. I imagine the pain of a child who is unceremoniously separated from the presence of one parent.  Walking out is the hard option. I beseech anyone who knows that their marriage has a fighting chance (even if it’s an ICU or HDU case), pursue it and try as much as you can to save it.

Finally, you make yourself happy. Marriage or any other relationship can never make you happy. It’s your attitude that determines where you go and how you feel. Marriage is meant to challenge one and make us into better people. You aim to achieve more and have a constant friend who soothes and comforts you along the journey of life. Sacrifice, compromise and selflessness are involved(Both parties better know this). It’s not child play and if you are not prepared for it, give it a big miss. Like everything else “If you feed it, it grows, if you deprive it, it dies”.

And so I walked away. Do I regret? No. What could I have done differently- Used logic and evidence and encouraged a number of people to be less deceptive. But most importantly, I thank God for bringing me this far and ask him to bless those girls who held my hand during those dark days. Lesson learnt.

Sojourner,

A friend asked me to describe marriage in this post in my own view: Assume you are in a car and the person (your partner ) in front has parked their car or are in reverse mode perpetually. Where would you be going?

Where are you headed in yours?