LifeStyle from Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Source: Silentbeads.com
2021-02-23
File photo of a couple on a beach
I was seventeen when I had my first girlfriend, Mansa. She was unique. She was nineteen and because I was a big boy, she believed me when I said I was twenty. I loved her like never before, but when the new man walked in the neighborhood her attention turned to him and before I knew it she was rolling with this man.
I rushed to her in pieces with my heart and asked her to leave this boy for me. I said, “Is it because he was from Accra? Or because he’s fairer than me. Mansa, he’ll be gone when the school reopens, but I’ll be here. Take me and leave him. “She said,” When he returns to Accra, I will visit him. I will be traveling to Accra for the first time because of him. I cannot leave him and I cannot return to you. “The village boy never wins when the town boy is involved so I lost my mansa to a boy who just came to Anomabo for a vacation. I cried when I saw the two of them together, so I decided to stay inside. When the boy finally left town, he left I went back to Mansa and asked her to be mine, and she said, “We go forward in life, not backward.”
Only in two months would I become anything backward in life just because a good boy came out of town to live among us.
When I was twenty, I’d become a playboy. If you love one and it fails, you spring back to love many. By the time I graduated from secondary school, I had five girlfriends; Sandra, Emelia, Alimatu, Joyce and Grace. When I was admitted to the University of Ghana, I added two more girls to the inventory. Because why not? I was the only man in my year who went to college and brought girls.
When I graduated from university and had a job in Accra, I met Ama. I fell deeply in love with her and wanted to do everything I can to woo her. She didn’t like me that much, but did enough to keep me close. Not too long after that, I met Louisa, who liked me from the start and was ready to do anything for me. She was the girl I moved with when I thought of the day Ama would say yes to me. And then came Efua. And then I had Naana. I lived with all of these girls, but the one I had eyes for was Ama. She kept playing with my feelings like the guitarist was playing his strings until she said yes to me in November 1995. I was so happy that I ran to Naana, kissed her so deeply and started dancing with her. She asked, “Why are you so happy?” I said to her: “You will not understand, so just join us.”
I thought winning the heart of the girl of my dreams would let me walk away from all these girls. I soon realized that no matter how much you love a girl, she wouldn’t have it all. While loving Ama with all my heart, I kept seeing Lousia, Efua, and Naana because they too had something I liked about a woman. Juggling all these girls without getting caught made my life very difficult. I needed a scheduling degree from Harvard to be able to schedule them without crashing.
When I got married to Ama in January 1997, Louisa, Naana, and Efua were still floating around innocently. Two months after the marriage, Efua got the tip. It was my own mother who confirmed my marriage to her. She reported me to her family, and her family demanded that I “push” her. They took huge sums of money from me and let me buy a white goat for them. They said, “This is to make her look like an idiot for all the years she was with you.”
When Louisa found out about my marriage, she came to my place of work to create a scene. She came with white eggs and brandy to curse me. To end this and make sure the curse was reversed, I went to her family and they also asked for a lot, poultry and liquor. They said, “This is the only way we can turn things around.”
I didn’t wait for Naana to find out. I went to her one evening and confessed everything to her. She was hurt, but she was kind enough to forgive me. She asked, “Why would you do this to me? I thought you loved me? “I said,” Dear, it’s family pressures. It’s my father’s idea and I couldn’t do anything about it. “She was easy to forgive when I didn’t deserve forgiveness.
The kind of peace that fell on me after that was nothing I have ever experienced. It was like a heavy load had been lifted from my chest so that I could breathe easily. My mind was at peace and I could love my wife with anything I had without holding back anything. If I had known that loving just one woman without hiding anything can bring such an aura of peace into my life, I would have done it when I was a boy.
It was an early morning in August 1999. I was traveling to Nigeria on a work assignment. I said goodbye to my wife and she said, “Does it mean for the next week that I’ll be living here all alone?” I said, “A week was coming so soon. Time is magic. “I was in Nigeria for three days when I realized I didn’t have to stay a week. What I wanted was over in three days and I decided to return to Ghana to be with my wife. I got to Accra by bus at 4am. I took a taxi and went straight home. I got home around 4:50 am, opened the hallway door, and tiptoed into the bedroom to surprise my wife. I opened the bedroom door and there was a man in bed with my wife.
I mentioned my wife’s name and they both woke up. When I saw her I didn’t scream, but when they saw me both of them screamed their heads off and started shaking. I asked her, “What is it? Who is he and why is he in my bed with you? “She started to cry. The man froze as he looked at me. I could see that he feared for his life. While my wife kept repeating that it was the work of the devil, the man kept saying Again, “I didn’t know she was married.” I knew the man lied to get away from the guilt because the walls of our house were adorned with photos of us, some in our wedding attire.
I left and went back into the hall. I thought the man would get dressed, walk down the hall and leave. Thirty minutes later the man hadn’t come. I went back into the room and he had jumped through the window and gone with the wind. My wife was in the corner of the room and was still crying. She was traumatized, to be honest. I didn’t say a word after that. I was so hurt that I didn’t know how to best express my pain. I woke up at dawn and cried for a few days. I went to work and cried there. My wife had no reason to cheat at all, but she did and that left me broken.
She didn’t sleep well. She would suddenly wake up in a pool of sweat at dawn. When there is love, there is forgiveness. So I learned to forgive. It wasn’t easy for me, and it wasn’t easy for her either. She told her pastor to ask my forgiveness without telling the pastor what she was really doing. I said to the pastor, “We are a family and we have learned to solve our problems no matter how big they are. We will overcome. “Because Naana easily forgave me without fighting, I also learned to forgive my wife without ever mentioning it or even mentioning it whenever we had a fight. We buried it and decided never to own a shovel so that we are not tempted to dig them up.
Because of this single act of forgiveness that I showed her, my wife worships me like a god. It’s the year 2021 and we’ve been married for twenty-four years. Our marriage is always new, as if we were married yesterday. People see us and say they want our kind of marriage. I say in my head, “You can have it if you can just get through our troubles.
– Thaddeus
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