My new year began with a rumor of my death

Happy new year, everyone. Hope you all had a great festive season and spent enough time with loved ones. I sure did though I deliberately avoided making any resolutions because ….– well, I prefer to stick to my monthly goals.
Anyway, after an amazing New Year’s eve party, I woke up in high spirits on the first of January of this brand new year. Seeing several missed calls from my sisters in law, I didn’t bother to call them back immediately because I knew it was probably our usual new year check ins. Shortly after, my husband came into the bedroom, weird look on his face.

What`s wrong?’ I asked.

My love hate relationship

image: thelovetherapist.org

 

Muna is one of my oldest friends and we have so many shared experiences from our childhood. We went to the same schools, had the same friends, enjoyed reading the same books, watching the same movies and even shared a couple of crushes on the same girls. Now, though, things have changed somewhat as, while I still love him, I also dislike him.

 

He’s so much more successful than I am but that is not the reason why. His attitude, since he got so wealthy, just irks me and I have found myself wondering if he was always this way or if the success was the 'change' factor – I’m not sure.

New friends and old stories don’t always mix

 

It was one of those boring nights at a friendly neighbor’s house and for lack of anything interesting to talk about, we began to gossip about friends and other neighbors – nothing serious or malicious, just fun and light.  My neighbor was one of those people who knew something about everyone and within the hour, she started to give me the backstage stories of people.

To show I was also in some sort of loop with the goings on, I gave her the story of a male mutual friend of ours, Andy, which someone had just told me. The gist was that Andy, a married man, had sexually propositioned his friend’s wife. Initially, she refused his advances but after a while, agreed and invited him over to the house during working hours when her husband would be away. When he got there, she was waiting but so were her husband and a few friends.

 

The day I forgot a tampon .....inside me

 

Due to my very heavy menstrual flow, tampons were a necessity as I wear them with my sanitary towel to stretch my change out periods. On one ‘after period’ day, it crossed my mind that I could not recall removing my tampon a couple of nights before. I retraced my steps but just could not remember at which point I took it out. I woke my husband and asked him to take a ‘deep’ look. He peered in and saw nothing; he used his fingers to widen the area and a torch to shine in more light but still saw nothing.

How I learnt to watch my mouth amongst strangers

image: www.survivingdating.com
 

Awkward silences made me nervous so to avoid them, I had a tendency to run my mouth. However, after an incident at a friend’s party, I learnt that it was probably better to sit through the silence than put my foot in my mouth.

Here’s what happened – I was at a friend’s event and I knew no one there. To get me comfortable, my friend sat me at a table with another friend of hers whom she felt I would have something in common with. We were both in the beauty and lifestyle business so instantly, we had rapport. When she told me where she worked, I was happy to tell her .....

 

Shielding my truth from my friend was required – now, she refuses to speak to me

 

 

It took over ten agonizing years to finally get my heart’s desire; ten years of searching for solutions from many doctors, prayers and vigils at all sorts of churches, fielding uncomfortable questions from our families, enduring the pitying looks of those around us – the list is endless. It took a little over ten years but one very ordinary morning, we finally heard the words – ‘you are pregnant’; we were ecstatic.

I wanted to share the news with everyone, especially my best friend, Marsha, but then, another close friend of mine, Gina, warned me not to.

 

In spite of my husband’s cheating ways, I cannot leave him

What do you do when your husband is the kind of man that will chase anything in skirts? I have been trying to figure this out for years now and still I have no answer.

Before you judge me, know a few things: I live in a very conservative society where the man can kick his wife out with nothing to her name. In my world, he can even take the children away from me if I do not co-operate with him. In my world, a man can almost do whatever he pleases especially when he’s got money and my husband has money.

For what feels like the hundredth time, my husband is having an affair but what worries me now is how serious this one appears to be.