“The biggest emotion I felt on the annulment of my marriage was relief. I was relieved that I was freely able to move on with my life and pursue my dreams as I’d like without having a man say ‘we might be separated but you’re still my wife and this is how you should behave and what you should do.’
These are the words of a mother of three, months after she officially disentangled from her husband.
I had approached her a while back to speak about the process, but she was hesitant. She is beautiful and assertive and always looking for ways to provide for her children, I was surprised that she initially did not want to speak of the process. Eventually, she agreed, but wanted me to send the questions instead, which I felt would not do justice to what I try to bring out in this space; it captures the raw emotions of women as they speak. But, as I always do, I did it on her terms. It was her story to tell and she had to be allowed to tell it in the form she preferred.
It was a journey she started since before she turned 15.
“It would be almost four years after our separation in 2014 that my divorce was finalized, and honestly, it was a burden I was carrying so long, feeling attached legally and knowing we were detached long before our separation,” she wrote.
One of the questions I asked her was whether she was happy that she got through and unlike what I have heard in the past she said she was. I remember writing here that one woman indicated she felt like someone had died.
Not so for this mother.
“I think I was so happy, I almost cried; it was a whole other me again, someone I wasn’t for almost 14 years and for the first time in a long time, I could do me again. Yet it was a bitter-sweet moment knowing that, that’s not how it was supposed to be, vows are meant to be kept and children should have both their parents, parents who love each other under the same roof. However, I needed to let that go for the sake of my sanity and for my children’s peace of mind,” she answered.
She was 16 when she got married and her husband was 24.
“Initially, we were going to get married when I was 15, before I had the baby. But the baby came the same day we tried to get married. Also, a new law was just passed at the time that the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 so officials at GPO could not marry us. A week after I left the hospital, welfare officers were looking for mothers under the age of 16 and were arresting the fathers so my ex-husband missed it by an umm.”
For her, it was love.
“Well, I know I loved him. Did he love me back? He probably did but because of his ignorance and culture he didn’t know how to love. While over time I felt worthless to him, he did boost my self-confidence at the beginning. I had grown up with the notion that dark-skinned girls were not pretty, and he had again and again told me I was beautiful; eventually I began to believe him. He told me every day that he loved me, but then again love is an action word.”
‘A lonely world’
By the time she was 21, she was already a mother of three, but she said she was not overwhelmed, but rather mature and had the hang of it.
“I would say I was overwhelmed when I was 15 with my first daughter. I couldn’t take her screams and having to get up in the middle of the night to feed her and walk around the house for an hour before she went back to sleep. My body wasn’t accustomed to being that sleep deprived. When she screamed, I wanted to scream myself. I felt this way, too, when I had my second daughter at 17 and as much as I regret feeling and thinking this way, it was at that time that I wanted to kill myself and children. I thought of many different ways to do so. I didn’t want to live anymore.
“I had children, a husband and a mom who I couldn’t keep a relationship with at that time. It was a lonely world. I didn’t want to hurt my children, but I couldn’t think of anyone taking care of them better than me, except my mother but she had such a difficult life having to fend for herself and other three children, I could not leave them with her. It was at this point I realized that drastic times called for drastic measures and even if telling these horrible secrets would have my children taken away from me, I needed to do something for the sake of our lives. This was when I reached out to two psychologists who advised me, and who especially listened.”
She was the one who filed for the divorce and there was another “her” in the mix-up.
“… I remember the day I asked for one; it was the last day we were together. I knew I couldn’t do it again after I saw a text come through on his phone from her. He had said his extramarital affair was done seven months before. By the time of the last message I saw, I had grown tired, tired of talking, tired of pleading, tired of trying to put on a brave face for my children, tired of crying, tired of wondering where he was at 1 am…, tired of lying that my marriage was great, tired of having no sense of worth, tired of not being able to share my opinions, tired of hurting and tired of hoping,” she wrote.
I could read the pain between the lines; her raw emotions did come through and I could imagine as she wrote tears must have been close.
“I showed up at Legal Aid the very week we separated and tried to get an appointment with a divorce attorney. This was the last week of July and I remember them telling me that because of the many clients they had, I couldn’t get an appointment with the lawyer until December. I was still upset at that time and was impatient for December to come so I tried other resorts, researching online about local divorce attorneys and talking with people. This… happened over the span of three years. Coming on the end of the third year, I met someone who said his sister had gotten her marriage annulled though Legal Aid and had paid nothing less than $70,000 over the lengthy process. He had advised me that it was better to try and find the $100,000+ that a private lawyer would ask for and get a divorce at a quicker pace than have to go through legal aid’s lengthy process,” she shared.
“What especially made me wait that long in getting it done was the fact that I had a family to maintain on a part-time job and had kept hoping that I would find a lawyer willing to do it at a cheaper cost or that I’d somehow manage to salvage some savings to eventually pay for it. Finally, I decided that I was going to speak with a lawyer and maybe she’d agree to let me pay in installments. One might say I struck luck and while religious persons would say God would never favour divorce, I believe that even though my stubbornness may have gotten me in this situation, God had his hand in this and knew there is only so much one can bear. Even now as I think of his goodness and how he has kept me, it brings me to tears to know that he never did forsake me.
“Religions most times never gives [an] okay to marriage annulments but how can one even consider that just because two are legally tied together, and when a partner has gone down the path of infidelity many times despite the many attempts to make it work, how can this marriage still be sacred on earth or in heaven? What is there to break when it’s already broken, and beyond mending. So back to my divorce. After sitting down with a lawyer, she said to me she’d do my divorce at no cost. All I had to pay was the court fees which I think amounted to $8,000 or around that. Well, isn’t there a God?”
I believe there is.
Weary of it all
There was no one reason for the ending of the marriage.
“Looking back now, it’s more than one problem. The biggest was infidelity. My ex-husband had cheated on me not once, but on numerous occasions at different periods in our marriage with three different women, at least that’s what he said; with the third woman it lasted for more than half a year,” she wrote.
“Other issues would be not wanting me to work or study. I left school a week after I turned 15. I was four and a half months pregnant. I recall my principal saying to come back to school as soon as I had my baby and that if I ever decided to get married, they won’t be able accept me back. My mother had said to me, that because of our religion we weren’t going to do any abortion and that my only options were putting the baby up for adoption and going back to school, giving my baby to her for her to raise and go back to school or getting married and having to take care of a family.
“I chose to listen to the man I was head over heels crazy about, who had said that we should get married and he’ll send me back to private school. Every year after we got married, I begged him to go back to school but he said we didn’t have the money and that I needed to be patient; that time never came, not with him at least. Working wasn’t an option either unless I worked alongside him, which was hardly ever. Belonging to the Indian culture, I was expected to be a stay-at-home mom. In addition to this, I was kept from seeing my family. If we went to stay over a night at them, it was a problem.
“My family was all I had outside of him and my children. I had lost all of my friends. I had no phone or access to social media; he had a phone, but it never had credit if I wanted to use it. My only joy then of the outside world was going to church and I looked forward to it, not because I needed to hear the word of God but because it meant that my mother and sisters would be there, and I’d get to see them. At the beginning of our relationship he had gotten baptised and visited church several times with me when we had our first child, but that quickly changed, and I went on my own with my children.
“Another reason for choosing to leave and a very important one at that, was never being able to voice my opinions. I recall when we had first gotten together, he had said that he had liked that I was different from the other girls and that my conversations were different, and I didn’t care for gossip. He liked that I knew what I wanted and didn’t need anyone to decide for me, but that very thing would bring a wedge between us. Every time my idea was different, even if I wanted the same goal but had a different approach towards getting it, I was said to be stubborn because I didn’t agree with his idea. He would ask many times after that, ‘why can’t you be like the other girls?’”
Eventually she and her husband separated in 2014, a week before the birthdays of their younger children. But by then she said it was not difficult for her to walk away.
“For me, separation wasn’t hard. I think by the time I had decided I wanted to go my way. I had already gone through that painful process. It had been the year before, the week of my birthday, that I had found out about the woman he was seeing. Over the course of the months that followed I knew it was coming. He didn’t change. It was getting worse, not better and I grew weary of it all.
“I was the one who changed and wanted better for me and my children. I think I stopped loving him before I told him it was over. By the time I said that to him, my mind was made up long before. I have to say what would have helped me deal with this was Facebook. Now Facebook is not a big part of my social life, as most of it is used for work but then it was the nicest thing ever. We had lived in my mother’s house for five of the seven years of our marriage and just at the end of our marriage, my mother and sisters had returned to her house where we were staying. By this time my sister had just completed school, had a job and a computer. On one of my depressed days, she said to me, ‘you know what you need, Facebook’. This was just a month before our separation. She set up a Facebook account for me.
“I went in search of all my old schoolmates and it felt good to have a life outside of having to take care of a family. I was again in touch with a side of me that had gone dormant for years. Then there were the constant Facebook inspirations and people who have gone on to make better for themselves from terrible situations. After we separated, I knew I had to find a job and went in search of one. Of course, this didn’t sit well with him and even after we separated, instead of coming around to spend time with the children, he would walk past them and waltz right into the kitchen where I was often and try to persuade me to take him back. But I couldn’t.
“It was hard for the children because they knew he didn’t live with us anymore but then again they were accustomed to him not being around. He came home at 1 am almost every night and left at 5 am … so they were always asleep when he was at home. When they did see him was on Sundays when he stayed back until there was light to wash his car. But even then, he was busy. Up until then, I was the one who took care of them all the time as their father was never around, so there wasn’t really a different routine that they needed to fall into. All that really ever bothered them was the idea that he didn’t live with us anymore.”
And, fortunately, the family support for her was great.
“I think if it wasn’t for my family and their support I wouldn’t be where I am today; an amazing job, three amazing children and me following my dreams. I remember my mother asking me if I was sure I wanted a divorce when I told her and after I said yes, she said I had her support and I really did have it.
“My younger sisters really couldn’t assist as they were much younger, but my mother did all she could in her power in spite of having three children of her own to take care of and being a widow at that. She was the one who made most of the meals and helped with getting my children off to school after I left for work. She was the one who tried to make her salary do when I didn’t have a job; she even did this when I was married.
“Of all the things I remember about her, it’s her praying. She always prayed and I believe in her prayers so much that when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I went to her and poured my heart out knowing that she’d do the same to God on my behalf later that night. Today, my sisters are all grown so I have their support too. They babysit sometimes and one sister takes care of dropping my youngest daughter off to school every day before work. If there’s some particular homework I don’t know and they do, they are there to assist.”
I asked her if she had another chance if she would have taken a different route in life. “I asked myself this question many times before,” she responded. “There were times when my answers were just for the sake of having my girls, if I could go back, I’d finish school, build my own house, and still meet their father just so that I could have them but what is done is done. I don’t want to go back. All that has happened from my childhood to now has made me a stronger and wiser woman. Having my children saved me from a destructive path I was going down.”
And this is her day as a single mother: “My day starts at 3:55 every morning though my eyes are wide open before the alarm goes off. I take care of preparing breakfast, lunch and snack for us. My youngest daughter has school at 8, so we leave at 6:30 since it’s an hour and a half commute. My two older girls are old enough and can take of locking up, feeding our dogs and getting themselves to school. Any other chores, dinner, homework are taken care of at night. I work Monday to Friday. My Saturdays are reserved for God, family and church. Sundays are usually laundry days and preparing for the school/work week, but we have our [time] once every two/three months where we go visit the theatre, seawall or park. On the two nights I have my Spanish classes, my sister babysits.”
To other young women who are single and are mothers, she adivses: “Your life is not over. You can still go back to school, you can still get that degree, that dream job and still visit Italy! Whatever you do, ensure you have a social life, a positive social life, even if it’s just your church members, they’ll give you the guidance and support you need; if not physically, at least mentally. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with a quote that has kept me: ‘Falling down does not make you a failure, staying down does.’ And just recently I’ve found another lovely one, ‘Let your past refine you, not define you’. Remember you are worth it, and your children are your greatest investments. Most importantly, have God in your life, He’ll get you all you need and more.”
I know this sister has greater days yet to come. March on sister and be a champion of your three princesses.
