Imet Kofi nine years ago. I met him through his elder brother who lived in my neighbourhood. The first time I saw him a certain kind of feeling erupted in my heart for him. It wasn’t an ordinary feeling.
It was the kind that said, “This is the man you are destined to marry.” I hadn’t met him for too long but my heart was so sure about him. The way he looked at me and smiled told me everything about how he also felt. I played it cool during that first encounter but my heart was beating erratically. The bell of love was ringing all around me.
That encounter got me both excited and troubled at the same time. I was excited by the feelings he stoked in my heart but I was troubled about his tribe—he’s an Ewe. Growing up, my mum consistently warned me and my siblings not to bring an Ewe home. She said this because of her past experiences with people from the tribe. To my female siblings she said, “If you marry a Ewe man, he will not be content with you until he marries another woman from his hometown. They usually love their kind—the kind they can speak their language with. I don’t want my daughters to deal with that in their marriage.”
It didn’t bother me when she was issuing those warnings because I felt I may never meet an Ewe man I would fall in love with in the first place. And then Kofi came along to make my mother’s warning start to ring a bell in my mind. Before I went to bed that night I prayed to God, “Our Father in heaven, I just met this guy but I like him. I know my mom doesn’t like Ewes but touch her heart and soul. Make her receptive to this love I’m feeling if only it’s meant to be.”
Kofi and I kept in touch. The more we spoke, the deeper I fell in love with him. After a while, he confessed his feelings for me. He said he has been in love with me from the moment we met. I should have been happy but my mother’s warning rang in my head, “They would always like to marry their kind even after they had married you. Don’t bring one home.” I should have accepted Kofi’s proposal right there but instead, I shared what my mom told me with him; “Kofi, I feel the same way you do. There is nothing I want more than to be with you…” “Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming?” He cut in. I answered, “Yeah, there’s a ‘but’ coming and the ‘but’ here is that my family wouldn’t accept you because of your tribe. I don’t want to start anything I know there is no future for.”
He said, “What matters is what you feel for me. We will deal with your mother’s issue later when the time comes.” So, I accepted his proposal on the condition that we keep our relationship a secret.
We snuck around for the first two years of our relationship. It wasn’t easy but we made it work. After two years my parents found out about us. As I feared, they strongly opposed the relationship. By then I was so deeply in love that I couldn’t give Kofi up. If I was offered a pot of gold in exchange for leaving him, I would have chosen him. That’s how much I loved him. The thought of losing him drove me insane. My parents also refused to back down. They put me under a lot of pressure to the point where I had to leave home.
Their attempts to tear us apart only pushed me further into his arms. When I left home, Kofi took me in. Unlike my family, his people accepted me. His mother and I bonded and she was like a second mother to me. She was kind and supportive of everything I did.
I was estranged from my own family for three years. Kofi’s mother always advised me to find a way to reconcile with them. She didn’t support my family’s prejudice against her son but she also didn’t want me to cut them out of my life. Sometimes she would say, “You need to make peace with them. No child should be separated from their family.” She was right. Her advice started sinking into my head. After three years of separation, I went home.
I apologized to my parents for leaving them. They missed me. They didn’t care about why I left. The only thing that mattered to them was that I had returned. My mum said, “If you are sure that Kofi is the man you want then go ahead with him. We shouldn’t have tried to force you to do what we wanted. You have our blessings to marry him.”
From that moment, we started planning our wedding.
While making preparations for our wedding, I was diagnosed with a medical condition that would make it difficult for me to conceive. I can’t go into details here but the bottom line is that even if I got lucky enough to get pregnant, the pregnancy would be a high risk for me. I would have to be put on bed rest in order to avoid getting complications.
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We discussed this with Kofi’s mother and she was sympathetic. She still supported us getting married. Kofi is someone who loves children but he told me, “I will go ahead and marry you. I don’t know what the future holds but we will face it together. Whether or not we have kids, it’s fine with me.” To me, I don’t really care so much for children. I’ve had trouble being around them so not having them didn’t really worry my heart.
Currently, we’ve been married for two years without children.
We haven’t tried to conceive. We want to take our time and be sure it’s something we want before we start anything. My mother-in-law who was very understanding of my condition is now pestering me to give her grandchildren. She already has five grandchildren from my husband’s siblings. Somehow, that is not enough for her. She used to tell me “God’s time is the best.” Now she brings me herbal concoctions; “Try this medicine. It has been recommended to boost fertility.” Our mother-daughter moments are now filled with conversations about pregnancy and childbirth.
I love and respect her but I am tired of her attitude. These days when I see her phone calls I become afraid. We have explained to her that if I get pregnant it would be a high risk. Either she doesn’t understand or she trusts her herbal concoctions more than she cares about my life.
My husband has also lost his patience with her. He wants to tell her to back off. But I have been holding him back. I don’t want any bad blood between the two of them. I don’t want him to end up separated from her. As the days go by, his patience is getting thinner but his mother never stops walking in with different herbs. How can I respectfully tell my mother-in-law to stop stressing us about grandkids?
I cannot involve my family in this matter because my relationship with them is not fully mended. If I don’t do anything too, my husband will snap and I won’t be able to hold him back anymore. This is a delicate situation and I don’t want it to escalate. Please help me out.
