Geraldine Ogwe: A Second Chance For a Second Wife

I invited my friend Nnamdi to a cocktail bar and he brought his best friend along. This best friend turned out to be Joe. I ordered Pina Colada, Nnamdi ordered Sex on the Beach, and Joe went for Bloody Mary. Joe told us that he was considering marriage with a lady but there was a snag.

This lady, let’s call her Meg, was once married. This is her story. Meg is thirty-two years old. When she was twenty-eight, she met a lawyer who asked her hand in marriage. Mr Lawyer was very kind and caring to her. He was comfortable and had a nice apartment. He had a good job too. He was a dedicated worker in the church, serving in the Protocol Unit, and as such was very close to the pastors. He was a member of the soon to be extinct group who believed in No Sex Till After Marriage. However, he used to kiss and cuddle her. Meg liked him. The pastors encouraged Meg to accept Lawyer’s proposal. Six months after they started going out, Mr Lawyer wedded Meg in church. It was well attended.

Meg was blessed of the Lord. She conceived immediately after the wedding. Then, the sad truth dawned on her.
Mr Lawyer travelled frequently from Abuja to Lagos for legal cases, according to him. During one of such trips, her phone rang.
Caller (a woman): Are you not tired of keeping another woman’s husband with you? Are you so shameless that you would intentionally keep the father of four children in your house?
Meg: This is a wrong number. I live with my husband and not my boyfriend or another woman’s husband. I am also pregnant for my husband, so sorry I have to hang up….
Caller: Meg, I know you.

The Caller, Uche, went on to reveal things she knew about Meg. Meg was eight months pregnant at the time of that call. Uche came from Lagos to visit her in Abuja. She came with all the necessary documents and photographs to prove to Meg that Barrister Esosa was not only Meg’s husband but her husband too. He was their husband who wedded both of them in two different churches. Uche told Meg that she found out about her when she mistakenly read a text message she sent to Esosa. She decided to gather more evidences before confronting Meg.

Meg knew that her marriage was a sham and built on a foundation of well orchestrated deceit. Two months after the revelation, she was delivered of a bouncing baby boy.

Meg reported the revelation to their pastors. Esosa was invited to explain this wickedness from the pit of hell. He honored the invitation and claimed it was never his intention to hurt or deceive Meg into marriage. He came to Abuja for a protracted legal case that would require eight months to wrap up. He met Meg the chorister whose ministration made him fall in love at first sight. He decided to join a unit in church to be closer to her. He kept observing her and studying her. The more he knew about her, the deeper he fell in love with her. He claimed to have asked her indirectly and she said she would never date a married man. He decided to marry her because he wanted to have her by all means. She was a person too good to be true and too true to let go. He even had to murder his parents with his mouth just to be with her. He paid people to front as his brothers and cousins. The people he introduced to her as friends were his friends whom he met in Abuja that didn’t actually know him very well. Her jovial and unassuming disposition became her undoing. She became a second wife not by choice but by unfortunate circumstances.
Meg’s father encouraged her to leave the marriage. She came back home with her son. She successfully divorced Esosa and was granted sole custody of their child.

When she told Joe this story, he asked her how she never knew about Esosa’s first marriage.
Signs she noticed but didn’t consider:

1) Esosa never took her to his hometown. He told her that his kinsmen were fetish and anti-progressive. If you visited rich, you left poor, if you were alive. She never pressed further because he gave her countless stories to buttress his hatred for his hometown.
2) Mr Lawyer said he was an orphan. The kinsmen killed his parents. She also failed to demand photographs or traces of history between him and the parents. He introduced her to three brothers and a few maternal cousins. The said brothers were living abroad.
3) Due to the horrible practices of his kinsmen, he didn’t relate well with his uncles and aunts who killed his parents and whom he was fighting legally to recover his father’s property from.
4) He never took calls at home. As soon as he came home, his phones were switched off.
5) Whenever he travelled to Lagos, he called not later than 8pm. She would expect him to leave his phone on so she could reach him at anytime but that was not the practice. He would claim to be tired of all deliberations of the day and needed to sleep. If she called in the day and he didn’t pick up, he would claim he was in a meeting.
6) His brothers and cousins never visited but he encouraged her to allow her own family members visit as often as they wanted. His friends visited very much though.

Joe knows that Meg is a good person. He likes her. He wants to marry her but on the condition that she sends the child to the man. I encouraged him to accept the innocent child who didn’t pray to be born in all these. He said he didn’t want to accept another man’s child and responsibility. I told him to see the child as the child of the woman he loved.
A lot of ladies date and marry married men, but they are usually aware of the marital status of the men. Why would Esosa go that far to deceive a lady into marriage? A girl who would never date a married man became an unfortunate second wife. Some men also would never marry a lady who have had a child from a previous relationship, no matter the circumstance that led to the birth of the child. I think this is not fair in all situations. A child would always call ‘father’, the man who showed him true love, irrespective of who contributed the Y chromosome.

Meg has a permanent reminder of that unfortunate marriage. As such, she will forever be a story teller until God gives her rest and a man who truly deserves and loves her and her child.

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