My husband looked deeply into my eyes as he raised his glass, and we toasted our first wedding anniversary. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and before either of us could reach the hall to open it, it burst open and in came my worst nightmare dressed in a flowing lace boubou-my mother-in-law, followed by a few house servants dragging big suitcases.
“Oh my son!” she declared, removing my carefully laid out cushions and sprawling herself on the settee. She then started to explain a long winded story as to why her husband, my father in law, was to be blamed for some “terrible thing” and why she had to remove herself for the hundredth time from her marital home and come to occupy her son’s home.
She declared that she is here to “oversee the running of the house” all the while staring at me as if daring me to protest. I kept my cool, but inwardly I was shaking with rage and distress. “Why can’t she leave us alone to get on with our marriage?” I asked later that evening in our bedroom. My husband looked at me with tired eyes. “Darling, she is my mother, I can’t turn her out onto the street. It will only be a few weeks” he said soothingly, cradling my head onto his shoulder.
I tossed and turned all night, mentally preparing myself for the onslaught of critiques that I knew would come my way. The next morning, I rose and went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, where I met her critically casting her eye over my pots and pans, and stocked food. “Where is the palm soup?” she demanded in her tribal tongue, hands on her hips. “Don’t you know that is my son’s favourite food?” “It got finished the other day” I muttered in English, determined not to rise to rise to the bait.
GC LIFE 101: And Then He Popped The Question!
I can swear I just heard him utter those words “Marry me, Tracy”. I stopped short in my tracks. I paused and looked at this Adonis of a man who has just professed his undying love to me. Those were the very words I had been yearning for weeks on end for him to say … Read more