Spouse loses out to enemy within over male kids

Spouse loses out to enemy within over male kids

In the Igbo culture, a woman’s place in her matrimonial home is not secure until she bears male children. This is because the Igbos have a preference for male kids, and most of them will do anything to have male children. For some, it could mean marrying more wives if their wives are giving birth to female kids only. This male-child syndrome often results in marital problems, like the woman having female children envying and hating the one who produced the much-coveted male kids, or the mother of the male kids becoming too proud and treating her less fortunate rival and her daughters with disdain.

Sometimes, this leads to the untimely death of the head of those families, as rancour among the women and their children is always the order of the day in such homes.

An Igbo family based in Minna is currently having problems as a result of the desire to have male kids at all costs. The couple have been married for long and are blessed with four kids, all females. But because their culture prefers male kids, the man’s family had begun to mount pressure on the wife to produce a male child since she had the second baby girl. And by the time she had the fourth daughter, they decided they had had enough. They told their son frankly to marry another wife since they had been patient enough with his wife. Up until then, he had resisted their suggestion to that effect. But his ability to resist his people became weak and he began to give the idea a serious thought.

There was this lady who was very close to his wife. They attended the same church, and she used to run errands for the wife. She would visit the woman at home, help her with some chores, and the woman was very fond of her. She treated her like her own sister, giving her clothes, cash and other gifts from time to time. She got wind of the male child issue and the pressure from the man’s family. Then she took advantage of the situation and moved closer to the man behind the woman’s back. One thing led to another and the lady became pregnant.

Before the pregnancy began to manifest, she and the man came up with a plan. They decided she should lie low until the baby was born. This was to avoid a situation whereby the woman, knowing that the lady was not married, would be asking her questions that she would not be able to answer. She then told the woman that she was going out of town for some time to clear her head because it wasn’t long that she suffered heartbreak.

After tidying up the woman’s end, the man rented an apartment for her in a secluded part of the town where she was tucked away throughout the period that her tummy bulged. The man on his part sneaked in and out of the place to see her and tend to her needs. He even got her a house girl to help her with house chores and keep her company. This was to ensure that she didn’t lose the pregnancy through stress, and she didn’t have to go out of the house to avoid the risk of running into his wife somewhere with a tell-tale tummy.

Eventually, the baby arrived and it was a boy! The man was elated that he finally had a son but there was the problem of how to break the news to his wife. He contacted his family back home to share the good news with them, and they decided to send some of the elders down to help him in breaking the news to his wife.

It was a double blow to the woman when her in-laws landed to tell her that her husband now has a son from another woman, and the woman turned out to be no other than her precious little friend. She felt so betrayed that someone who was like a sister to her, whom she trusted so much to have allowed her into her matrimonial home could stab her in the back the way she did. Not to talk of the fact that they all worship in the same church. Her husband and his people are currently making plans to marry the mother of his son, while the woman is still bitter against her husband and friend (turned enemy within) for conniving to make her marital life a misery.