A Hiatus from Husband Hunting I

The Genesis

At my grand old age of twenty-six, I’ve decided to conduct a post-mortem of sorts of my husband-seeking trials and tribulations. I will dissect where they started, the role I played, what I learned, and why it is best for me to take a breather. Even if only for a little while. So here goes.

For as long as I can remember, I have always compared myself to one of the four women I love most: my mother. I loved her intellect, her frankness (even though I hated when I was in the line of fire), and her resilience in the face of the many obstacles she had overcome. She grew up in Nigeria, to the east, in a bustling city called New Haven, Enugu. Although Nigeria has experienced one form of instability after another over the decades, Mumsy came up when it was even closer to its infancy. She shares fond memories of it now and laughs, but I know things were never carefree for her. I thumbed through her old pictures many times, and rarely did her lips part to show the whites and gaps of her teeth. And it makes me sad.

Mom and grandma had a strange relationship. Mumsy has always been a lively, no-nonsense person, even in the midst of austerity and authority. Her courage made her quick to call out flagrant hypocrisy, so I can only imagine what she was like as a young girl in an African household. On top of that she knew she was beautiful, as did her many admirers. For these reasons, among others, mom was the black sheep of her family. A young woman like this must be subdued. Have her wings clipped before they can fully mature. To protect her, and get her to calm down. At least that’s how grandma felt.

Marriage would be the tool to do this. Dad married mom when she was quite young. About eighteen or nineteen. He was thirty-three or thirty-four. They were just two people that encountered each other, connected through perceived family status and intervention, and married. My memories of their relationship are neither warm nor fuzzy, but I loved them both individually. Mom and dad got used to living together, bearing each other’s idiosyncrasies, however difficult. They did what was expected based on Nigerian societal standards, but I won’t delve too far into that for now.

This introductory model of male and female relations was short-lived for me. My father died young. It was sudden, like a candle flame snuffed out, plunging the surroundings into darkness. I was six. Mom was our stronghold, the remaining semblance of normalcy we had, so following her every move felt natural.

From that time onward, I thought that in order to “life” correctly, I had to reflect my mother’s to the best of my ability. I wanted to become a nurse because she was a nurse, have three kids like she had (at that time), be as skinny and tall as she was when she was younger (my deep-rooted weight obsession bordered on absurdity for many years), and even marry as she did. This mindset is where I started to unravel, even in my younger years.

At that time, I didn’t think critically about how and why Mom was in her position. A good deal of her choices were not hers to begin with. Marrying my father, pursuing nursing school, and carrying the weighty responsibility of supporting everyone home and abroad were things she was pressured into. She only knew a life of being placed in the sacrifice seat and strived to survive. Had she made the choices herself, life would have looked much different. She might have traveled the world as a flight attendant like she wished and eventually fallen for someone along the way. There’s no way to tell what could have been. With what I know now, I try to extend more grace to Mumsy. I remember that she is just a girl at the end of the day, too.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t armed with this level of nuance in my teens and early twenties. I didn’t yet realize that Mom’s life was her own, and that mine would look completely different. And that that difference was OK. This period was the genesis of my husband-hunting woes.