YOUR GOD.

( Isaiah 66:9).

*

I truly do wish there was a God, even one with jealousy and anger issues going on genocidal rampages over inconsistent infractions. A sky daddy who at the very least dropped the narcissistic chauvinism and focused a little bit more on maintaining order, rewarding good and punishing evil.
       
                     *               *              *
I must have been snoring, or perhaps it puzzled her that I could sleep so deeply despite everything. I don’t know for sure. These days anything can irk my lady, especially when her mind and heart tango round an evil axis to deny her sleep. One thing I knew for sure was the pain in my chest when I startled awake to find her straddled across my belly,  her face drenched, her brown, feebly folded fists wildly banging at it.

‘Give me a child Ezenwatu! Give me a child or I will die!’

Mixed feelings whirled like a cosmic cesspool in me as I watched the baggy sleeves of her white linen night dress flail in the air, one meager fist after the other, dropping on my chest.

I felt sorry for her, yet not understanding why she would demand a child from me. Like her peace, her strength too seemed to desert her, each subsequent blow  waning and losing its sting until the last one was just a petal landing. Mnandi then flopped, her beautiful spongy cheeks covering my face, her tears becoming mine, flowing down my temple, sadly marking our grief and lack of fulfilment. She was hysterical. Crying, sobbing, hiccups, drooling, all of it. The angst was too much and the days had counted for too long.  I could say narry a word, all I could manage was only an instinctive curling of my hands round the small of her back and holding her for what it was worth.

The lights char my eyes even when I close them, but I dare not move. We are in one of those moments where she churns her brains and spirals down until she hits the rock bottom and I know her well enough to understand that her feelings are most fragile at this exact moment. People see her on TV deftly handling guests on her show, ‘FamilyTime with Mnandi' and they could never tell that there were instances where a simple stretch of the legs, or turning of shoulders would set her off. I stay put under her, she feels heavier tonight. The weight of grief.  Even I am usually amazed by the stark contrast. I have never missed a single episode, always awed by how the women on her show eschewed her grace and strength. A woman so collected and in control sometimes I entertain thoughts of a doppelganger. The founder of an investment group for female soldiers once came on her show and described her as a, ‘beacon of strength and inspiration to many of her colleagues'. A beauty Queen came on and unapologetically cooed over my wife’s hair,  liberally using the word ‘jealous’. Our study has a cabinet full of her accolades. Top this, and top that. Under 40 this, the best that.  Several honorary degrees. Even the president was not to be left behind, she holds a state recommendation that comes with a title and a few nifty goodies, my favorite being a diplomatic passport.  They all grace her show, artists, politicians, researchers, all women captains of their respective industries. All want to emulate her. Oprah with the good hair.

By all accounts my wife is more than any man could dream of. A decent human being. They all want a piece of her, everyone goes home with a little bit of perfect  Mnandi, but behind the bright smile, the bespoke suits and the red-bottomed heels is a man who has to hold it all together deep in the night. She is as resilient as Ann Frank, but also switches and compartmentalizes like Amy Dunne.

Every night she wakes me up at exactly 3:17 am. The pastor said that that was the time heaven’s lines were not jammed and the spirits that impede prayers between the terra and the heavens are elsewhere clogging up the dreams of those who are too lazy to burn the midnight oil for their lord. The pastor always calls them the unwise virgins whose oil ran out.

I brave the incandescence and peer at the wall clock, it’s 1:00. What an exact time. A little early for prayers but just the right time to be there for your wife. She mumbles incoherently, still sobbing and drooling on my lips.  I’ve since got a vivid understanding of the  ‘or for worse' part. At that moment, lying on my back, I am distinctly aware of her cold wedding band on my shoulder. I imagine that puggy finger bulging on the silver edges like muffins. The hand that has my ring gently runs through her hair. She is my baby, my everything.

‘I want a baby.’ She whispers to nobody in particular just as the crying abates.

In silence I pull her closer and hold her tighter. My mind goes back to the day that straddles the before and after of our lives and marriage. I had always read Doctor Dawood's articles from a tender age; I hoped I would meet him under different circumstances. A book signing is what I’d always envisioned. It amused me though that he didn’t thump his D’s and T’s as I would stereotype asians. His remarkable  precision of articulation is perfectly textbook. A surgeon  who eccentrically carried his stethoscope in his hands. My mind was otherwise primed on illustrations of him with thinning hair around a hidden bald, stethoscope hanging on his shoulders and him wearing a short sleeved dress  shirt under a white dust coat. Seeing him in a suit and without those thick-rimmed glasses was rather strangely jarring.

 When he affirmed our gynaecologist's  assessment that no surgery could fix us, I saw us as another couple in one of his tagging narratives; only that ours would lack a happy ending. The surrealism and the graveness of his news made it dawn on me that all his stories have been about real people going through great challenges and now we were on the very same precipice. Many months of trying had brought us to those very seats where he delivered news that wildly swung people’s lives for better or worse.

‘She has a weak uterus.’ He declared gently. Whatever that meant, I knew life would never be the same. He was facing Mnandi but his intonation suggested that he was specifically addressing me. Like -look man, don’t give her pains over this. It can happen to anyone.  I must have chuckled, an instinctive shock absorber, maybe it was a resigned grin, I can’t remember which but Mnandi caught it. I too was devastated but she chocked up my expression as insensitivity and crassness. How could I in any way be even ambivalent about the love of my life being barren? How could I? How much have I wished it was actually me so that she could find some other way of conceiving? How many times have I flatly refused her offer for me to take up another woman? Still our house has never really been the same. Everyday, even with my own pain, I still work overtime to cover for that sin.

We are always trying everything and anything and I always go along sometimes reluctantly. We have gone back full cycle. We are back to prayers, albeit under a different church where miracles are supposedly a staple. We got ‘born-again’ and were hurriedly pushed through the motions of baptism and all our earlier sins washed away. It’s an expensive undertaking considering the myriad contributions we are obliged to and morphing causes being announced every Sunday, but I’d do it ten times over for Mnandi.

Before all this, Mnandi was a borderline agnostic only believing in a mysterious power that connects all living beings, I was the religious one. I was the full works. That kid who never missed Sunday school, who became that teen who organized youth bible study perfectly timed to coincide with Sunday jam sessions. That kid  ebbed into the skinny university chap always donning a cheap suit, attending too many C.U meetings, lagging drums and keyboards around pretending not to be too interested in bothering God for a ‘prayer partner'; then he became the young man who used his all to help an upcoming pastor set up a branch of the church and got sucked up into the politics of running a church and things just did not add up anymore. Did this Lord really see the  darkness and greed of those that claimed to serve Him. My eyes begun to open, but I stayed for I didn’t know any other way. I stayed and watched helplessly as wolves from all denominations did what they did best. The fact that they kept on multiplying didn’t make any sense. Even a sleeping God would wake up at some point, a mindless one  would draw the line somewhere. My wife’s irredeemable pain, it’s pointlessness, was the final straw. It could only happen under a nonexistent God. I finally swung one way, Mnandi went the other.

She pushes herself up from my chest, unlocks my grip, rolls out of bed and kneels by its side. Those large, round doe eyes beckon. I look at the clock again, it’s 1:17 am. My head feels heavy and I know I need to get enough sleep because in the morning I’ll have to make a presentation to our shareholders and explain why the company is still losing market share even after we acquired a major competitor at great cost. Still, I oblige.

 At my age and experience in the unending compromise train that is marriage, I have affirmed that the tree of patience and understanding has bitter roots, but its fruits are low hanging and succulent. I lazily push away the covers and drag myself out of bed. I kneel besides her and hold her hand. She immediately takes off like  a kee kee driver during rush hour. She prays loudly, binding the devil and evil spirits, she breaks all chains her enemies have tied over her womb and thanks God in advance as a show of faith. Every few moments she pauses to reign in her voice when scarring emotions are about to crack it. She swallows and continues. Her grip tightens with every declaration and her emotions rise in tandem.  In between she has spoken in several, yet to be adopted,  languages but I have restricted myself to one word that could be in any language, ‘amen’. My knees hurt as I try to sound powerful and enthusiastic in my umpteenth Amen. My mind wanders though. How could such a smart person come to believe these things? How did I ever believe these things? The answer is apparent, but I still ask myself incredulously. An hour goes by, two, we are still in prayer and I swear to myself that God is lucky He doesn’t exist. Because if He did, I’d make it my life’s mission to drive his jealous 'I am@ crazy for putting my wife through all this  bulshit.

Mnandi is a fundamentally incredible woman. As a person, she gives out more light than the next thousand souls combined. That’s why no God in any world would take us through our pain. It is suffering that only dims her. It doesn’t teach us any lesson, it doesn’t edify us, doesn’t improve or make us stronger in any way. It hasn’t drawn us apart and couldn’t bring us closer than we already were. instead it just pours cold sadness in our hearts for no reason. Our breaths only getting wasted in inconsequential burdens. I’d probably get me a thousand other god’s and simultaneously worship all of  them in His sanctum if it would be  the last thing I’d do to get back at Him.

Many times I have thought about bringing her back to her senses, breaking it down to her. But where does a man get the courage to tell his hurting wife that all her efforts are in vain, that her energies are being channeled in the wrong direction? I am at pains too that we are a barren couple, but one of us has to be the other's pillar. That pastor, that church, fake as they are; are her clutch, her way of coping with the massive chasm in her chest no husband could ever fill. It’s her opium, so I move along, I take the cool aid, biding my time until I feel that she is strong enough to take a reality check. For now she gropes in the inky mist of grief and my only hope is that time will numb down some of it.

3:55 marks the pastor’s time. We must have sex at that exact time and in a strictly prescribed fashion. If I were to travel back in time to meet up my high school self and tell him to relax because I’d come to hate sex anyway, that boy would laugh me out of Alcatraz. It’s terrible, arrant torture if anyone asks. The sex. We go about like automatons, two factory workers repeating the same inane procedure over and over until the mind grows numb. Mnandi is assiduous about it though.  Minutes later it’s over and I am hard pressed to conceal my jubilation that I can finally catch some sleep. As I cover my head it occurs to me that the alarm is just about under an hour away, I think about the crazy long day ahead, about the endless cycle, and feel a pressing need to call out, to ask for help, to pray. Who do I pray to? Where does my help come from though?