Dear Ojiugo,

It took a policeman driving into a ditch whilst ogling me, to restore my confidence.

It happened in the fourth month of living with my parents again. How did I end up in my parents house after marriage, you might ask?

Well, my husband locked my daughter and I out of the house all day. It wasn’t the first time he treated us like this. But this time, he didn’t open the door when the clock ticked 11 pm. By midnight, the door was still locked.

At about 1 am, I used the last bar of battery on my phone to book an Uber to my parents’ house in Ikorodu. By some stroke of luck, the driver was heading my way and didn’t cancel the trip.

While I lived at my parents’, my daughter’s father never called or picked his calls. I cried in my room every day till my mother started scolding me. She asked if I wanted to kill myself for a man. What would happen to my daughter? Actually, I hadn’t thought about her at all. My one and only baby!

Since I got back to the house, I stopped thinking about anything or anyone. I didn’t care if she had eaten or bathed. My mother simply took over. I still didn’t think about my baby when I took Sniper in a failed attempt to end my suffering.

Thoughts about the looming reality of my life as a single mom, caused me so much pain and shame, I wanted to end it all. At least a dead person has no shame. I found it difficult to reconcile my reality with the image of myself as Christiana, the choir mistress. What would people say? It’s funny, how I put so much pressure on myself when no one actually cared. In fact, they all thought we came to vacation at my parents, or that my husband had travelled abroad. But in my head, they were all gossiping about me. Laughing that now, I was just like every other woman who had failed at keeping her husband and marriage.

Talking about my marriage, when I had my daughter, my dress size went from 8 to 14. Rolls of fat replaced my perfect figure. At first I didn’t think much about it. I thought to myself, after breastfeeding, I will start exercising and snap back to at least a 10. Ojiugo, you see, I was very realistic with my weight goals. But a year passed, and my exercising plus dieting did not do anything to change my weight. In fact, I was closer to a 16 than a 14 when my daughter turned one. I stopped looking at mirrors. I began to feel ugly. My face was puffy now, and stress added pimples to my once smooth face. I didn’t dare look to my husband for reassurance about my changing body because his constant biting remarks about my weight gave me more motivation to crush my goals. In spite of everything, no matter what new diet plan I followed or weight loss exercise I incorporated to my regimen, the weight stayed with me.

Then, he started keeping late nights and blamed me for not being flexible in bed. I apologised and tried harder.

He would get angry at the slightest thing i did – provocation or not. Even the way I breathed annoyed him. I tried to make myself small to see if it would make him happy, but he even found more faults in that.

My cooking that was once better than his mom’s, now always had too much of something. Today, it’s maggi. Tomorrow, it’s salt. The next, it’s pepper. It was a never ending harassment.

I began to ask my mom and my friends if this was normal. Everyone had an advice to give but the general consensus was to pray more. So, I prayed harder and longer, asking God to bring back the man I loved and married. The one who, in front of all our family and friends, promised to love me till the day he takes his last breath.

Still, nothing changed.

The day he locked us out of the house, he had asked me to stop taking our daughter with me when I go shopping. Of course, that was impossible because I didn’t have any househelp and he was barely around to watch her. The alternative was to starve. And I now believe that was his unspoken wish.

So that day, he came back while we were out grocery shopping, and locked the house from inside. When we got back, the keys couldn’t open the doors. I figured he was home. So, I knocked. And knocked. And knocked. When the knocking didn’t help, I called all his lines, he allowed them to ring without picking. Then, I called his sales boys. They said he came home to eat. I continued knocking till I started banging on the door. A few neighbours came to ask what’s up. I said it’s fine – still trying to maintain the perception of “there’s peace at home”. When it became obviuos that it would be a while before he opened the door, I took my daughter and went to a neighbour’s apartment to wait out his anger. Yet, the door never opened that day.

This man made me feel like I was unworthy of love or even a man’s sexual attention. At some point, I began to fear that if he left me for one of his numerous girls, no man would want me. Yet, here I was on this Thursday, wearing an oversized shift dress, Crocs on my feet, with my hair barely combed, just walking on the street, and a policeman had longingly stared at me long enough to drive into a ditch.

When I got home and calmly dropped my purchases from the shopping expedition that morning, I couldn’t get the man’s face and words off my head. It felt like I was walking on clouds that day and my face had a permanent smile throughout that day. And the days after, whenever I remember the incident.

This obviously married man (probably with grown kids in school) had unwittingly restored my confidence in my ability to attract a man.

Names have been changed for privacy, and permission was granted to publish this.

Dear Ojiugo is a subseries of Ojiugo ‘s diary. They are letters of previously married women sharing their marital experience.