Now you see him, now you don’t ... Now he’s back
Now you see him, now you don’t ... Now he’s back. What would you do if your husband came back years after pulling a disappearing act? Would you forgive him, and love him again? PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Margaret Nduta, a counselling psychologist also believes that such men can in deed mend their ways and become better partners.
- However, Dorah Ogunya, a marriage counsellor based in Nakuru does not advocate for forgiveness and total reconciliation. “You can forgive him for the wrong and pain inflicted on you and your child, but you don’t have to take him back,” she advises.
Everything was going well between Jessica Achieng’ and Nelson* (name changed to protect his privacy.)
They had met at university, found good jobs after graduation and settled down together happily as a married couple.
They worked hard and rose steadily in their jobs; he started as a junior advocate at a city law firm and went on to start his own firm after nine years.
Likewise, Jessica began as an office assistant at a public relations firm and eventually started her own PR firm.
“We were moving on up and had a good future ahead of us, and then it all began to unravel,” Jessica recalls.
Nelson sold the family car without his wife’s knowledge and began coming home drunk in the wee hours.
Sometimes he stayed away for days without divulging his whereabouts.
He became critical of everything she did: her cooking, her clothes and her lovemaking. Then in October 2008, he left and did not return.
“After two weeks I went to his office to find out why he wasn’t coming home but he slapped me and ordered the guards never to allow me in again.” But the shocker of all was yet to come.
“He emptied our joint bank account, leaving me struggling with a child to raise and a mortgage to pay,” Jessica recalls.
Unable to withstand the upheavals, her PR firm collapsed.
For the next four years, Jessica didn’t see or hear from Nelson. Meanwhile, Nelson squandered all the wealth that he and Jessica had painstakingly built.
The saying, misfortunes never come singly became his nightmare.
FORGIVEN
He was accused of misconduct and struck off the bar, and January 2012 found him a jobless and penniless man. Three months ago, he returned home, pleading for forgiveness and asking Jessica to take him back.
“He looked worn out, sorry and desperate, and despite my anger, I couldn’t help but pity him,” says Jessica.
Nelson hasn’t moved back in but he is now a regular at his wife’s place.
She foots his bills and is she trying to get him a job. Jessica says they were meant to be and is contemplating letting him back into her life.
“We never had a divorce and he is still the father of my child. The more I’m with him, the more I realise I still love him.”
Apart from having a soft spot for Nelson, Jessica wants her son to be brought up by his biological father.
“He is repentant and as a woman, I should have a forgiving heart. I want my family back!”
Sue Nthamba, 38, agrees with her. Her husband disapeared for seven years, married a younger woman and had a child.
But once his financial well dried out, the lady walked out on him saying they couldn’t survive on love alone. Her husband came back to her flat broke.
“I was just happy that he was back. I’d been praying to God to bring him back alive.”
Mended ways
Six years down the line, the couple is still happily together. Sue says, “No one is perfect. We all make mistakes of highly consequential proportions and thus, if he is truly repentant, the best thing to do is to forgive him.”
Margaret Nduta, a counselling psychologist also believes that such men can in deed mend their ways and become better partners.
“It may be that the partner has learned the hard way and will henceforth avoid things that may ruin his career and family,” she says.
TOTAL RECONCILIATION
However, Dorah Ogunya, a marriage counsellor based in Nakuru does not advocate for forgiveness and total reconciliation.
“You can forgive him for the wrong and pain inflicted on you and your child, but you don’t have to take him back,” she advises.
Her reasons are partly founded on her own experience with a wayward husband.
“I took a Sh400,000 loan for him to start a business. Instead, he moved to Nairobi where he gambled it all away at a casino. He returned broke and I accepted him back into my life,” she says.
She then bought him a tractor to work with but after a few months, he sold it and drunk all the money with women and friends.
“I’d go looking for him in pubs because I loved him and I wanted my marriage to stand. But he couldn’t see it and thought he was irreplaceable.”
His die was cast one Sunday afternoon in October 2011 when he slapped her in public outside Gilanis Supermarket in Nakuru.
“I quietly and painfully moved out and swore to never take him back.”
Two years down the road, he has been trying to reconcile with her in vain. “There’s no need to accept a man who once looked at you and saw no value, beauty or love. What is it that he couldn’t see then that he now misses?” she poses.
Vanessa Sudi, 37, couldn’t also find a place in her heart for the husband who left her, a housewife, with a broken heart, empty bank accounts and debts amounting to hundreds of thousands of shillings.
MOVING ON
“I thought I couldn’t survive. I didn’t even know where to start. But at some point, I realised I had couldn’t throw my life down the drain. I had to move on.”
She got a job as an accountant and two years later, started dating.
“My husband reappeared a year ago. I have forgiven him and wish him well, but we can never be get back together. I found a man who deserves my love and I have been remarried for three years now,” she says.
However, moving on is not always a reason to decline a vanishing husband’s pleas to get back together with a woman he abandoned years before.
At least it was not with Roseline Nafula. The 33-year-old had vowed never to reconcile with her husband and even got a good responsible man who loved her and her two children to replace him.
However, when her long-disappeared husband came back, she dropped her new love at a blink and took him back in.
“I told my new partner that he deserved better than me, and that my children were asking to have their father around. But in reality, I just wanted to get back with my husband. There was a way my husband had always made me feel that my new partner couldn’t.”
Nduta, the psychologist, explains that this happens when women blame themselves for the actions of their partners, and consequently stagnate emotionally, unable to fully open up to another man. This is evident once the husband reappears.
“She will feel reprieve and accept him without much probing on where he’s been or what he’s been doing while he was away,” she says.
WHY DO MEN DISAPPEAR
What propels a man to abandon his family and waste hard-earned resources with other women?
Rufus Kisia, a 36-year-old father of three who walked out on his wife for two years, says that no man sets out to abandon his wife or squander his wealth in pubs and lodgings.
“I thought it was fun and manly to lure any woman I wanted and living large made me feel like a king. I didn’t realise it would carry me away from my wife. By the time I got back to my senses, all the wealth my wife and I had accumulated together was gone – together with the women and my drinking buddies.”
Stephen Mwenda, 39, adds that men don’t go back to the women they left behind because of financial frustrations or desperation, but because of love.
“Every man has that woman to whom he will always go back for love, and he trusts that she will take him back.”