“Mommy, is the…”

Reasons in the past that I’ve been called ‘disrespectful.’

I asked, “What would have happened if you’d died while in this relationship? Didn’t you care about God?”

You’re being disrespectful came the answer.

“Do you know how stupid it would have looked to the angels if you’d died and others are claiming you’re such a good husband yet you weren’t?”

You’re being disrespectful.

“I miss the preacher you were with the stirring sermons and studies. Did you mean any of the things you taught? I fell in love with you for what you pretended you were. And those people you call your immediate family… I’m the one ( not them) who loved you enough to want to spend an eternity (in heaven) with you.”

If you don’t stop being disrespectful and accusatory, I will block you.

“You were disrespectful to me.”

“When?”

“When I agreed with your brother that you speak at your father’s funeral together with him. You say you obey the Bible but you didn’t submit to me.”

“So you’re saying that my exercising my rights as an adult to say no to a speech about my father at my father’s funeral when there’s already the firstborn son speaking, is disrespectful?”

Yes. You embarrassed me in front of them by not obeying me.

Rewind to 2003.

We had saved up our flat deposit and rent so that after our April wedding, we’d move into our own place in the Uk. We didn’t get any visas like we wanted but hoped while there we could sort something out.

After the wedding, we go back to the UK and it’s time to pay our rental and deposit and move into our own space instead of sharing a flat with his mother, her married lover, his friend, the oldest brother. Except, his mother had stolen all our money.

He never asked her anything. My money I broke my back for, gone. When I didn’t understand why my bones were hurting when nobody else’s were, why walking for hours was agony on my feet but everyone else seemed fine, all the money I hurt myself for, gone. And no accountability expected. Apparently you’re only disrespectful if you’re not blood.

I never forgot the hurt of someone who stolen from me not being addressed. She now knew she could control us and that her son was not my husband in the true sense of the word husband. She would always be his number one, even above God.

His sister said she knew someone at Home Office who could process a visa for me so we don’t go down to the office but rather send it to him..

I was naive .

Eventually my passport came back with the working permit or whatever it’s called, inside. With great joy, (before this as undocumented immigrants we’d worked at a warehouse that didn’t ask anything but for your body to work hard) I went to a very well known care agency so I could be a care worker in a nursing home etc. I happily filled in the form, handed over my passport and imagined myself in their beautiful uniforms while caring for the elderly. It was a dream come true. I wanted to talk to lonely people…

After a longish wait, the staff member came to me, blonde lady, and said, “I’m sorry, this visa is fake.” I asked, “What??” She said, “ This is fraudulent. It’s not the real thing.” I wanted to sink into the ground.

My character is everything. To be known as a criminal?? I apologised so much telling her I thought it was real because… I think she could tell I truly had been duped and was genuine because instead of reporting me, she just apologised that I couldn’t work there. I walked out with such a broken heart. How could she? Why??

I could have been imprisoned, or deported and not allowed back for ten years, or sent to a detention centre to wait. And those detention centres are strict, they provide phones that have no access to any forum type site or things like Facebook, IG etc. You only text your lawyer and only he or a doctor was allowed to visit you back then as far as I knew. Nobody else.

I was placed at risk of imprisonment innocently?? Obviously I told him what his sister had done. No big shock. No apology came. The response I got from him when he told her, “Why did she give it to them?”

Ok then. Strike two. I am less important than the sister. She told us she had cancer. She played it for years. She was lying. No outcry. Ok, if you lie and you’re blood, it’s ok.

Brother phones ( around 2005?) and says he found his wife unconscious and she had tried to commit suicide. Why? Because she had found out that he’d been unfaithful with multiple women from a month after their marriage to even the day after she gave birth to their baby when he went to go meet one of them in Zimbabwe while she was in Botswana with his one day old baby.

The response, “How could she do that with an eight month old baby in the house? Didn’t she care about their baby?”

Ok. Strike three. Another wife who doesn’t matter. Adultery means nothing. The reaction to adultery is everything.

I asked her how she found out. She said it was because of me. We used to live with them in Kenya and she had missed an episode of Oprah. I told her about how it was about a woman who found out her husband was unfaithful when she opened his email. She then decided she should check her husband’s.

Later on when the marriage was dying she showed me his emails and chats. I wanted to throw up. Different women. No protection used. Using their money to send formula for the baby of one of them ( she was married.) He gave his wife 3000 Kenyan shillings a month, but gave the one girlfriend he even brought to Kenya, 30 000 shillings. (See a pattern?) Guys, she was broken. “I thought I married a godly man. He preached so well and he really loves being a Pathfinder director but instead…”

Eventually he divorced her.

Oh well, she was a horrible wife. Now he is free.

It’s true. She even apologised years later because she’d been horrible to us too. She said she hadn’t been consulted about us coming to live with them, he’d not told her why (To help start a company) and she’d wanted to be alone with him. The house was large so we weren’t in each others’ way and we’d shared the cooking. I’d even offered to do their ironing when she was pregnant, but nope, she was horrible to us.

But, as she read in his emails, she told me she saw that I had asked him if he please couldn’t do counseling first before breaking up their family.💔

Two little children. Left dad in Joburg and had to go live with granny then sister while mom tried to rebuild her life.

Did you ever see anywhere where God said adultery and divorce are ok if your wife is a disaster? Poor woman was later diagnosed with bipolar and major depressive disorder. It explained everything. But she had become the opposite to what he’d married so the entire family felt he was justified.

He remarried an unbeliever and everyone was excited. (Remember, I don’t count as family so everyone in THEIR family) Finslky he was marrying a career woman, not someone who as their mother said about me and wife number one, “ finish my sons’ money.”

Marriage number two didn’t last. She divorced him. That’s the power of being a career woman. You have money to set yourself free.

Maybe 2021 or 2022, “This same bro wants to do something to make lots of money quick. He needs R400 000 more. I’m thinking of giving him the money from the sign on bonus I got when I joined this new company (they had poached him.) I am working for.”

No. Please no. (We are married in community of property. My no should have been the last word on that)

“You said that we are looking for a home out the city, this would be a lovely deposit! And you want to give it away? This project will not work! Our money will be gone.”

Strike four. My word is nothing.

As you can guess, Satan doesn’t always take care of his people so it didn’t work and we didn’t even get that money back.

I was disrespectful for commenting on it. For bemoaning such a big loss when we have such a big family that takes money to raise.💔

I have gone through a lot in 26 years of loving someone who was in love with his family of origin. When he was unfaithful the first time, I texted his seemingly caring sister that I’d hoped he would be different to all the other siblings and break the generational curse. I had had so much hope that what he was at church was real and THIS would never happen.

She pounced on my attack of the family. Apparently, pointing out that being a baby daddy of multiple children with multiple moms, is not what I’d want, is bad. Pointing out ( by implying it ) that being a serial adulterer was bad, was bad. And so I became fully, an enemy of everyone.

I stood alone.

I will fast forward the time he had a meeting with a woman I didn’t know who told him what I had always told him, that his mother hates me. And they didn’t know why because her reasons didn’t make sense. Nothing I did, wore etc qualified for hatred. But, she deeply and strongly hates me.

And he deeply and strongly keeps phoning her and laughing with her.💔

Honestly by this point it wasn’t even Strike five. Many things have happened over the years that by 2016 when he was unfaithful then unfaithful again after I caught him again, divorce was a great hope. I’d finally be free of people who almost sent me to prison, of people who stole from me, of people who gossip to each other about what the other is doing, always in each others’ business with negative gossip.

What a joy it would have been to be free of them.

But I stayed.

And so I created more chances to be called disrespectful .

June this year he gave the fraudster gossip sister who had sent my WhatsApp messages to everyone in their extended family my ‘attack’ my children’s number. They met. And she immediately lied about me to my children. And got into MY family’s business about an aunt they have no connection with.

I was disrespectful for asking why that was done. Why after we homeschooled to give them a pure environment, he then allowed such a cruel person to have contact with them. The kids at school, at the shops, there’s no choice. (But to deliberately facilitate the connection with someone who had harmed your wife says a lot about how little you matter.)

That is when I was told that the constant attacks on his immediate family made him want to go live somewhere else but he came back home for the adopted children. (I’ve shown people these texts)

June is also when the invoices started for his girlfriend’s rent.

When they have found someone to replace you, they abuse you so much that you leave to keep your sanity, and then they can look like the innocent party. “She just left! I don’t understand why she’d break up our family like that.” Typical narcissist behaviour.

In 2016, I kept quiet and so all people saw was infidelity, they didn’t see all the other ways I already didn’t matter.

This is why I did those maternal son enmeshment videos on my YT channel. I needed to warn just one girl that sometimes it’s not good to marry a guy who loves his mom..when he loves her more than he loves God. No accountability for her, but cruel words thrown at his wife. No calling out her living with someone else’s husband but grabbing a piece of biltong from a church goer and telling her, “Not in my church!”

This is hypocrisy, and I hate it. I hate lies. I hate cruelty. I hate injustice. The adulterous married twice brother borrowed money from first wife and as you can guess, never returned it. When she begged and begged, he sent her a text telling her, “Leave me alone, you fat ugly pig.” Would his church also turn a blind eye if they knew? Anyway, ex sister in law then sent the screenshot to fraudster sister in law asking her to intervene. She forgot she’d an outsider. They are one ‘ego mass’ as one research paper calls such enmeshed families. Instead, fraudster sister in law sent the screenshot to her brother, my children’s father who then showed it to me like it’s the funniest thing ever.

As you guys know, I am very sick. But after the tiring week planning a funeral – my mom’s- going up and down and missing my poor children, doing it alone because he was in Joburg for work so he said, after the funeral when my body was so so sore, I was told we had to entertain cruel adulterous name calling money taking brother. But we had no food at home. And I needed to REST MY SORE body and mourn my mother I’d just buried.

Strike 100. My coming to undress, change into less painful clothing and finally lie down while wondering what exactly they expected me to cook as we hadn’t done the week’s shopping was disrespectful. God hates for the sick to suffer. He told husband to “honour your wife as the weaker vessel..that your prayers be not hindered.” But hey, the prayers were already hindered because he had the floozy at this time. As David said, “ If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”

And so, having seen our life compared to what we used to study on Sabbath evenings and what the Bible stories say, my perceptive daughter asked this weekend, “Mommy do you like THIS song because you’re the only kne who stands for God and you’re all alone?

(It’s in isiZulu. Basically asking if you’d stand alone for Christ even if you suffer for it.

Reminding us how Christ has cared for us and kept us from many dangers that might have killed his, pleading with us to follow Him. And how they don’t want to be like Peter and Judas, or Jonah and ask God to make them strong till His second coming.)

Yes. It’s my strengthens song. My reminder. My encourager. My song. I can. I am.