By Bunmi Sofola

One of the serious problems of second marriages is bonding with your step-children. It becomes a bit complicated when you have children of your own. Your step-children are instantly on the defensive – you love your children more than you love them, treat your children better and tell on them to their dad so as to show them up as delinquents. The stepdad, in the middle of all this becomes an ostrich with its head in the sand, hoping that the problems will go away when he’d not seen to be taking sides.

Bola’s six-year marriage ended when Victor, her husband got his long-term lover pregnant. “He’d had both of us on the boil for years,” she explained, “but when I got pregnant, he insisted we get married – that it was me he really loved. Our two daughters were five and two years old when Linda, his lover got pregnant and Victor insisted on standing by her. I was aghast. It seemed most of our friends knew the affairs never cooled but when he insisted on ‘making an honest woman of Linda, I resented it. I earned more than he did and I would be damned if he would use my money to finance his second home. So I moved out and rented a cute flat close to my place of work.

“Two years after the break-up of my marriage, I ran into Jide, a childhood sweet-heart. We’d been as thick as thieves for years until Victor swept me off my feet. He wasn’t married yet, but he had a five-year old son. Within a year of our getting together, I became pregnant and we decided to get married. Seun, Jide’s son got on well with my two for a while until he was nine and started stealing things. He would steal from classmates and lied that his real mother had bought them for him. His real mother seldom visited and she’d gotten married and was still trying to make ends meet with her other children, yet Seun would lie that his real mother lived in a mansion that belonged to his step-father. He obviously had been watching a lot of home-movies! Whenever I tried to discipline him, he would run to his father, who was helpless on how to handle him.

“He was in the secondary school when he told me cockily that he was spending a long vacation with his mum. I heaved a sigh of relief – at least for close to two months we would have peace. I had expected an easy ride as a step mum to a five-year old, but it was a nightmare coping with Seun. I used to give him a smack once in a while until he started lashing out at me that I wasn’t his real mother and should leave him alone. But we’d been fine before, what changed? Why was he bent on being nasty to me all of the time? Did he hate me that much, want to hurt me? Was he jealous of his half-siblings?

“After he left for his mum’s, we sort of settled down to a life of bliss without his usual tantrums hugging the children’s remote control and the video games until he was fed up with them. Unfortunately, he was back less than two weeks after he left on his supposed grand holiday. His real mother couldn’t handle him, Victor said, and Seun was a bad influence on his mother’s other children. What’s more, his step-dad thought he was a brat and blamed us for spoiling him – if he knew!

“I was a bit sceptical when Seun’s lies stopped and he started being a nicer person. He told me falteringly, that his mum preferred his other siblings to him and his step-dad actually gave him a spanking from time to time. Gradually, Seun and I grew closer and learnt to trust each other. His half sisters now adore him, but it took us years to get to the state we’re now in. Some second marriages aren’t this lucky…”

Oby was in her early 50s with grown-up children when she met and married Tade, a widower 15 years her senior. “I’d given up on remarrying when I met Tade at a friend’s home,” Oby recalled. “I’d been used to looking after myself and my three children who I single-handedly brought up when my irresponsible ex disappeared abroad. They’d all finished school and I was enjoying my respite when Tade’s proposal came. It was the icing on the cake. But his grown-up children were something else. Because Tade was comfortable, they thought I’d married him to have a roof over my head. His first daughter was particularly nasty and was always insinuating that it was a good thing I’d passed my child-bearing years or I’d be scheming to cement my hold on their dad with a child! In the end Tade lost his patience with his children. He had a family meeting and insisted his five children were present. Then he told them I was a woman of substance in my own right and that he needed to be permanently looked after. That all their sporadic visits were nothing compared with the care and attention he now had.

“His two daughters looked sullen but the sons said they were happy for their dad. There was some truce with the daughters after this until their dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was up to cancer of the breast. “I felt angry and betrayed that my mother not only kept the sickness to herself until it was virtually too late, she also suffered her illness along with the betrayal of a husband who left her for another woman. Dad still pretended to live at home, of course, but most of the time, he was shacked up with the mistress who had two children for him.

“As a result, mum was home alone most of the time. All her four children had flown the nest but we got together often to cheer her up. It was much later that I began to notice a strange odour every time mum was near and realized it was oozing out of her. Even when she was fresh out of the bath, which recently took much longer than before, the odour still lingered. I am the eldest child and when I asked my two sisters if they noticed anything, they said they did. I was all for letting her know so we could improve her hygiene if necessary, but my sisters were dead against it. Their argument was that mum had enough to worry about with her constant battle with arthritis and worries about our dad, to add to her stress. It was on one of the evenings that mum had a moan or two about our dad, and we all agreed he was a heartless creep that mum blurted out she had cancer of the breast. We all stared at her in shock and she was in flood of bitter tears. Calmly, she lifted her buba to reveal an entire breast that was rotting away. It looked as if someone had cut off the offensive breast and had forgotten to sew the skin together. I felt like throwing up as the stench almost choked all.

“We were all in shock for days. According to mum, she didn’t let us know until then because she thought that if she told someone, it would make it a reality. She was in denial and her fear made things worse. Now she had this open wound that was the source of the odour that clung to her all the time. My poor mum. It is difficult to imagine the nightmare she could have been going through all these months. “We took her straight to the hospital of course. Even dad was shocked and angry at mum for keeping such a serious illness from her family. She had radiotherapy and chemotherapy. But we all knew we were just buying time. Mum’s face became puffed up from the drugs she was taking and the chemo ate at her hair. But the drugs and treatment didn’t help and she started wasting away.

In the end, it was dad, the love of her life, that mum turned to. He made sure he made her hospital visits with her and stayed at home most of the time. In spite of her resentment at his treatment of her, we were pleased that mum was in the care of the person most able to comfort her. She wouldn’t let us say a word against him either. ‘It takes two to err,’ she always said, ‘and the other woman also had a hand in your father’s mistake – if you could call it that.’ Life is what you make of it. I’m taking a bad thing and trying to make something good out of It. ‘What a woman!’ Dad continued to wait on mum hand and foot, organizing her medicine and constantly turning her so she wouldn’t get bed sores. More than that, he talked and listened to her as they both recounted the past years, and once in a while, they would erupt into bouts of laughter. During her last years, dad would stroke her weakening hands and let their fingers intertwine. His wife was fading and he was making her passing an easier prospect. He had won back the respect we once had for him. When she eventually died, it was with dad by her side. She died in the middle of the night when none of us was around. It was a relief that all her sufferings, for which nobody could relieve, had come to an end.

“Dad was a rock. He organised the funeral and we all felt sorry for holding his second ‘wife’ against him. We were more than relieved that mum was in the care of the person most able to comfort her. It never stopped us from being angry at her concealing her illness from us. Who knows if she would have been alive today if the disease had been treated as soon as she knew about it?”

Oh, What A Night! (Humour)

A couple have a dog that snores. The wife asks the Vet for help because it keeps her awake. The vet tells her to tie a ribbon round the dog’s testicles to stop the snoring. That night, the dog snores as usual. So the woman ties a ribbon round his testicles. The noise stops and she settles down to sleep. Later on, her husband comes home drunk. He falls into bed and starts snoring very loudly.

His wife thinks maybe the trick will work on him too. So she ties a ribbon round her husband’s testicles. Sure enough, he stops snoring and the woman sleeps soundly. Next morning, the husband wakes up with a thumping hangover. He stumbles to the bathroom and notices a blue ribbon attached to his dog’s parts. He looks down at the mutt and says: “Boy, I don’t remember where we were or what we did, but by God, we got first and second place!”