The life that I live.

I got home late and very tired last night. Only a month ago, I'd have gone to crash at a friends place, closer to my place of work but now I'm "married" and had to go on home. As I climbed up the four flights of stairs, resting at each landing, the only thought on my mind was to hit the shower and crawl into bed. I consoled myself with thoughts of curling up under the blanket with the ac at full blast and probably I'd finish the Undomestic Goddess; a book i've been reading for a month now.

When I get to the door, I hear the television on, and I hope its my sister-in-law at home and not my husband. Whenever I'm this tired, I pretend to be asleep when DH comes in; otherwise, I'll have to warm his food, and look for accompaniments for his meal, which I don't mind most of the time, except when I'm tired. Besides, he knows how to work the stove very well. Alas, I walk in and hubby is watching tv in the dark. I go to give him a hug and kiss and ask about his day.

Moji: You're home early today.

DH: Yeah, I've been at home for over an hour now, and I'm starving.

I look around for something to hit on his head. I mean, the man has been at home and he couldn't start dinner or ask his sis to do it?(We live with two and a half siblings-in-law.) Too tired to argue, I go into the kitchen and thank God for the makers of indo mie. May their brand continue to grow and excel.

DH comes into the kitchen to ask what's for dinner, I ignore him. Take my bath while cooking and by the time I'm through, I'm fresh, dinner is ready and served. My sis in law appears and asks "you've cooked?!" in mock surprise. She should thank her stars that I came from a good home. I forgive her because DH does acknowledge his sisters' laziness and she's a sweet girl where physical work is not concerned.

Of course when DH saw the dirty looks I'd been giving him, he told me how it was the best meal he'd had today, blah, blah, blah, to get back into my good books. I let him off the hook, gist for a few seconds before I slink off to bed, hoping he'd take an hour or so before he decides to join me. This was not to be as he follows me in a few seconds later. Guy that he is, thinks that the best way to make up for the night is with sex. If I had known, I'd have boned him early on.

Ah well, welcome to the world of a tired married woman.

P. S.: I love my marriage, my husband and sometimes my siblings in law. But boys will be boys, wont they?

Happily Ever After

Its been a long week. My first week back to work since my wedding two Saturdays ago. I would've posted pix but, nah. I prefer to remain anonymous. Married life is so so, and not all its cracked up to be (just like every other thing: sex, cigarettes, booze, etc). I do like the living together part. The cooking is a drag though, I shall start being a good wife and make breakfast every morning as from next week, so help me God. Thats not easy because, I have to leave home at 6:30am. He usually is in the mood at 4:00am and, I'm one of those women who fall asleep immediately afterwards. An hour's sleep is barely enough rest for me to get through the day. I take a long time waking up too. End result: I usually rush out of bed, get dressed and leave for work in 30 minutes and DH has to drink coffee for breakfast. He hasn't complained, yet, but I want to be a good wife.

There's this freedom I feel, unlike before when I avoided the neighbors. Not the Desperate housewife Susan Meyer kind of avoidance, but I just kept my distance because good fences build good neighbors and I didn't want to end up being the subject of gossip. Now, I have to make friends with them so I can have people to show off my wedding album and video to.

Anyhow, personally, deep inside myself, I don't feel any different than I did before the wedding. I don't love him more (or less for that matter), I don't feel as if I've accomplished a major life goal. I feel like me. How long does it take for the change in feeling to come, I wonder.

My father's daughter

This was a post I had wanted to make a few days to my wedding day:


I have spent a lot of time with my father this week. Its bringing back memories that I don't want to have and making me depressed. Me and my Dad used to be really close before I became a teenager. I was indisputably not his favorite kid (that was my sister, difference being that she was the protected one) but I was the one always trusted with taking care of everybody else. I was the enigma that he respected. Really, whenever I had something to say, the man listened. He asked my opinion about almost anything, including his business. I decided his business name over 20 years ago, chose th location for the business, decided we should move to Nigeria from the US, and a host of other things. My decision often over rode my mother's and it took me a while to understand why she took that so personally (after all, I was her daughter) I thought I was lucky and that someone must've told him I was a prophet or something of sorts. We began falling out when I became a teenager and in my late teens, we developed this civil relationship that wasn't cold, but all the same wasn't all that warm.

I came home ten days ago for my wedding and me and the man are bonding so much it frightens me. We leave together in the morning and come back home in the evening. Its making me feel funny. I am feeling so sorry for all those years we could've remained friends and for some reason weren't. Ah well, that's one of many tales of fathers and their daughters.

One morning

One morning, I woke up and realised that there was something different about my body. I was incredibly fatigued, I was getting cramps and I just generally did not feel so good. A week later, it occurred to me that I could be pregnant and I freaked. A week later, I got over it and began to warm up to the young being that was growing inside of me. I began to talk to her and even named her (don't ask me how I knew it was a she, yu just do).

I joined all the baby sites I came across, babygaga.com, pregnancy.com, etc. And joined all the other May 2008 Mommies on all the boards I saw. Believe me, its cool being pregnant. You glow naturally and just have this inner happiness that I can't explain.

I lost the pregnancy a day before it became an official viable fetus (according to webMD) and I am coming to terms with it. It just happened though, I've thought of a thousand things I could have done differently, I know deep down inside that it was never meant to be. So, this is the final stage of my grieving process. I'm letting go. Unfortunately, no one told me how hard it was (I do know a few people who have experienced it). Its so so hard. Its over a week now, the pregnancy was only nine weeks and I'm still hurting. DH is okay, being as supportive as he knows how to be (silence, silence and silence as usual) we haven't even mentioned it but for onnce, I am grateful for the silence. I don't think I could cope if I had to recount the incident over and over again to people, so its a good thing that only the two of us knew about it.

Confrontations

I am not very good with confrontations. If I must confront someone on something they have done that I do not like, I find that it's better to stay quiet. I'm one of those women who say nasty things when I'm angry. The worst part of it (I think) is that what I usually say is so close to home that the other person always feels the blow. Fortunately, I rarely confront people unless I am really pushed to the wall (thanks to Mom and Dad. Maybe its the pregnancy hormones racing through my body, or the preparations that are driving me crazy whatever it is, I think I have got to stay away from people.

We all have that colleague/classmate/sibling or whoever who loves to hog the limelight. They love recognition and feeling important and always feel as if things only run with them around. I was blessed with two of such siblings and basically, I have learnt that as long as they are not bugging me directly and/or slowing me down, they need to be ignored to avoid quarrels. Anyway, I have a colleague thats like that and it had been becoming extremely difficult to ignore her.

First of all, she takes honest jokes seriously. Then, in her eyes, she is the only
person at work that actually works at work and of course, she says repeatedly about how all of the rest of us people are always swamping her with our own work (needless to say that she does this with things that are her responsibility). My patience with her has been growing rather thin and yesterday, we had a less than pleasant exchange of words. Nothing nasty or loud. Okay I confess, it was nasty but ran more like a discussion than an argument. I subtly put her in her place and made my position clear .

So, why do I feel I over reacted? I have played it time and time again in my head and have come up with different ways I could have handled the situation. Well, we're both respecting each other today so, thats a good sign.

I think I'm pregnant

Yep, I and I ain't telling a soul until after the wedding. I have actually spent a lot of time worrying and weighing my options, planning my life etc.

Let me confess, I've been freaking out over the whole issue until this morning. I mean, I don't have a good job, the wedding is still about two months away, I may not be able to start a career until early 2009, I am not ready to be pregnant talk-less of being a mother, and on and on and on.

To be frank, I am not even sure yet. It could be that I'm just late. I will take a test on Saturday though and clear that part up. Then if I'm not, it will turn out that I've been worrying over nothing. If I am, then my EDD will be at the end of April, almost six months after the wedding.

I am not against being pregnant before the wedding because, really in a relationship, its all about whatever works for you. And I have realised that after the wedding day, your issues will be money, in-laws, in-laws and in-laws and not about how you agreed to have sex before marriage.

But please young girls reading this, keep your cherry for as long as you can. Sex does not equal love and learn to use it as a reward for being treated nicely. And please note that he has to do ten nice things before you do two (if you know what I mean) There. I've done my piece for the youth.

I don't need any unnecessary attention so, I wont tell hubby-to-be even, until maybe a month after the wedding. Then the career thing. I really don't know how I want to juggle that. No one will give me a job and let me go on leave after six months. Baby has to be at least six months to go to a creche and thats about November 2008, the end of the year when most businesses will be rounding up for the year. that leaves me here until 2009. thats a long time.

Actually, I don't feel pregnant. I have been sleeping a lot but that could be as a result of stress. I am not putting on weight, though I usually do just before my monthly (strange huh?) I really don't know. Its all his fault. All through this month he has been staring at people's babies and playing with them. I am superstitious about a lot of things. I dont trust myself to take the test on my own and i don't want go to my clinic, not yet anyway until I'm sure so I'll just go to a lab. On the bright side, I may begin to throw up any moment from now. And I would lose a lot of weight. Will try to stay calm.

Before I get me

Today is one of those days, Pink couldn't have said it better, I really do want to be somebody else. Don't get me wrong, I'm not depressed. It's just one of those days.

Let me introduce myself, I'm in my late twenties, engaged, in between jobs, and generally trying to put it all together. I actually intended to start this after my wedding so it could be a chronicle of my married life, but I changed my mind, I need this now. I have always kept a journal, but growing up in a house of five - six kids, sharing a room with three of them and not to mention the cousins, aunts, and their friends who were always around, I never had any privacy.

In fact, it's still so irritating to me that someone will read your journal and not have the decency to pretend they didn't see anything personal. Years later, I do think journaling is therapeutic and I'd love to share my thoughts and I honestly believe that I express myself better in writing. I've also missed having a pen pal (I had one for about five years).

I love to read, mostly fiction, memoirs (you can actually feel the writer), and used to read but have sworn myself off self help and How to books (e.g. How to be a better entrepreneur and blah blah blah), except for Laura Schlessinger's "Cook for your Husband". That wonderful book opened my eyes to relationships and honestly, I probably would not be getting married to my SW if I hadn't read it. Let me explain, me and my boyfriend always have had communication issues, because he doesn't talk to me. Not that he doesn't talk at all but you know, intimate talking. I would tell him about the most mundane happenings in my life or someone else's and he'd be grunting along, or just giving me responses that make it obvious that he's just not listening and, worst of all he didn't want to talk about feelings, his or mine.

I tried to get over it by initiating conversations, ignoring him and breaking up with him. Nothing ever worked.

Meanwhile, I'd also been feeling like a piece of meat because he was so much more concerned about our sex life than our emotional intimacy. Then I read that book where Dr. Laura said that communication to women is like sex to men and then, I understood. That was my light bulb moment. I learnt to tolerate the fact that he did not want to confide his worries to me and when I notice him getting moody, I try not to pry him for information and cook for him or just baby him instead. He still doesn't talk much and I still nag and ignore him about it sometimes and I still envy those blessed women who have companions that are not averse to share their feelings, but now, I don't take it personal because I know that it's not me and I know that he adores me in many other ways.

Back to me, am not a movie freak but I love TV. My favorite colours are blue and blends of blue, and I think I'd make a good interior decorator.

I feel so much lighter already. Ttyl.