THE SNEAKY THINGS WIVES SOMETIMES DO.

THE SNEAKY THINGS WIVES SOMETIMES DO (First featured in the NEW EVE MAGAZINE 2016 first edition)

Sometimes it’s as if I try to outdo my ability to annoy my husband. I mean I try to be a good wife and lover, a good mother made of sugar and spice and all things nice but some days it just doesn’t work. When such days happen I wonder what I must have done to trigger it. Maybe I didn’t spend enough time in my morning devotion.
Anyways, yesterday I was almost sent back to my father’s house (not really , but close enough) and all because of an internet modem.

I had taken it out in the morning (without informing him) to browse on some stuff I needed for a project I was doing. Please don’t be too hasty to judge me. I believe the one- day –one- trouble syndrome had just kicked in because I honestly didn’t remember to ask nicely for it. Well, unfortunately hubby sited his modem sticking out of my laptop port.
“Bia is that my modem?” he asks. That’s how conversations go in my house always a nice mixture of Igbo and English. ‘Bia’ means come. It’s Just a way to get someone’s attention.
“eh…I’m using it to browse”. Talk about stating the obvious.
“I don’t recall you asking for it, i n’achom okwuo! (Meaning you are always looking for my trouble), I told you this modem is for work”.
“Ok sorry, sorry let me just finish downloading this….” too late the owner had already taken his property.
Then he marches up to the room leaving me wondering what to do next. I needed to get the project done. Passion is the only thing that fuels whatever I do and I was in the right mood to complete the project I was doing in a day. This is definitely not good.

The day passed without much event but by the next day the syndrome kicked in again. This time it was in the evening and I needed to do some more downloading. I’ll be honest, I did remember what transpired yesterday, but I convinced myself that after what happened he definitely wouldn’t want to give me the modem today.
At this point I can imagine a little devil and a little angel perched on each of my shoulders.
“Don’t do it”, the haloed angel was giving me bullet points from the last married women’s meeting I attended in church saying ‘remember to honor your husband by simply obeying him. That’s the test of your respect for him”.
“Babe you need to download this thing unfailingly” said another voice, “after all is it not work related .Just a quick one. Don’t go browsing for any other thing, don’t even Facebook. Just dash in and out and return it nicely the way you found it”
At this point the second voice didn’t sound evil. It just sounded…well…reasonable. It made sense.
So I took his remote car key, went outside, opened the boot and took out the modem and shut the boot. I did everything under five minutes…no facebooking or unnecessary browsing.
I went back to the car, pressed the remote and the boot flipped open, I put back the modem and closed back the boot with a nice thud.  I was begining to  feel like maybe I should go into a branch of espionage when I realised what I had in my hand wasn’t the car key but the modem. That means I had put the car keys into the…… I screamed.

I rushed back to the car praying that by some miracle I had left a door open or maybe the boot didn’t close properly. Story! This was an official brand new Toyota corolla and it looked smooth and seamless like an egg. There was no immediate hope except for a spare key. This was Sunday, tomorrow would be Monday the first working day of the week. How would he feel getting ready for work and not finding his keys? O Lord of mercy!
I knelt down in the middle of the front yard and prayed fervently. The sand stung my knees but I didn’t mind. It dawned on me what I thought was being smart was plain disrespect and sneakiness. How would I confront my husband? How would he feel? How would he react? “Lord is there a miracle for me somewhere…” I had this uncanny feeling God was having a splendid time laughing at me.
With no idea what I was going to do next I started hailing God in my dialect…yes o, when you are in deep trouble like I was in you’d better know how to speak your dialect.
'Onye nwem na onye nzoputam' sounds deeper and more serious than my Lord and my saviour. So I started…
“Jehovah nke usuu nile nke ndiaagha (Lord of host), chei! ogbajiri igwe kpoo ya nku (Lord of impossibilities), ugwu ana ari atuegwu (the God that deserves to be feared), hei! Oloro ihe loro ehi (just another nice way of saying Lord of impossibilities)…” I went on and on. When I finally calmed down I just asked Him to help me as I dreaded my husband feeling let down. I was truly concerned about his feelings.
Finally I summoned the courage to go and tell him. And I did it in a dramatic way. I knelt down by him and looked into his eyes with my best soulful puppy eyed gaze and broke the news.

“You mean my car keys are in my boot and the boot is locked?” he looked baffled
“yes sir”, I said tearfully . It was no longer sweetie or sweet heart but 'SIR'. He scratched his head and gave me the is-there-no-end-to-your-drama look.
“what do we do?, is there a spare?” I asked ignoring the fact that my knees where hurting from all the kneeling.
“I don’t have a spare and I’m going to sleep” and true to his word he went to sleep.
I don’t understand the male specie. They can snore through a natural disaster.
Anyways, by the next day I had to do all the school runs and drop him off at work. He came back an hour later with the spare key and drove off back to work. Phew! That ended nicely.

Lesson learnt. I had to make what the motivational speakers call a quality decision to cease and desist henceforth from every form of sneaky behaviour and respect my husband in truth and in deed by simple obedience.
Husbands need a good dose of longsuffering to keep up with us wives sometimes.