Our parents can’t live in harmony, we in disarray too

With Auntie Agatha, gataedo@yahoo.com, agatha.edo@gmail.com ,Tel: 08054500626

Dear Agatha,
I should start by thanking you for the various ways you help people deal with their burning issues.
I am 25 years old, married and from a polygamous family. There is this issue concerning my parents that bothers so much. It has to do with how they have failed to achieve a happy home as well as their inability to put behind them, their old ways.
They have been married for 35 years now. My daddy has four wives and my mother is the last. My mother is the only one who lives with him presently. They are practically intolerable of each other and flare up at the slightest provocation.
The love between my parents has drastically reduced to the extent that they hardly communicate with each other. My father does not care what becomes of my mother, any of my siblings or even me. He tells anybody who cares to listen that he won’t ever come to us for anything even if he is penniless.
In fairness to him, he invested so much in us all, giving us the chance to be whom we are today by sponsoring us to one of the developed countries in the world. By the way, he makes so much noise about this, announcing this to all and sundry. He is also in the habit of telling people what is happening to us in our private lives.
Being the only one among my mother’s children who showed interest in acquiring formal education, it has been reduced to nothing by the irritable attitude of my parents. I am suffering psychologically so much so my grades in the programme I am doing is falling.
My father is a disciplinarian and my mother easily provoked. This attitude of theirs has affected our family dynamics, my education and the general well being of my siblings.
Like I said, my grades have dropped badly, and I have been kicked out of my programme because I failed a course twice. Now I am really sad, and don’t really know if it’s worth informing them. I love them both and I wish they could love each other once again, put all the ugly old ways behind them and exhibit exemplary deeds. I am really sad and confused about the way forward. Kindly advise me on what to do next.
Worried Son.


Dear Worried Son,
If you are married as you claim, why not focus more on making your marriage work rather than bother yourself with the choice your parents made? Your concern should be more on how to avoid the mistake of your father.
If your mother is his fourth wife, your worries should be how not to acquire wives like your father. Something must be wrong for him to keep changing his wives.
Worrying over how to make things work for them is rather too late in the day. The moment your mother decided to be fourth wife to your father, she gave up her sole right in reforming this man. Whatever she does would be neutralised by the women before her who think they have more rights over this man than she has.
She may be the only one currently living with him, but the truth is, she is living with the presence, interests, antics, bitterness, disappointments, and intrigues of all the other wives. There is no way they would leave the management of your father and his affairs to your mother.
It is unfortunate that you and your siblings are the ones suffering the consequences but the truth is that your mother has to make the choice of what is most important to her at this critical point. The interest and well being of her children or trying to keep a home that was never hers from the moment she made the decision to marry your father.
Besides, by now she should have mastered the technique of avoiding problems with her man. Having stayed with him for 35 years, she by now know your father like a book, knowing his moods, weaknesses, strengths and his good side.
She should also by now have integrated herself to him, making sure she finds the key to unlock some of his irritating habits and making the place comfortable for her children.
The fact that they are still finding it difficult to find their rhythm shows they are both not doing enough to make each other happy. Like I said before, it would be almost impossible to achieve a harmonious home considering the disadvantage that followed your mother into the marriage.
At this point, encourage her to be closer to God for the sake of herself and her children. Being the last set of children, you and your siblings would need more than your efforts to make it in life.
Your peace and happiness would come from the efforts your mother is ready to make on bent knees praying to God. She also has to make the effort to control her temper to ensure her children do not suffer unnecessarily. If your father has done his bit of helping you all find the right footing in life, the rest is her battle to fight.
If your grades are falling, it is because at 25, you haven’t learnt to distant yourself from what is happening around you. It is also statement of how immature you still are, something you should really work on if your own marriage is to avoid following the pattern of your father’s.
One thing is the strength of character to withstand the storm of life. You don’t have any reason at your age to suffer from psychological problem because of your parents’ marriage. And to blame it on your inability to make good grades is only an excuse to dodge the obvious.
What are you really afraid of? This is a question you must carefully consider before answering. If the truth must be told, it is more than what you are saying. It is more to do with your own inadequacies as a man, your own limitations as a husband as well as your own failures as a son to help your parents realise that marriage is more than the two of them.
If you are really worried about their marriage, don’t limit your efforts to your immediate siblings alone. Enlist the help and support of every child that comes from your father’s loin.
Without a concerted efforts by you all to repair the foundation of your lives, by bringing together all the children of your father, nothing much can be achieved. Every interested party must be heard, canvassed and settled together before any of you can drum up support for progress for anyone in the family. A fragmented family can never stand. This should be your starting point in finding solution to your parents’ troubled marriage.
The outcome of this meeting would determine how much success you later achieve in bringing about peace between your mother and father. If your father has never attempted to reconcile his children and wives, it would be too much to expect him to reconcile with your mother and her children.
If he has always been harsh on his other women and children, there is no way he can change from what he has always been to something you and your siblings want.
Your mother’s happiness can never happen in a vacuum. All hands have to be on deck to ensure it is not achieved at the expense of any member of the family.
There is also the need for you to privately call your mother for discussion. If she is to achieve peace in her home, she has to learn to give respect to her man, recognise that being the only one living with him, gives her the added burden of being mother to all the other children by ensuring they have unhindered access to their father.
She should act as the bridge that would bring peace between those before her and your father.
Whatever happened between her and the other women at the time of her marriage to your father should be left in the past if she truly desires happiness and progress for her children.
Where she has to offer apologies or forgive completely, she shouldn’t hesitate at all. The beauty of life is in our ability to rise above our limitations.
The best thing you can do for yourself and wife is to learn from these experiences. Multiple marriages don’t solve the issue of inadequacies noticed in our partners; rather they only complicate issues. There is no problem patience and selflessness cannot solve in any relationship no matter how difficult it may appear at first.
Once we have the determination it eventually works out.
Ironically, the patience your father or mother didn’t have in their younger days is what they must have now to enjoy the benefits of old age if they hope to enjoy the fruits of being parents. Only a happy child thinks of providing the parents with comfort in their old age. At that meeting, ensure you emphasis this point.
Good luck.