My mother hates my husband

I love my mother, I must admit.

But this time round, I choose my husband over her. I know everyone thinks I am mad because the man might leave me, yet my mother will always be a mother to me. However, unless I fight this, I will never settle in marriage.

All my sisters are happily married. Mother has no problem with, and never visits them. My first husband could not take it. He left me because he thought I was over protected.

My mother would come and spend months at home, pretending to be sick and demanding I sleep in her bedroom as she might need something. I did that for the first week, and then told her my husband would also feel lonely.

She cried as if she had been beaten. She practically wailed. She accused me of abandoning her and taking care of a man I just met a few years ago.

She would tell my husband to get a maid to serve him, and leave me to attend to her. Nonetheless, I had observed that mother was not sick. At night, she would sleep so soundly, but start complaining the following evening, just in time to make me sleep in her bedroom.

I accepted everything like the meek and humble girl I am but, eventually, my husband chose his independence. He left me. When he went, my mother also went back to the village as if to say ‘mission accomplished’.

I got into a relationship with another man. When my mother learnt of it, she came to visit and never went back. She did her old tactics but this time, I refused to sleep in her bedroom. She would cry through the night and walk around the house.

She would call upon her late husband’s name and lament that if he were alive, he would take care of her. Amidst all this, I would lock my bedroom door and hide the key. My new husband was more considerate. He always wanted to go and calm her down, but I would tell him to leave her. As time went by, he also got tired of the sleepless nights.

“What’s with her? Is she possessed with something?” he asked me one day.
“She is normal. Don’t mind her,” I replied.

It became clear that even he, considerate as he was, had started getting fed up of the little drama mama was staging up. He asked me to leave, but still took care of me. We met in other places but at the house I had rented. Then my mother returned to the village after accomplishing her mission.

When I asked my sisters if they had had similar experience with mama, they said she does not even visit them. I was so furious that my mother had decided to see me as a single woman. I was well behaved, clean, a good cook, submissive wife, dutiful and hardworking. Any man would want to have me as his wife.

When I got my current husband, I requested him to do a civil union rather than spoil lots of money on a lavish wedding. He obliged, and we started a journey together. My brothers and sisters helped me with everything, sitting in for my mother, from whom we intentionally hid all this.

I have been living with my husband for seven years, and mama knew about him just recently. I told her we live out of the country so she does not suggest a visit. When I told her we will visit her, she said: “Do not bring that wicked man here. I hate him.”

Apparently, she knows I live in the USA, and will be travelling this weekend. She can’t visit because we do not have a home in Uganda. Too much for lying, but I was left with no choice, dear mother.