HOW DO YOU deal with finding condoms in your wife’s purse? And how can you confront her for cheating when you once cheated on her? That was the dilemma I faced six years ago.I don’t normally go into my wife’s purse but I needed a dollar coin, so I asked her if she had any. She told me to look into her purse.That’s when I found a packet of condoms. I looked into it and there were only two inside; one was missing.My heart missed a beat because she was out the previous night, supposedly at church. Could she have been with a lover, I thought?For a few seconds I froze at the mental image of my wife with another man. I could not believe what I was seeing.Then I got angry. I wanted to drag her out of the shower by her hair and beat the daylights out of her. How dare she have a man on me? How dare she shame me?Then I began to wonder who it could be that was involved with my wife. My mind began racing. I settled on two possible people. One was her new boss whom she was always saying something good about. It could be him – after all who says good things about their boss unless they are getting some favour from them? So it could be him. She has the opportunity to be with him and could always have the perfect excuse why she should be with him.Or it could be Derek from her church, who she was talking to before I came along. She said they were just friends, but when I look at him I could see he dislikes me for stealing her from right under his nose.Again she has opportunity and a ready-made excuse to be with him as they are both on the church council. That he is married and says he is a Christian means nothing, because I’m married, also supposedly a Christian, but I cheated. So why wouldn’t he?
Anger rising
I could feel my head swelling in anger. I was getting madder by the second. How could she cheat on me? How dare she?I rushed into the bathroom with the packet of condoms as she was drying her skin. I literally shouted as I confronted her. My sudden outburst was so ferocious that she froze in fright, dropping the towel and exposing her naked body.Seeing her naked made me angrier. After giving birth to two children, she was still as desirable as when I first met her. How dare she share this sweetness with another man? I was boiling now!“Is this payback?” I yelled. “Are you getting even with me now after so many years?”I was sure her actions were in retaliation for my cheating on her about three years ago with a woman I had befriended. It was a brief fling and I truly regretted doing it because, as it turned out, that woman was no more than a prostitute who went after married men to fleece them. I was just another one of her victims.I apologised to my wife and we had a rough few months after the woman had told her I was sleeping with her, to get back at me for quitting the relationship – something like blackmail.But I thought we had worked that out. I genuinely thought my wife had forgiven me for that stupid move. These condoms proved she had me in mind all along, I thought. She just said the right things but was planning to get back at me all along – and now she was doing it. My head felt as if it was swollen and was going to explode. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, as if I had just come from running on the beach.I wanted to grab her and shake the life out of her for cheating on me. “How dare she?” I kept saying to myself.I began screaming at her and lunged forward to grab her, but she jumped back into the shower screaming. I intended to make her pay for cheating on me and making some man laugh at me.My shouts and her screams brought our daughter to our bathroom. My little angel was crying asking me not to “hit mummy”. I told her that her mother was a slut. She had a man on me, and the condoms in her purse were the proof.It was then my angel shouted that her mother had bought the condoms the night before and a visiting counsellor had used one to demonstrate to the youth group how to use condoms properly. It was part of the community outreach programme the church was having to sensitise people about the dangers of contracting sexually transmitted infections, particularly HIV.I looked at my daughter. Then I looked at my wife. I could not say a word. All I could do was to slump to my knees and cry. What an idiot I was. Then I tried to apologise. I crawled on my knees over to where my wife was standing with the retrieved towel wrapped around her body. I begged my wife’s forgiveness. I begged God to help her to forgive me. And I asked my daughter to forgive me too.
