Through a Mans Eyes

Cover of The Words of a Woman

Paul Adams could feel the glare of his mother’s inquiring eyes at the back of his head. It was so intense that he could feel the heat beneath the skin of his forehead trying to escape. He refused to be put off by the almost irresistible force that was tugging at the little shoe strings that were loosely attached to the child in him. He had a mental flash of his mother holding a feeding bottle and trying to force its glistening tip through his tightly shut mouth. He swallowed hard as if this mental image had lodged itself in his parched throat like a fish bone with evil intentions. He looked up at his father from where he sat. He could feel some unspoken opinion lurking beneath the prison of his father’s expressionless face. In the silence of unspoken words between him and his father, he could feel the alliance of partial understanding. Words that if spoken would be a taboo that will inevitably incur the wrath of his mother. A wrath that was so familiar to his father now afraid to face the woman whose anger was a promise that if he gave voice to that alliance he would go to bed that night with hunger in his stomach. The air was a charged stale mate of the unpredictable calm after a thunder storm had unsuccessfully tried to tear a hole in the sky. He was the sky, constant and resolute to maintain the status quo of his decision such that it wouldn’t have taken a seer to see that his mother was the thunder storm.

 Why she would refuse to accept his final decision was beyond him. There had been times when he had been pushed to the brink of screaming right in her face, “If you love Jennifer so much, maybe you should go right ahead and get married to her!” Somehow he had chewed down those words and like chewing a bitter pill of aspirin the bitter taste had settled at the back of his tongue. His dad had been more accommodating. His words had seemed like a stepping out from a meltingly hot Lagos afternoon into a delightfully air conditioned banking hall. “If Maybell is the woman you feel you want to spend the rest of your life with, why don’t you bring her home so we can get to know her.” The instant his father uttered those words, it was signed sealed and delivered that he was bound to go to bed on an empty stomach. He had given more than he had ever thought was possible to give to see that his relationship with Jennifer transmogrified into the blissful union of marriage. What he had succeeded in doing was widening the corridors of confusion on the inner machinations of Jennifer’s mind while deepening his mother’s preference for the woman he had once thought he loved because she had reminded him of his mother. That explained why the moment he told his parents that he had made up his mind to marry Maybell, has mother automatically asked, “…and what of Jennifer?” This was how Paul tried to make his mother see how the man in him had found a good thing.