Loving A Schizophrenic Woman
I dreamt of swimming in a white sea. A thick white sea that churned silver when it was deep. I was flailing in the liquid, not swimming, flailing. My arms seemed to be the only things keeping me upwards. I briefly wondered why my legs were nonfunctional, I had a fleeting thought that they were glued together as one giant fin. I looked down to make sure, and I woke up.
I was lying facedown on the white tiles in my room. It took me a moment to realize I was no longer in the dream. I pushed myself off the floor, my head hurt, my knees hurt. I must have fallen face down from the bed. I groaned as I stood, I was just forty years old but at that moment I felt eighty. The usual bustle of a new day had been successfully erased from my spine yet again.
I took off the sweater I slept in and made my way to the bathroom, my wife’s voice almost made me smile. She was singing with a toothbrush as a microphone again.
You make my life so beautiful
And as you are, you have made me here on earth
A song from Sinach. I hugged her from behind and kissed her cheek. She melted into me.
“My love!” She squealed, turning to face me. She looked so happy, I took the memory and bottled it. “I saw you slept on the floor”
I nodded, watching a shadow pass over her face. “I wanted to wake you, but decided to let you sleep”
“Wise decision” I said through a throat that was already dry and scratchy. My wife Aduke kissed me quickly on my lips and went back to her brush singing. I watched her and smiled. It seemed like a million years ago since the day we met.
“Aduke! Aduke!” Her friend Bliss had called that day, from my vantage point I watched as she walked over to a girl who seemed to be praying very earnestly. I looked at her head and posture and confirmed that I had never seen her before. Our fellowship was a relatively small one. Bliss slowed down when she was close enough to see what I was seeing. She stared at her friend for a moment, then she picked her bag and left.
Personally, I did not understand her behavior. I had never seen Bliss so irritated or angry before. I tried to rationalize it by making excuses for her. Perhaps there was an emergency and couldn’t wait, perhaps she had classes to attend or a test to write. I just could not imagine why you would leave your friend who was praying to go home alone.
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The young lady prayed for hours. People came and left. I spoke to dozens of people, comforting some, praying for some, and discussing church affairs with some executives. Finally, she raised her head and wiped her face with a handkerchief. I allowed her to calm down for a few minutes, then I walked up to her.
I asked her if this was her first time and she said yes. She was dressed impeccably from her natural hair and make-up free face to her sandaled feet. I was intrigued as the months rolled by, she kept coming to our church and I kept seeing her. I could only talk to her. “Dating” was beneath me as a man of God so I secretly prayed to God to show me, my wife. I prayed to God with her in my mind’s eye.
Then I graduated and I didn’t see her again. I went ahead with my life, loss is a usual thing. I did not take losing her too badly. Afterall I had Jehovah dictating my life, and yes, it was so much easier knowing someone else was calling the shots. Someone who had my best interest at heart. I got a job at a telecommunication company but I quit to follow God full time.
I founded Living a Holy Life Ministry (LHLM) and slowly my church grew until we could have television programs. It was on one of those programs that Aduke found me on. The next Sunday, she was sitting in my pews looking just as I remembered her. Five years had raced by for her and she hadn’t aged a day. I was delighted to see her among my first timers and took her out to lunch.
“Pastor Ben! I can’t believe I found you!” She said excitedly as soon as we were alone, displaying that excitement I had missed.
“Me neither” I said, “I’m not letting you out of my sight again” I promised, Aduke’s eyebrows rose but I wasn’t taking no for an answer.
Our courtship was a tentative one, we skipped around each other to prevent ourselves from sinning. We were both virgins and wanted to remain so until marriage. We married six months after our reunion in the presence of my family and God.
“Honey, please get me that shoe” Aduke said one day as we did the laundry together.
“What shoe?” I asked. I didn’t look up.
“That shoe, oya na!” she said, angrily now. I looked up at the tone, why was she suddenly angry?
“Where is the shoe?” I asked I hadn’t even finished asking the question when she threw the bucket she was holding at me, water, clothes, and all. I tried to dodge but it was too late. The bucket clipped my lip and bruised the soft skin beneath my left eye. I was shocked and furious. I got up from the joko and glared at her, water and blood running down my body.
She closed her eyes as though she couldn’t bear to see me, then she ran into the house weeping. That was a year after we were married. It didn’t end that day, I kept getting hit by my wife. Anytime she became furious she would pick any object close to her and hurl it at me. I fled my home many times only to come home and see her kneeling at the threshold, begging for my forgiveness.
It got to the point that I would scoff when I saw her kneeling there shedding crocodile tears. Why would she keep doing something if she felt so sorry about it? I was positive that she was manipulating me. Spending time with her became increasingly difficult because I began to have delusions, every smile that rested on her lips seemed like a bloodthirsty laugh to me. Anytime she lifted her arms, I shrank away from her.
Aduke was hurt. She would pray alone into the mornings, and fall asleep on the hard floor like I used to. She prayed for God to help her mostly but I also caught snippets of prayers for a baby. Our two year wedding anniversary was in November which was just a few months away and yet, we had no baby to call our own. Sometimes, I imagined that having a baby would calm her.
Other times, my growing paranoia would lead me to imagine her flinging our child across the room and I would bless God for closing her womb. My wife wasn’t the only one praying for our family, I wept to God daily. I needed answers from him as to why Aduke had become this vicious woman. Every time, God referred me to the book of Hosea but I wasn’t satisfied. I booked a doctor’s appointment for both of us.
Aduke was diagnosed with schizophrenia. My world crashed that day into pieces so fine they befuddled my mind with images of loss. I mourned on our way back home and while we prepared ourselves for sleep. I mourned alone. I couldn’t imagine bringing anyone into the circle of despair I was locked in. Aduke did not pray that night, she must have still been in shock.
“What do you want from me?” She would ask me later. “It is not my fault I am like this” then she would burst into tears. I would feel wretched within myself. I learned to separate the part of me I gave to God and the part I kept to myself. The latter being too rotten.
“You have to take your drugs” I would reply, earnestly at first and tiredly later. We were five years old as husband and wife. We were as different as night and day. That brief warmth we had shared in the yet hopeful days of our marriage was gone. I continued to pester Aduke to take her drugs and she continued to give excuses.
She was too tired to get up and take them, she was sure the drugs were reducing her fertility. I turned away from my Wife to God, I prayed to him day and night. I began to understand what Jesus meant when he cried “Father, let this cup pass over”. I was desperate for relief.
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I turned to the internet. My search history showed questions like: how do you diagnose schizophrenia? How to care for a loved one with schizophrenia. How do you help someone with schizophrenia who doesn’t want help? Are schizophrenics manipulative? and other related questions. I studied the disease and every day of discovering left my eyes wet with tears.
“Benny!” My wife squealed one day when I got home, I pulled up short. There were a lot of things wrong with the scene. One, my wife was grinning from ear to ear. Two, my wife was home early.
“Honey what is it?” I proceeded to ask, stepping into her hug “Why are you home so early?”
“Mommy called” she said, and I instantly knew it was her mother. We both called our parents daddy and mommy but with slight inflections to differentiate. I followed her to the kitchen and there was her mother, smiling gently at me. I bent my knee.
“Èká sùn ma” I greeted
“My son” she replied customarily. That evening we had a delicious meal of amala and ewedù soup. Aduke chattered excitedly after the meal and I made a mental note to invite her mother home more often if it made my wife this happy.
“Baby, come to bed” Aduke said, patting the space beside her. She was wearing the see-through dress she hadn’t worn for years. I was flabbergasted. What had come over my wife? When she saw I was hesitating, she pouted her lips and turned away. I rushed to her, we men know how important it is to have done what our wives asked as soon as she turns her face away. Knowing that when her face returns to its previous position, she would have changed her mind.
“I’m here,” I said to her. She turned to me and smiled. I caught a wicked glimpse of the woman I had prayed to marry all those years ago. She took my hand in hers and started to fondle it. Then she brought it to her belly. For a moment my mouth hung agape, my wife’s eyes dripping happy tears. Then she opened her mouth and pronounced those three words.
Throughout Aduke’s pregnancy, I learned to be way better in coping than I ever was. If she was bad when she wasn’t pregnant, she became horrible. Her episodes began to happen more frequently and one time she held a knife to her belly and asked me to choose between the baby and her.
In the eyes of the world we were a very happy couple. A couple that had been barren for six years and now possessed the fruit of the womb must be deliriously happy. That’s not to say I was not happy, I was. I just spent too much of my “happy” time worrying about Aduke and our baby who she carried.
“I will call him Chukwuka” I pronounced during the very small naming ceremony that consisted of just a few of our family members.
“Adekunle” Aduke said. She was holding the baby as though he was her life. I felt so much love for both of them.
The baby would scream all night because Aduke had no patience to put him to her breast and sleep. The doctor said the postpartum depression was aggravating her mental health issues. I was left alone with Chukwuka most of the time. I slept in his room with him, waking at intervals to feed him from a bottle.
Soon, Aduke’s maternity leave ended and she went back to work. She would often forget Chukwuka at the daycare facility and come home “empty-handed”. We fought many times. I was sick of her sickness. Sick of her lack of effort. Every time we fought she would burst into tears and murmur. She would say I was picking fights with her because I no longer loved her.
“I have given you a son, what else do you want from me?” She asked. I stared at her. She was looking less and less like the Aduke I knew. I could not understand why a woman would want to hurt her own baby. I went for counseling, finding I needed it more than her.
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“Come in” my father in the lord said when I knocked at his door. I stepped inside respectfully.
“Good afternoon Sir” I greeted him, in all humility, he got up and took my hand.
“Welcome, please sit down”
I told him of my pain, of the “cup” that God had declined to pass over me. I told him how I wanted to end my marriage. How my life had become an endless search for peace. I wept that day in his office. The grief is too much to bear. I showed him the bruises my wife’s sickness had inflicted on me and he sighed in deep sadness.
“Kneel down” he commanded me when I was done pouring out the dark parts of my soul. He prayed for me and comforted me. He told me divorcing my wife could be dangerous given her unstable mental health. He advised me to go home and learn to turn the left cheek when she abused me. He told me to live as though she wasn’t the one living with me in our house, that it was God.
I thanked him and left, but I was not satisfied. I made an appointment with the doctor that had diagnosed my wife. He gave me solid advice, and I went home with some closure. I began to treat my wife the way my father in the lord had admonished me to. I would let her have her outbursts without saying a word. When she pushed me to the floor at night because she must have felt uncomfortable in her sleep I took it in stride.
She became a happier person. The woman who could sing with a toothbrush in her bathroom. She also developed some fondness for our son and would shout “Adeee Adeee” just to hear herself calling her child. After we had our bath, I helped her towel her hair and held her hand as we both walked into our bedroom.
“Sit down Aduke” I said when we got to our bed. Her eyes widened, I hadn’t called her name in a very long time. She complied and I sat down beside her.
“What is it baby?” She asked me. I stared at her for a moment. I would have loved if there was, but there wasn’t anyhow I could change what I was about to say. There was also no way I could sugarcoat it.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” I said. Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
“Why? I am healthy.” She said. Then it dawned on her what I meant. Her tone of voice changed “Talk to me Ben, tell me what hospital you are taking me to” she demanded, gripping my calf.
“The psychiatric hospital” I said, hanging the betrayal shining in her eyes on my shoulders like a cross. I deserved it, I had promised her this would never happen.
Quick Questions:
- If you were in Ben’s shoes, would you have left the marriage?
- Do you think Aduke exaggerated her symptoms to distract her husband from her terrible actions?
- How would you fare, living with a Schizophrenic person?
- Was Ben right to do what he did?
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