Dr. Pat Utomi’s Homage to Ifeoma: Nothing Like a Good Wife, By Mike Awoyinfa

I met the erudite Prof. Pat Utomi recently and we ended up exchanging gifts of books we have both written.  From his autobiographical reflections on the Nigerian condition titled TO SERVE IS TO LIVE, I bring you this human angle excerpts which really interested my wife:

One of my more interesting chores in recent years has been standing behind a young couple as they recite their marital vows.  My wife, Ifeoma and I, seem to be doing that quite a bit lately.  The invitation to be wedding sponsors has come from quite a few family friends.  Each time, we have been able to oblige the request, we have taken it quite seriously.  This has meant an invitation to the couple to visit us sometime before the proposed date of the wedding.  These visits have been a combination of marriage counselling and celebrations of the joys and beauty of happy marriage.

Often, my wife and I have been greater beneficiaries of these visits than the young couple because they have given us opportunities to relish what we have, not because we deserve it, but because of God’s grace and the generosity of family and friends who have allowed us the peace to live out our commitment. There has never been a doubt in my mind as to who the true hero of our marriage is, my wife Ifeoma.  There is clearly nothing like a good wife.  A good wife may not be perfection.  A marriage and family life surely are work in progress and require a continuing effort and sacrifice which could happen especially if a loving wife keeps rising to the occasion.  The reason my wife is such a heroine, in my mind are manifold.  They flow partly from my awe of the modern professional woman who can hold down a career, and manage a family.  Managing a family is just about as challenging as running a small enterprise.  My admiration for my wife and women like her also derives from their managing around men like me who have come out of a tradition of minimum domestic involvement when much more is required of their time and talent.  In addition, my wife also continues to earn my admiration in how she manages to keep a smile in the face of the distress of my always springing on more surprises, another guest for dinner or a quick trip to Europe.  More importantly, I hold my wife up for the skill to support the children with their school work and daily troubles when I feel so lost about how to solve problems in arithmetic for an eight year old.  She also proves outstanding in adapting to values, which means that she has less material things than people expect.  In acknowledging how much more capable my wife has been than I, I have not given up struggling to do my bit and enjoy my family life.

I will return to those traits later but first read the story of how the paths crossed and the road to the many joys and peace of mind I enjoy.  It all started without a specific aim.  I had just come back from graduate school and was caught up in so much work to establish a reputation that I did not spend the time my peers spent socializing.  But I had a childhood friend who I was surprised to see living three doors away from my family flat on my return from the United States.  Tony Nnachetta, who went to Our Lady of Fatima, Gusau with me and preceded me to Christ the King College Onitsha, before we met again as undergraduate at the University of Nigeria, lived three houses away.  Tony made it a point of disrupting my work from time to time so I could get some air.  It was often a trip to Mama Calabar’s place for tasty home-fried chicken or to the suya corner for grilled stuff.  Occasionally, Tony would divert without advance notice to me, to the College of Medicine Idi-Araba.  His objective, to visit a young woman finishing her dentistry programme.  At first I endured the visits which ate deep into my time.  Then Tony’s girlfriend’s roommate and classmate began to catch my attention.  Tony and I ended up marrying roommates and classmates.

Early days of marriage saw me under enormous stress.  These were the days I ran my own business but paid very little attention to it.  Cash was tight and I was short-fused.  But she coped so well that I felt guilty.  When I accepted the Volkswagen position that gave us some stability and better income flow, I was relieved primarily for her sake.  It was just as well that things started off like that because most of our marriage, her big problem has been managing expectations.  Many thought she was married to a man whom money was no object because they equated media exposure to with being well-off.  The more modest middle class income we have lived on surely has kept our consumption profile at levels below what her peers expected.  This would be extremely frustrating for many women in today’s material society.  If this has cause her any anxiety then she has been good keeping her frustration to herself. Just as she was beginning to settle into corporate welfare, my term for the perquisites of senior corporate life, a house in Ikoyi, company cars and chauffeurs etc., we were victims of a scam.  It was a scam that extorted money from people with the threat of assassination unless they were paid off.  That we were not familiar with the fact that such a scam was doing the rounds made us take it more seriously than we should have.  A report to the police proved to be a bigger problem that the assassination threat.

The Police Commissioner at his press briefing for the week announced that their accomplishments included my being saved from assassins.  In the process, he gave out my house address which was published in one of the newspapers, exposing my family to real danger.  In response to anxiety expressed by my German colleagues and some of my friends in the diplomatic corps, we decided on relocation.  Something was found for me to do at VAG UK in Milton Keynes and I moved with the family to London.  I would find to my chagrin that months later that it was a cheap scam that some got away with paying as little as N5,000 or just telling off the extortionist who called on the phone claiming to be a retired army captain and leader of a gang of assassins for hire.

Moving to the UK was costly for my wife who had been getting ready to enter a residency programme at Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH).  But she took things within her stride.  I returned home a few months later and was soon involved in the accident that claimed the life of my driver and saw me come back from the brink when the vital signs were nowhere to be found.  When I was evacuated to hospital in Germany, she had to leave our four-month-old daughter and other children in the care of her mother in London to come to Germany to nurse me.  It was a big cross for her to carry and she did it with dignity.  We decided while I was recuperating in London that it was time for the family to return to Lagos.  For six years following the family’s relocation, I watched her do amazing act of coping with a very demanding residency programme and schedule of examinations; visiting the United States for workshops in her chosen specialty of orthodontics; coping with raising four children and managing a husband who was so incorrigible in attracting all kinds of “wahala” from work and from public life, without earning enough to support all those activities conveniently.