Where did the men go?

Not a Sunday goes by without the pastor of the controversial church I attend assuring the 30 year old age range women in the crowd that there is still hope for them to get married. [The controversial nature of the church is mainly based on the Princely can-do-no-wrong nature of the status bestowed upon the leader. This superhuman nature which is sometimes highlighted but also sometimes turned down by the pastor himself, I choose to obliviate from my observations since the more conservative church I used to solely belong to was too scaled down to help me when I faced matters which were beyond the natural laws of normalcy. If you have ever been caught in the supernatural, the soothing undisturbed rhythm of Sunday church as usual may cease to be enough for you. Just twenty years years back, this now somewhat conservative church was so radical that it was branded a new religion all together and I know for certain that one could be disowned for attempting to be wed in it.]

Anyway, Where Did The Men Go?

Why are women hunting husbands like they are the last Dodo bird?

I have written before about why I think that the nature of Apartheid South Africa and Racist [Slavery and Jim Crow]America have created the same type of men, enraged, violent, invisible, un-husbandable fathers with very low goals as far as employment and education are concerned. Meanwhile, the women, unloved involuntary century old holders of the community’s collective psychological trauma become single mothers, superwomen, can-do-it-all, a PhD is the limit high achievers.

The question should no longer be, why are women not getting married, the question should make an inquest into why marriage is not attractive to men anymore. Is it because of what these young children saw or maybe never got a chance to see when growing up? A stable home. A father and mother present as caregivers and providers living within the same household respectfully. How can they possibly recreate what they do not know?

As usual, women trying to fill in those gaps as hormonally and emotionally gifted nurturers, to recreate the mummy and daddy dynamic by sourcing for husbands everywhere they can find them, even if it is in another woman’s household. For some boys, their mummy-daddy game only replicated abuse, for some women, the mummy daddy game is only transactional- the bizarre ‘dzaddy’ peculiarity- a house and car arrangement in exchange for sexual intimacy to the highest bidder.

I wonder if the working culture is partly to blame. A way of life that allows men and women to spend long periods of time apart [first, no more lunch at home to no more weekends at home] naturally leading to a deficit of love, care and attention that is promptly satisfied by the new [or as old as the time when women entered the workplace as secretaries] phenomenon of work-wives and now, work-husbands. It is now becoming normal for husbands to leave for years, to far away locations, away from their primary wives and children. Our national leader himself stressed that he was away for six years fighting for our liberation from corrupt regimes and his own daughter thought he was some strange black fellow when he arrived at their doorstep having last witnessed her as an 8 month old.

Is this something to be celebrated? A Mandela moment perhaps? What happened to Mandela’s girls? For a country he sacrificed so much for, it seems his family paid the ultimate sacrifice for his absence. A hero to all and a hole where love and support should have been.

Should men not fight? Should they not become martyrs?

It seems as if to many men, you can either be great or you can have a stable family. Maybe the adage is true, you can’t have it all or maybe as Oprah said, you can have it all, but not at the same time. So for many men seeking greatness, Love is stupidity, Multiple trysts a norm and The all bearing, aging woman of virtue at home, bringing up the boys who will never see the need for a marriage, the standard.

I know, the change, I have seen it. Most men with dreams change when that first bundle of joy is placed in their shaky hands. The alarm bells go off. They suddenly remember the dreams the dreams they once had as boys, the ones they never achieved, the ones they had postponed, the ones they will have to fulfill for this their new responsibility.

Before I was pregnant, I knew that like most women, after giving birth I would forever after, always come second after my child. It is an idea that I contemplated, leaving space to remember who I was, before. It turned out to be true, but mostly from the people around me, that somehow my identity and dreams, if any [I can’t remember them] should be hidden under heaps and heaps of environmentally unfriendly diapers. Some women wake up to an empty nest at 60, lamenting about what they could have achieved. Though, the paradox is that, the very lamentation is a blessing some women do not even get to make.

So where is the balance?

I saw in one of the endless Korean vlogs I spend my money [data] watching, that South Korean men can claim up to a year in paid paternity leave at least three years after their child is born. Of course, that may be too much to ask in a country which can happily drown itself in plastic, fumes and muddy water when the rain falls because we despise the very regulations that could keep our population alive and effectively working for many years and also too much to ask since the number of children a Ugandan man pro-creates is a taboo topic.

Among the many things the lockdown taught us was that, people were waking up to spouses they had last seen clearly on the wedding day. Newspapers reported serious dysfunction. Parents couldn’t stand their children, some wanted their daughters [and now sons] back to school because they needed protection from drunk uncles and houseboys. Spouses could not wait for offices to open because that is where their hearts lay.

It is said that the family is the smallest unit of a community and that a group of communities makes a nation.

Is busyness and an unavailability a sign of productivity? We should have the German train system in East Africa by now.

For every Anselm, there is a gap which could have only been filled by the superstar of every child’s life.

When you are operating in a crowd, you see people as a crowd. It is easy to hurl insults at them, demean them. But when you meet the individual of the different tribe or group you disparage, you are face to face to with a person just as human as you are. That is why you can’t go to war without making a monster out of the people you are fighting. Most people, as individuals are complex intriguing characters, unless of course they are so absorbed in their identity as a group and have nothing to offer in personality.

I appreciate how the ATM sound for withdrawals does not change regardless of the amount withdrawn.

It is strange to see everyone grow old around me.

“Mummy, I saw God crying.”

“Where did you see God? People have been looking for him.”

“When we were going to the airport [school trip], I saw God crying.”

“Why was God crying?”

“Because He doesn’t have friends.”