By MILLICENT MWOLOLO mmwololo@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Wednesday, March 21 2012 at 00:00
Posted Wednesday, March 21 2012 at 00:00
The impression you get when you listen to radio, watch the news, and read newspapers is that marriage in Kenya is on its death bed. But is it really?
We had a chat with two young couples who are convinced that, in spite of the challenges, marriage can work, and yes, it is worth all the hard work. Tonny and Faith Amisi, and Timothy and Naomi Makumi, share how they have been able to navigate their “teething” years.
Tonny Amisi, Graphic designer and Faith Amisi, advocate both 36. Married for 10 years
This couple describes their first year of marriage as a discovery journey. They had courted for seven years and thought that they knew everything about each other. They were wrong.
“Take it from us, courting is nothing like marriage. In fact, it prepares you very little for it,” Tonny says.
For instance, it is only after their wedding that he learnt that while he was most productive in the morning, Faith preferred working late into the night. This caused some conflict because whenever one wanted the other’s company, the other would be engrossed in work.
“After some time, we realised that we needed to reach a compromise, otherwise we would never get to spend time together. After a lengthy discussion, we agreed to stop carrying work home,” Tonny says.
The other startling discovery was that Faith was not your traditional domestic wife who was happy enough to do all the household chores alone. She would frequently ask Tonny for help, requests that he resented.
“I was brought up in a household where my mother did everything, and not once did I hear her ask my father to lend her a hand, especially in the kitchen. I assumed that all women were like her until I met Faith.”
Though it took him time to appreciate that it wasn’t fair to let her to slave in the kitchen alone after a hard day’s work, Tonny finally came round to the idea of helping out.
“Today, as she prepares ugali, I help to slice the onions,” he says with a smile.
Wise spending
Initially, there was conflict over how each managed and spent money. Faith explains that Tonny is too liberal with money, and that as long as he has it, he spends it, and tends to buy things in bulk.
She is the opposite. She calculates every single cent she uses and buys only what we need. Fortunately, Tonny was aware of his weakness and gladly allowed Faith to take charge of their monthly expenses.
“We have shared bank accounts and are free to withdraw what we need. However, each month, we review how we spent it,” Faith explains. This she, adds, encourages wise spending. A few months after their marriage, while still learning to navigate their way through it, Tonny, then a civil engineer, was abruptly transferred from Nairobi to Mombasa.
“I was very disappointed. We were just getting to know each other and I feared that the separation would undo the progress we had made,” Faith, who was a few months pregnant, recalls.
To help her to cope with his absence, Tonny convinced a cousin to move in with Faith. He would visit every Friday evening and leave on Saturday afternoon by bus, an exercise that was not only tiring, but also expensive. The following year, Tonny decided to quit his job.
“I felt that for our marriage to work, we needed to spend time regularly, not just two days a week,” he explains.
With the assistance of a mentor, he decided to pursue graphic design, a childhood passion. It took six months for his new business to start making money, meaning that during this period, they had to rely on Faith’s salary for all their needs.
The sacrifice eventually paid off. Tonny’s business, which he operates from the family home, is now eight years old and doing well.
By the time their firstborn, Mathew, eight, was born in their second year of marriage, they had somewhat settled down. Right from the beginning, Tonny got involved in taking care of their son.
“He helped to feed, bath, and change him whenever he was at home, a gesture that I really appreciated because the help made it easier for me to cope with motherhood better,” Faith says.
When their second child, Eden Amisi, came along two years later, they realised that even though they understood what it took to be parents, two children were twice as demanding.
After maternity leave, Faith negotiated with her employer to work half-day for half pay for a year. This gave her more time to spend with her children and husband.
Ten years later, they say that they have finally figured out the rhythm that works best for their marriage. They feel so capable, that six months ago, they decided to do without a house help. Their reason? They want to teach their children to be independent at an early age.
This is how they have worked it out. Every morning, Tonny drops the children at school, which is five minutes away from their home. He then drives his wife to work, and then heads back home, where he runs his business from.
Normally, he tidies up the house before settling down to work. In the evening, he picks up his family and drives them back home.
Faith cooks supper and helps the children to prepare for the next day. They brush their shoes, do their homework, and lay out the next day’s uniform.
They also help out with chores such as washing dishes and cleaning. Each chore comes with a reward or “motivator” of Sh10. At the end of the month, each makes about Sh1,000, which they are free to spend on what they want.
Family time
Occasionally, the family goes out on weekends.
“He tried to visit once or twice a week, but it wasn’t enough. I was lonely, and really missed his company,” she explains. She was working with a bank in Nairobi then, and decided to seek a transfer to Naivasha, so that she could be near her husband. Eight months later, the transfer was granted, and an ecstatic Naomi moved in with her husband. Ironically, two months later, Timothy was transferred back to Nairobi.
The first challenge the Makumis encountered was how to make a long-distance marriage work. Soon after their wedding, Timothy was posted to Naivasha, something that devastated Naomi.
“I felt harassed,” he says.
“As the children play, we use this time to talk about any issues we need to tackle,” Faith explains. Over the years, they have learnt the importance of having that one couple that they can turn to in case they face a challenge that they feel is beyond them.
Theirs is an older couple, who has been through and weathered the challenges they are experiencing.
Currently, both Tonny and Faith are studying for online degrees. Faith is studying for a Masters degree in law while Tonny is doing a Bachelor of Arts degree in graphic design. The advantage of online courses, they explain, is that they allow them to fulfill their work and parenting obligations.
“It was a conscious decision to further our education. In the long run, it will have a positive impact on our earning power, but more importantly, we are doing it to set an example to our children, to tell them that education is a continuous process,” Tonny explains.
Faith believes that a successful marriage takes sacrifice. “Marriage is a selfless giving to your spouse and your children,” she says.
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Timothy Makumi, 40, Engineer, and Naomi Makumi, 38, Interior designer. Married for 11 years
“He tried to visit once or twice a week, but it wasn’t enough. I was lonely, and really missed his company,” she explains. She was working with a bank in Nairobi then, and decided to seek a transfer to Naivasha, so that she could be near her husband. Eight months later, the transfer was granted, and an ecstatic Naomi moved in with her husband. Ironically, two months later, Timothy was transferred back to Nairobi.
Luckily, Naomi’s employer was understanding, and agreed to transfer her back to Nairobi. Though they were together, just like they had wanted to be, their marriage was far from enjoyable. They had no idea how to resolve conflict. They both reacted to their disagreements with anger, rudeness and giving each other a cold shoulder, a reaction that would only foster more resentment and escalate the problem.
There was also frequent misunderstanding. Timothy singles out one incident that was a constant source of conflict between them. His arriving home late.
“I put in extra hours for extra pay, yet she would get upset when I got home late. Why couldn’t she understand that I was doing it for our welfare?”
He dismissed his wife as a nag, while she thought he wasn’t interested in spending time with her.
Consensus
Eventually, the situation became so bad, that they started to drift apart, sometimes going for hours without talking to each other.
Timothy says that this could have been avoided had he sought his wife’s opinion first.
“Sometimes, money isn’t the answer to everything,” he says.
Today, the couple makes an effort to consult each other before doing anything that could have an impact on their marriage. They have made it a rule to communicate openly — no half-truths or sugar-coatings. But this was a minor challenge compared to the one they faced when Naomi gave birth to their first child. “Teejay was born three years into our marriage. By then, we were used to being just the two of us and had a set routine which was suddenly disrupted when our son came along,” Naomi recalls.
Errand boy
Timothy especially found it difficult to adapt.
“Don’t get me wrong, I had looked forward to the Teejay’s birth, but I wasn’t prepared for the change that came with him,” Timothy explains.
Their house became a beehive of activity and just like that, he became an errand boy, a role he resented.
The feeling was especially overwhelming when he came home from work tired, only for Naomi to inform him that it was his turn to hold their son.
“To be honest, I looked forward to going to work, because this way, I would get to escape the endless demands, at least for a few hours.”
It took friends who had been down that route to help Timothy to appreciate that his wife needed help with the baby, that parenting, including lulling a crying baby to sleep, was a shared responsibility. When their second born, Natania, came along three years later, Timothy was a changed man who knew how to change a diaper, keep a baby entertained, and gladly stopped by a supermarket on his way home to buy diapers. However, the turning point for this couple came in 2003 when they were chosen among a group of young couples in their church to conduct premarital counselling.
“We knew then that we needed to first confront and deal with our issues so that we could be in a position to help other couples,” Naomi says.
They’re now enjoying marriage. They recently moved into their newly-constructed home, an achievement, they say, which couldn’t have been possible without each other’s help.
“When you work and do things together, you will progress in every area of your life — materially, emotionally, psychologically,” says Timothy.
To “keep the fire burning” the couple has a date night once a week when they “reconnect” over a meal. This, they say, reminds them to appreciate each other and helps them to focus on each other’s needs. On other days, they put their children to bed early and then unwind with a cup of tea.
They are convinced that marriage can succeed. All you need to find is a formula that works.
“If you’re patient, you’ll find practical solutions to your challenges. You also need to have patience, be willing to forgive and to sacrifice,” Naomi advises.
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