Atlantic Post

In life, be responsible for your own happiness. Yes, we all need someone to lean on, but we shouldn’t overstay our leaning on other people’s shoulders.

We the 21st century parents need to groom, nurture, or prepare our children to be largely independent and be responsible for their own happiness and well-being. By this, no husband will give an excuse that because his wife couldn’t wake up 4am to cook for him, then he resorted to eating a colleague’s foods at the office. What stops him from doing the cooking himself?

All my roommates in my university days, would attest to it, that Adeolowo would readily take care of his meals from start to finish. In fact, I did not borrow any cookingware while on campus — I had all I ever needed to cook. The same experience as a Bachelor, and this eventually transcends to my marriage (I will keep that private). There are people on this space that will corroborate these claims.

Be responsible for yourself. Don’t say because he or she didn’t do it for you, then you have to hang on another person. What stops you from doing it for yourself and by yourself? If you don’t know how, learn. Domestic roles are not gender-based. I hate to see husbands lord it over their wife that her place is in the kitchen. The kitchen is for everyone who has a stomach. Even rodents will go there to sort itself out.

Despite that fact that my wife have been waking up by 4am since we got married over eight years ago, the chores including cooking are not tagged to a particular person. If the both of us can’t do the cooking, I in particular will snack outside, instead of tasting another person’s food, something I never did even in school days. It is gross indiscipline for a married man to depend on a male colleague’s food, not to talk of a female colleague.

Some recently used the analogy of a male colleague’s car to drop her off at home every evening just because her husband wouldn’t come to pick her up from the office. My response was; what if that your colleague doesn’t have a car, would you not still find your way home? And there is no rule that says your husband must come to pick you up from the office in the evening, unless it is just a gesture from him, not the entitlement mentality.

My Bishop would say; what you don’t want you don’t watch. Unfortunately, many people have given rooms for the temptation to take place, and when it finally does, they blame it on the devil. The Devil that is not omnipresence. The Devil can only be aware of what you made her to be aware of.

Several years ago, just before I got my first job, there was this married young wife whom I had regular physical chats with in the same neighborhood. It got to a point she said: “if not for the Holy Spirit, myself and her would have been sleeping together.” Sincerely I pretended as if I didn’t hear her, but I had to reduce our regular conversation afterwards. It was from that day I realized that women are moved by who talks to them regularly.

Mind you, all these social media donors are largely males, and they are doing so to pass a message across to the female folks, not because it is coming from genuine hearts. It is hypocrisy-induced gifts. If not, what have they done to alleviate the stress and struggles of single mothers we see regularly on our streets and junctions, who wakes up as early 4am to prepare the yam and akara they want to fry, in order to make a living? Have they given them a car, house or even raise business funds for them? Hypocrisy everywhere.