Dearly Beloved

I went to a wedding today.

Doing so was a nice addition to the long weekend we’re enjoying over here this week. It was fun getting all dressed up. Wearing things I only rarely wear. Choosing the right shoes for the outfit, the right earrings, and the right shade of lipstick.

At the venue, I sat in one of the rows in the little garden, taking it all in. The wedding color scheme was burnt orange and chocolate brown. It suddenly occurred to me that I should’ve known this already, since the wedding invitation was printed out in the same colors. It just goes to show that I haven’t attended many weddings in the last decade.

I looked around, taking in all the details and wondering how much time it must have taken the couple, their family, and friends, to pull everything together: the bouquets of orange and cream roses; rose petals in the same colors mixed with hay and sprinkled all along the center aisle in anticipation of the bridal party’s grand entrance; the white chairs wrapped up in chocolate brown bows; the Afrocentric twist to the bridesmaids’ gowns and groomsmen’s outfits; the hairstyles of the bride and her bridesmaids (they all had braids); the cuteness of the little flower girls as they walked down the aisle, doing their best to keep permanent smiles on their faces; the earnest photographers and videographers, doing all sorts of acrobatics in a bid to get the best shots.

I was touched by the ceremony.

I paused for a few minutes, trying to put my finger on what it was, exactly, that touched me. I realized it was the refreshing simplicity of the event, and the innocence and purity of the couple. This was a young couple, just starting out in life, with a world of possibilities ahead of them. They pooled together what they had for their special day, and their family and friends were there to witness the beginning of their journey together. It was so precious to sense and watch their excitement and love.

They haven’t hurt each other yet, I thought to myself suddenly. That’s what it is. That’s what makes this moment so beautiful.  

There’s something really beautiful about a couple that hasn’t hurt each other yet (and that hopefully never will in a major way). It was just so touching to see.

And those beautiful words that traditional wedding vows start out with! Like I said, I hadn’t been to a wedding in forever, so I paid heightened attention to this one. The pastor began to speak those words and we all sat back and basked in the familiarity of it all:

Dearly Beloved: We are gathered together here in the sight of God – and in the face of this company – to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is commended to be honorable among all men; and therefore is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly – but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and solemnly. Into this holy estate these two persons present now come to be joined. If any person can show just cause why they may not be joined together – let them speak now or forever hold their peace.

And then the vows, which both bride and groom committed to unflinchingly:

Do you …… take …… to be your lawfully wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance, in the holy estate of matrimony? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, to cherish and continually bestow upon her your heart’s deepest devotion, forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?

Then, the couple read out their own, individual vows to one another. Like I said, too, too cute. I was really impressed by their personal vows and that they took the time to write them down and declare them publicly to us all. The personal vows were so moving that I saved as much from them as I could on my cell phone, my thumb moving furiously over the dial pad as I tried to type out everything. I thought it would be great to share some excerpts in a blog post, then I thought about it again and decided not to. I’ve just deleted the draft message I saved of their words. They were their words to one another, meant for each other and those that they invited to their wedding. I will say, though, that their words were heart-felt, poignant, and sometimes humorous. The bride and groom were totally comfortable with one another.

This is a couple that’ll make it, I thought.

When it was time to kiss the bride, the groom comically made a big show of things: rolling up his sleeves, pulling up his socks, and tightening the grip of his belt. It was terribly, terribly cute and we onlookers laughed in delight. He planted a nice, French kiss on his bride's lips for a few seconds too long (for ‘conservative’ audiences, anyway), and we rejoiced with him and his new bride.

They sat together afterwards as husband and wife, brimming with palpable excitement as the pastor gave the sermon. Grinning at each other in slight disbelief and whispering to one another. I could imagine everything just being a blur to them both on this exciting day.

They craned their necks to make eye contact with me across the garden, and grinned at me simultaneously. I grinned back.

Here’s to you, young couple. Wishing you all the best.

Little Things

The children have a particular phone that I keep for them – ‘the Nigerian phone,’ we call it. Their Dad bought it in Nigeria (along with a Nigerian SIM card) in order for him to be able to make cheap phone calls to them whenever he wants, or whenever they want to speak to him.

For the first few months after we got it, I just handed it over to them and told them what it was for. That didn’t work very well, though. No one could ever remember where it was. No one ever remembered to charge it, either. And so that would mean no phone calls.

Their Dad expressed frustration about this a few times. So I decided to keep the phone in my room. It’s usually on my bedroom mantel piece, somewhere behind my head when I’m in bed. I also took on the responsibility of keeping it charged this year, and of rushing to hand it over to one of the children when it rings, reminding them to pass it on to their sibling for some talking time, too, when they’re done.

Still, we haven’t gotten it down to a science. He still complains periodically that he’s been calling and can’t get through, and is convinced the phone has been off. I still insist it’s been on and no calls have come in. We conclude that maybe there are some network problems that we aren’t aware of.

Or, the last child that was on the phone forgets to bring it back to my room and it lays somewhere – maybe hidden under a couch cushion, until the battery dies and no one has any idea where it is.

Sometimes, he calls when I’m at work to point out that the phone isn’t on (like today). Again, I say the phone is on, as I charged it and turned it on myself. I point out that although the children are at home today, maybe they’re just not in my room and so can’t hear it ringing. I suggest that he keep trying. Other times, ask why he doesn’t simply call our son on his ‘real’ phone (his Kenyan phone), and ask him to charge or turn on the Nigerian phone so they can chat. Or that he send his son an email or FB message. He doesn’t seem to like these options, as I noticed he never tries them out.

These are some of the teeny incidents that are part of the divorced life when you have kids, and if you’re not opposed to having your ex involved in his children’s lives.

Sounds pretty simple and banal. But there are undercurrents of apprehension – at least in my situation/on my part. I feel like I did a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the relationship when we were married, and this is a pattern that I do not want to repeat, particularly not now that we’re divorced. I know that marriage is ‘work,’ and I understand why this is the case; I mean, any relationship that you want to preserve is ‘work,’ really. But I don’t want my divorce to be characterized by the same kind of labor.

It’s a challenge, though, because my former husband and I, while not being ‘friends,’ are not ‘enemies,’ either. We’re more like casual acquaintances that don’t know each other too well, as a childhood friend of mine observed recently. After having an opportunity to watch us interact for a while, she marveled at this fact. She said something to the effect of: ‘If I were in your situation, I would either still be in love with the person, or really hate them. But you guys are just totally neutral. You’re just like acquaintances. I was looking for some sort of emotion between you guys – anything – and there was absolutely nothing!’

I laughed and remarked that maybe we were both just really good actors.

She was right, though, in sensing that there is neither romantic love between us, nor great anger or hatred. I mean, I do get angry when certain things occur or when certain memories come back to me. I just don’t get angry ‘enough,’ nor often enough for anger to make its mark as a major emotion. Maybe my emotions would be more volatile if we had more contact. We actually have very little interaction.

I’ve just remembered that an older, father-figure person I used to know in my 20s once asked me what the opposite of love was.

‘Hatred?’ I offered.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘The opposite of love is indifference.’

Whoa! I thought.

But I can’t honestly say that what I, personally, feel is indifference. I don’t know what to call it, really. All I know is that there is this underlying sense of apprehension on the rare occasion when we do have to interact; a constant feeling that I need to have my guard up, or watch my back. A feeling that I need to have all my senses in a heightened state and be prepared for anything. An ‘unsafe’ and unrelaxed sort of feeling (I don’t think ‘unrelaxed’ is a word, but …).

There are other minor things that I sometimes contend with. Well, maybe they’re not minor after all. I guess I’m just treating them as minor for now because I’m not sure how to classify them. Like, on the rare occasion when I take pictures of the children, I wonder if I should send their Dad some copies.

The last time I did so was a month before we appeared in divorce court. Our daughter’s school pictures had just come home and, without giving it a second thought, I packed copies for her father since I knew I’d be seeing him. I remember now that he was touched to receive them.

Since then, however, I have always stopped short of doing that again. I think it’s more because the only way to do that right now would be via email, and an email from me would be so unexpected that I fear it might be mistaken for a sign that I want to open up some sort of conversation. Of course, I could be totally wrong, but I’m not ready to take that chance yet.

Same thing goes for report cards. Do I offer to send the children’s report cards to him, or at least tell him about them, when he doesn’t ask? I ask myself that question sometimes, but have always concluded that there’s no point. I have no reason to withhold the information if he asks for it, but I also feel like I have no reason to provide the information if he doesn’t.

What would be the point? Except perhaps to encourage him to be as involved as he can, and to make him feel like they’re still his kids – because they are. But again, this is not a job that I want. I suppose I would feel obligated, though, if he contributed toward their schooling in some way. I mean, it would be really bad of me to overlook sharing this sort of info in that case, whether he asks for the report cards or not.

This internal struggle came up again when one of the children needed to have a procedure done. Fortunately, my children are pretty healthy. My son never seems to get sick. My daughter is really sensitive to weather changes, but never really gets anything more than periodic colds, coughs, and mild fevers, which are easily handled. But there was this one time when she had to have a procedure done. The procedure was investigative – nothing scary; but she had to go under a general anesthetic, and that unnerved me a bit. For some reason, I still wasn’t sure if I should let her father know. I eventually did, a couple of days before the procedure date.

I wasn’t terribly thrilled about the response I got. There was nothing ‘bad’ about it. I do believe he was concerned and that he loves his children. But I felt like there was a tinge (okay, more than a tinge) of smugness, and this made me recoil. A sort of you-see-I-told-you-you-can’t-do-without-me air in what he said initially and how he said it. I wanted to say out loud: ‘This isn’t about you and me right now. This is about our daughter.’

Fortunately, she hasn’t had to go through anything like that again since then.

Today, when he called to find out what was happening with ‘the Nigerian phone,’ he started out by asking how things were going. Specifically, he asked: ‘How is the house?’

I hesitated. “By ‘the house,’ what do you mean exactly?’

‘I mean, how is everything?’

‘Oh … well … everything is fine.’

In my mind, I was thinking: What if everything weren’t fine? What would you do about it?

And then I caught myself and chided myself for over-thinking a simple greeting. It’s not uncommon to ask people how they are in a bid to be polite, without really expecting/wanting to hear exactly how they are. So I decided not to sweat the small stuff in this case.

Now, I just need to keep practicing this. 

Wishful Thinking

I still get the odd phone call.

Phone calls of shock and disbelief from people who had heard years ago, but are still coming to terms with it – or who are just struck by the finality of it after bumping into one of us.

I got one such call yesterday and found myself negotiating what has become a familiar, dual role. I’ve had a lot of time to get accustomed to my new reality. In less than three months, it will be a whopping six years since the separation, and two years since the divorce.

Six years is a long time, and for me, this amount of time has been more than adequate for me to make sense of the past and get over it to the extent possible. We were separated for so long that I don’t feel ‘newly-divorced.’ But it’s different for others who haven’t seen either of us in a while.  Still a lot to absorb and try and get over, I mean. And so when I do get those traumatized phone calls, I find myself playing the role of consoler, while trying to avoid getting swallowed up by the trauma myself. I feel obligated to mourn with those who mourn, over something that I’m personally done mourning about. And so I listen politely and make all the right noises, and genuinely feel bad that they’re feeling bad, and feel bad along with them that the marriage had to come to this awful, screeching halt. But I do so as someone who has already mourned. There’s a difference, you know, between someone that ‘just heard’ and someone that heard long ago.

In situations like this, I always tend to use my father’s death as a reference point, but I guess that’s because it’s the one death that has had the greatest impact on me. Even though next month will make it seven years since he died, I still get phone calls from people who have just heard, or who heard long ago but never quite had a chance to reach out – or wanted to, but didn’t quite know how. At such times, I comfort the distraught caller, fully understanding the rush of emotions, having experienced them myself time and again. I honor their grief by giving them time to express their shock and disbelief. It would be easy enough to hurry them along, comforting them with the assurance that all is well and that my mother, siblings, and I are doing well despite the circumstances. But that’s the last thing I want to do. I allow them to pay their respects to that which is honorable. (And marriage is no less honorable.) But as I do this, I’m careful not to transport myself back to where I was seven years ago when I first got the news of my father’s death. I mean, it’s never really over. But it’s over. I will always mourn that horrible incident. But I’m a mourner who has already mourned.

The same thing applies to the marriage I once had. As I comfort those who mourn, I don’t want this practice to take me steps backward. Oftentimes, in people’s well-meaning minds, there is this deep hope for a turn-around in the present state of affairs, and this hope is usually expressed very clearly.  And so, I have to negotiate these conversations very carefully, not wanting to upset the mourner further, but wanting to care for myself, too. I see not dealing with and living in reality as particularly bad for my health.

The analogy between these two important deaths in my life (the death of my father and the death of my marriage) is something that I can go on and on about. There is a major point that sets them apart, though: No one expects my Dad to miraculously rise from the dead. 

Holding Back

Holding back is something that I think I’ve managed to do quite well over the course of my life. I make it sound like if this is some sort of achievement. Well, it is in some ways, and in others, it’s not necessarily.  I had a Skype chat with a good friend of mine about a month ago – one of those good friends that are constantly scheming or threatening to set me up romantically with someone, worried that my current life is too boring. Anyway, the conversation made me quickly go over the list of people I’d dated in the past and think about what those relationships were like. We talked about the two things that stood out for me as a result of conjuring up this list: 1) the list was short, and 2) all the relationships (except for one, which lasted two years) were short. With the one exception, they all lasted no more than a couple of months. It occurred to me that it was all about holding back, even then. Holding back from exploring each relationship further, from waiting to see how things would develop, from giving the relationship time, because it seemed clear (either before the relationship ever began, or a few weeks into it) that it couldn’t possibly last. So, why bother? I would wonder, and that would be the beginning of the end for me. Even in the two-year relationship, there was evidence of holding back (which eventually led to it dying a natural death).

This isn’t an account of regret, though. Merely a new observation. I spent much of my life holding back and holding out. Holding out for what I thought would be the real thing. I never saw the point of investing time and energy in relationships that clearly couldn’t be more than temporary.

This inclination kept me out of a lot of unnecessary trouble (thank goodness!), but it did little to enhance my level of wisdom.  As I’ve alluded to before in many previous blog posts, ‘getting wisdom’ is a whole other process.

There’s a young person in my life who has a slightly different approach to her relationships: some holding back, but without necessarily holding out.  Because why hold out for the unknown (my words, not hers – just my personal analysis of her approach)? In other words, why not enjoy the process of getting to know the person that’s in your life right now, regardless of where it’s meant to lead? Why not take interest in a person simply because they’re a person, whether a relationship with that person will lead you to the altar or not? Sounds quite reasonable, actually, but it’s a completely new thought for me.

Hmmm … I have no personal answers right now; I need to think about this some more. These are just some fresh thoughts for further consideration. In all your ‘getting,’ though, get wisdom – whatever your stance on the issue.  

No Words

The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men [women, children] are taken away, and no one understands ... (Isaiah 57:1, NIV)

Why I will be using a pen name

After my divorce, I did not revert to my maiden name.

One of the things that the publisher, the editor, and I have had to deliberate over has to do with the name that I will be publishing under. Although the publisher acknowledged that marketing non-fiction can be tricky using a pseudonym, his first instinct was that this particular book should be able to circumvent those problems. The editor, on the other hand, was of the opinion that I had to use my real name – even if it meant resorting to the use of my maiden name instead. In his words: ‘I feel that the author should write the book in her own name. Writing under a pseudonym will make the book difficult to market and does not align with the author’s core message of dealing with divorce in an up-front way.’

We went back and forth over this and I was almost convinced to just go ahead and use my maiden name after all. I would have loved to, actually, but it didn’t feel quite ‘right.’ In the end, Bill (the editor) said it was ultimately my call.

A divorce memoirist whose work I have admired since my own divorce agreed with Bill. As she put it: ‘I never would have considered publishing my book under a pseudonym.  It was extremely important to be fully truthful, and I think readers would have had a difficult time trusting me if I hid behind a fake name.’

We had this conversation several months after I thought I’d settled the name issue for good. Her words made me really question myself, though, which was a good thing, as this is a decision I’ll have to carry with me forever.  In addition to feeling like using a pen name would prevent the book from ‘ringing true,’ she also brought up the point that the use of a pen name seemed like a means of protecting my ex-husband from the consequences of the choices he made – a means of preserving the status quo (which is that, men tend to be unfaithful to their wives and there’s nothing women can do about it, and that’s that).

Interestingly, like Bill, she also advised that I steer away from saying certain things – that I find a way to allude to infidelity, for instance, without directly making any accusations in this regard.  In Bill’s case, he gave the advice that any book editor would: that I couldn’t use the words of identifiable people in the book without getting their written permission.

Well, what’s a girl to do, then?

I resolved these issues in my head on a recent long-haul flight which provided plenty of time to just sit in one spot and think.

I do not at all feel that using a pen name takes away from the authenticity of what I have to say. I have never felt so. This blog actually started out (and was maintained for quite a long time) without an association with any name at all. I’m convinced that the fact that I was anonymous (and started out thinking that I always would be) actually freed me to delve into some things that I might not have, had I started out using my name. And since I have neither sought nor obtained permission from my children’s father to use his words, not using my real name just makes sense to me. No one’s privacy can be protected 100%, but the pen name gives a certain measure of protection.

I have hung on to using snippets of certain conversations, and certain words of others, including my ex. I’ll just have to take that risk. What would the Running into The Other Woman post be without the ‘classic’ sentence: ‘On behalf of my family, I just want to apologize to her for all the pain that she has suffered as a result of being falsely accused’??? That sentence is probably etched in my memory forever. Unlike it the past, I think of it today without bitterness, but I don’t think I will ever come to remember it without complete amazement. In my mind, that is one sentence that holds much of that particular story together. Without that sentence, I wouldn’t have fallen apart in public. I would have succeeded in holding onto to my usual, cool, calm demeanor throughout that fateful meeting. Without that sentence, I don’t think the reader would have gotten to see just how deep the hurt was, just how far below the belt the blow was.

Well, who cares? So what if I was deeply hurt once? Or twice, or more?

I think women might care. I am not suggesting that this sort of thing happens in every African woman’s relationship, but whether it does or not, I think it’ll make us all sit up and be more proactive about creating the sort of relationships we want, to the extent that it is within our power. 

I think men might care. Because communication is often such a huge problem in relationships, men often have no inkling just what kind of pain that one poor decision can inflict on their partner. I hope that many of the stories will give them a glimpse into just what it is like. A glimpse into just how much havoc a wrong decision made in a split second can cause.

I think the Church might care. These stories are mainly about the demise of a Christian marriage. They represent just one of many Christian marriages hanging by a thread or already destroyed. I hope that in laying it all out, that the Church will be forced to look at the remains of one marriage (mine), and glean something from the autopsy in order to help other struggling marriages. I hope that the Church will gain a sense of how to help out a bit better, of what to do in general, by reading my story. 

Some dear friends of mine (a married couple) also made me pause and think about my motives for moving forward with this book. Not that they were discouraging me from doing so at all; they were just playing devil’s advocate – just to be sure that I was clear about things in my own mind. Having a blog is one thing, they said. But having a book is a whole other ball game. Why are you writing this book?

I’m writing this book because I was meant to write it. Call it denial, but my mind is simply unable to accept the idea that my experiences in marriage and divorce have all been for nothing. There has got to be a reason for the path that I have walked. 

I’m writing this book because when I was struggling in a difficult marriage, and then, navigating the waters of divorce, I desperately wanted to read about the experience of others to help me with mine, and I couldn’t find any books by anyone like me.

I’m writing this book because I have finally found a form of ‘labor’ that I would gladly give myself to even if I weren’t paid for it.

I’m writing this book because the chance to do so essentially fell in my lap. It came to me more than I had to hunt for it. And now that I think about it, the best things in my life have always been those things that weren’t a big struggle to obtain or to make happen.

I’m writing this book because the reactions to the blog made me realize there’s a need for it – not just for the divorced, but for the married and never married. I have written frankly about quite a number of things that I wish someone had been able to tell me in plain English before I got married. I have written about things I wish I had known when I was in a marriage. I have also focused on the realities of divorce – the ‘good,’ the ‘bad,’ and the ‘ugly.’ Few books can actually be for everybody, but I have written a book that I know will be for some people. And that’s enough.

I’m writing this book because I have to keep on keeping on. To keep moving. Although I wouldn’t say I’ve experienced it myself, necessarily, I think divorce can have a pretty stagnating effect. I’m struck by one of the last things that Efuru said in Flora Nwapa’s book by the same title: I have ended where I began …  I can see how easily that could turn out to be the case for any divorced person, but I reject this as my personal testimony. There’s a lot to do out there, and so I’m ‘doing.’ I can’t end up where I began. It just not possible – I’ve come too far. I'm writing this book because I sense that the book's ending will open up a new chapter in my own life. 

There’s one more reason why I will be using a pseudonym. It is, in fact, the first reason that came to mind when I decided not to use my real name: My day job involves a staggering amount of a very different kind of writing that is supposed to have little or nothing to do with how I ‘feel.’ When the publisher expressed interest in turning the blog into a book, my first thought centered on the need to keep some distance between the book and the job that I earn a living from. I’m not sure why that was an immediate thought; it’s hard to explain. I suppose it boils down to the fact that, for each type of writing, I want to be judged as objectively as possible (since writers are always judged, no matter what). I don’t want the judgment pronounced over the first type of writing I do, to cloud the reader’s judgment of the second type (if that makes sense).

And so, I will be using a pen name.

p.s. – Excuse the disjointed arguments and any typos. Very sleepy right now. Night …

Thank you

In the next month or two, I am going to have to take down most of the rmj blog content for the year 2012, and just about three or so posts from 2013. The book publisher had told me that this time would come, but I hadn’t expected it to come so quickly. Where has the year 2013 gone??

I’ve been meaning to blog about the process of turning the blog into a book. I have just had such a crazy past three months or so that it’s been impossible. That doesn’t mean I won’t do it, though! This post is one step in that direction, actually.

In a nutshell, the manuscript has been reviewed by the editor (more about his suggestions for the book later; and YAY, I've finally taken the time to figure out how to insert a hyperlink!) and has recently been passed on to a copy editor who will clean up all my grammatical errors and typos, etc. I allowed the manuscript to be sent to the copy editor, but pointed out that I still hadn’t written an ‘Acknowledgments’ section. With the distraction of work, I didn’t quite have the presence of mind to tackle that, and so planned to do so later. I also wanted to take the time to go back to the comments section of each blog post to draw up a list of all the commenters so far. If there’s anyone I need to acknowledge, surely it would be the readers that I’m able to identify because of their comments. Well, ‘identify’ is not quite the word because out of all those that have commented since March 2012 when this blog was set up (excluding anonymous commenters), I only know 2 of these readers in person. So I can only ‘identify’ people by the names they’ve chosen to use.

I reviewed every single rmj blog comment yesterday in order to make my list. Although I will be taking down most of the blog posts, I will be saving every single comment, given my fetish for words of affirmation. I had to blink back tears as I re-read many of these comments. I guess because of how far I have come, by God’s grace, along this journey – and how people that I have never even met have come along on this journey with me, anyhow.  What an experience this has been. Who would’ve ever thought, when I finally decided to write down my rambling thoughts, that this simple act would begin to take on a life of its own?

There’ve been times that I’ve wanted to hold back the process, frankly – to rein it in so that it didn’t move too fast for me, or so that I could even change my mind before things went too far. There’ve been times that I’ve wanted to chicken out from moving ahead with publishing the book. Why am I doing this? I’ve sometimes asked myself. I didn’t start out even imagining I would write a book. Why is it important?

I have definitely had moments of doubt, but reading the comments again reminded me of why it’s important. I’ll be blogging a little bit about this topic this week, come hell or high water (so do stay tuned).

There’s this chilling quote by Elbert Hubbard: ‘To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.’ In developing this book, I realize that I will be opening myself up to a number of things, and criticism is only one of them. But I’m more scared of leaving this earth having done nothing, said nothing, and been nothing. I always have been.

I want to say a warm ‘Thank you’ to you all: those that have visited, those that have lurked (I’m a professional lurker myself), those that have signed up to receive the blog posts via email, blogger, etc., those that have shared the posts with others, those that have linked to the blog (I'm discovering each of you slowly but surely), and those that have commented anonymously. I would particularly like to thank those that have commented out in the open; here are their names/pseudonyms:

Ezeji

Alexa

Doris

Seyidott

Alive in STL

Nene

Adaeze Ibechukwu

Michael

PradaPrincipal

Ekene

Rachel Faltus

Bridget

Engagement Ring Company

Demashi

Oluwayemisi

Jemima

Thomas Watson

Nzilani

Unknown

Affy (where are you, Affy??)

Chinny

thewordsmythe

Becky P

Jero

Creative Works

Kitchen Butterfly

LagosMums

Casio

Merrykiks

Tosin

Seke

Laine Harwell

Lucas Boles

Jermaine Gardner

Platinum7

Lohi

Sugabelly

Kiki

Allan Morais

Nkaytchee

Albert Gates

Myne Whitman

Chizy K

Ichie

Many, many thanks.