Tarisai Maregere
I sat on the edge of my sister’s bed, my hands shaking, my voice breaking before the words even came out. “I stayed because I thought he would change,” I whispered, eyes fixed on the floor. “But how do I stay in when he’s out late? How do I calm down knowing he is in the arms of another woman?”
My sister sighed, an old, tired sigh I had heard from the women in our family for generations. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders, as if preparing for a familiar script. “Stay, child,” she said softly. “All men are the same. We all go through it.”
I felt my chest tighten. “But when I question him,” I continued, “it’s a blow, a spit, a kick. Or he just walks away and sleeps somewhere else. A tear sheds every night. Should I go or should I stay?”
She didn’t look surprised. Maybe that’s what hurt the most. “Marriage is not easy,” she said. “Relationships are not easy. If you leave, will the next one be different? Have you ever had a boyfriend who didn’t cheat?”
Her words stung because they carried truth, truth shaped not by wisdom, but by wounds. Women in our community have learned to survive heartbreak the way others learn to breathe. Quietly. Automatically. Without complaint.
“I could stay and be quiet,” I murmured. “Then maybe all of this could feel like it’s not happening.” The thought scared me. Silence was supposed to protect me, but instead it felt like slowly drowning.
My sister reached for my hand. “You just need to endure,” she said. “As long as he provides, as long as the home stands, you learn to live with it. Men… they will always wander.”
But something inside me rebelled. I thought of the women I’d seen at clinics with bruises hidden beneath long sleeves, the ones who smiled painfully and said, I fell. I thought of my own reflection, eyes dimmer, spirit smaller.
“Endure?” I whispered. “Until when?”
She had no answer.
In that moment, I realised we were both victims of stories passed down to us, stories that teach women to shrink, to stay, to swallow pain as if it were a duty. And yet, something in me knew: love should not require disappearing.
As I left her room, one truth beat loudly in my chest;
Staying might save the home, but leaving might save me.
