The first time I realized Dad was cheating was when I was ten years old, well, almost ten years old. It was two days to my birthday and Mom had just thrown Aunt Ndidi’s red box into the bush opposite our house. It was a pity because I liked Aunt Ndidi; she always bought biscuits for me on her way home from work and she once whispered to me that I was her favorite because I looked so much like Dad.
 
You should know, Aunt Ndidi was not my real Aunt, she was just someone who came to do IT at Dad’s workplace and since she didn’t have anywhere to stay and she was from our village, Dad brought her to stay with us, it was his house after all. So as Mom was crying and talking to Aunt Lovelyn (who by the way, is my real Aunt) on the phone and telling her something about a hotel and every Wednesday, I was pondering on my sudden loss of late night snacks.
 
The first time I found out Mom was cheating was 5 years ago. We had travelled to the village for Christmas and she had taken us out to a bar one evening. We were ordering Malts and Suya when I noticed she was cutting eyes with Obinna who worked as a manager at the bar. I had just learnt what ‘cutting eyes’ meant because my cousin Nneka who was in the university spent the last summer break with us had used it whenever we went to church and the youth president started looking towards our direction, mostly her direction, a lot then started paying us a lot of visits at home to ‘ welcome’ Nneka fully into the fold.
 
Anyway, while we were eating Suya and sipping Malt, Mom said she had to go to the bathroom. She came back 30 minutes later with a flushed look, a wrongly buttoned blouse and no lipstick on again.
 
The first time my sister cheated on her boyfriend was on a Saturday. I remember because I was searching for what to wear to church the next day when she had come home looking really remorseful and tense then she went to her room and started singing the type of Christian songs that Aunt Julie who is ‘looking for husband’ sings, that’s when I knew something was not right. So I knocked on her room and immediately she opened up she blurted out ‘ I’m a sinner. I cheated on Mike and I enjoyed it’.
 
It was really unexpected because she was the one who acted out and held strong grudges against Dad and Mom’s adulterous lives. She was also the one who was astonished on how rational I took it and how I even formed fast friendships with Dad’s mistresses and Mom’s boy toys. Secretly, I felt a bit smug but my sister looked like a child who had just lost her innocence so I joined hands with her as we prayed for forgiveness.
 
So the first time James my boyfriend (ex boyfriend now) told me he couldn’t ever cheat on me, I just smiled and didn’t say anything about it. Two week later, I caught him with Ngozi with the big butt that sells credit opposite his house in a very uncompromising position which involved a lot of sweat and no clothes on.
 
Three weeks before my wedding, I found myself driving to the house of my fiancé’s best man to do exactly what I didn’t know yet. You see, my husband-to-be was outside the country for a business trip that would last for half a year so most of the preparations for the wedding were done by his best friend and so in between reception hall searching and cake tasting, sparks began to fly. We had began to share long stares and I sometimes found myself looking at the bulge on his pants and having thoughts a good woman shouldn’t be having. He knew what was happening and he knew that I knew that he knew and he seemed perfectly fine with it. In fact, he was the one who ‘jokingly’ suggested we have sex and ‘get it over with’.
 
The plan was to go to his house and get everything over with before the wedding. It was just going to be casual sex, nothing more; nothing less. I had not cheated before (not because I had made a firm decision not to cheat but because the opportunity had never come up) but it seemed really easy if everyone I basically knew could do it. So I texted him that I was coming over to ‘get things over with’ so that he knew exactly what I meant.
 
As I drove to his house, my mind wandered back to how the act of cheating had affected me and the people I loved. How my parents’ marriage was not really a marriage but just two people who lived together because they were afraid of what society would say or how my two brothers’ changed girls like seasons because they believed everyone cheated or even how my sister’s carried so much hatred and guilt around because she thought cheating ran in our genes and she clearly could not escape it.
 
So when I pulled up at his house, my mind was eighty percent changed on what I was about to do. I knocked on his door, when he opened up, I stared at him for one minute, made up the last twenty percent of my mind and walked back to my car. Two weeks later, I stood at the airport waiting for my fiancé to arrive. Quite sure, I soon saw him and a stunning white lady clinging to him like her life depended on it. Surprisingly, she wasn’t carrying only her luggage, she was also carrying a pregnancy that was at least five months old. The same man that swore he hated white women.