ME HIM AND THE SLAP!

We were having dinner, I had just tried the roast chicken recipe I got from my sister last week and they turned out great. I introduced an interesting topic that I picked up from the chama meeting that I had had during the day about Men being better chefs than women especially with the meaty foods, maybe in my subtle way I was trying to engage him in a conversation or I was trying to persuade him to make his favorite beef stroganoff the following day. I was really hoping to achieve both. Brian wasn’t falling for my small talk and the conversation took another turn into awkward silence and hence I picked up another conversation of how next week is my sister’s birthday and that I was planning to host dinner for her and her hubby at my place. He didn’t budge into that story either, so I opted to follow trend of the awkward silence. I cannot recall when we actually got into dialogue again, but all I remember is when he mentioned a sensitive topic, I flipped. The exchange of words that took place after that was like a chaotic strike, all manner of words were uttered and really ugly confessions flew into the air like the grenades during war.

In a blink of an eye, my head hit the wall after a slap landed on my left cheek .It hit hard until I felt some sort
of numbness and literally went into a short black out before strong doses of headaches invaded my head in intervals of 3 seconds. I almost felt small leaks trickle down my thighs but that was just my imagination.I had never felt pain like that before except from the excruciating pain from the road accident I had last year but that’s totally different this was not an accident, it was an act of violence that had just happened from the man who has been my husband for the last three years.

Now this is when confusion sets in and you have no idea what to do after that. At that moment, my husband had walked out and slammed the door on his way out. From the look of things, I didn’t think he would be coming back anytime soon. However, I was still clueless of what to do.

The funny thing is that when it happens to someone else you have solutions right at your finger tips. ‘Walk away!’ ‘Leave him”Call the police’ but I still hadn’t made any move yet. “Should I call my mother?” I asked myself, but then I remembered how emotional my mother is, I wasn’t  ready to start calming her down. I thought maybe I should call my sister but something told me that my whole family will be involved before midnight even my 109 year old grandmother. “Should I call my dad? ” my husband will not survive the night and I would end up visiting my dad from jail and that wasn’t the plan. Who can I really have this conversation with, without it getting out of hand?

The next thing was panic. I panicked because this was the first Brian had ever raised his hand on me. If I go public with this, there’s no going back and salvaging our relationship will not be in our hands anymore. I didn’t want to judge him yet because I had never seen this side of him but now I was his victim.

When exactly do you raise alarm when violence strikes, Is it after the  very first slap that happens over a misunderstanding or do you wait for the next time because it has never happened before? How do you tell whether to walk away or stay and resolve the issue. This is not exactly a boyfriend of two months? It is a husband of three years married at the church. Is this when you bring out for better or worse ? It was just a slap, can you blame it on the spur of the moment? maybe you did go overboard with your insults but does that guarantee a slap really? And if that’s the case, who will slap the man when he goes overboard with his actions? How exactly do you solve the situation of the first slap? Is that even normal to be slapped? Where do you draw the line?