12/04/2025
"I lost my husband the day we arrived in Canada."
That was what I told my mother when she asked why I hadn’t called to tell her we had settled in. It wasn’t that he had died—no, death would have been easier. He was right there, breathing, moving, eating. But the man I married, the one who promised to love and cherish me, had disappeared the moment we stepped foot on foreign soil.
It had always been our dream to relocate. Canada was the promised land, a place where we could build a better life for ourselves and our children. We spent years saving, applying, and praying for this moment. When my husband, Tunde, finally secured his visa, we celebrated like we had won the lottery.
"This is it, Lara! We’ve made it!" he had said, lifting me in his arms as we danced around our tiny living room in Lagos.
But no one warned me. No one told me that moving abroad was not just about packing bags and boarding a plane. No one told me that marriages were buried in the cold foreign soil, that the man you married in Nigeria could become unrecognizable within months.
It started with little things.
At first, Tunde was frustrated. Back home, he had been an executive at a bank, respected, admired. But in Canada, no one cared about his title. His degree meant nothing here. He was just another immigrant with no "Canadian experience."
"I can't be doing these menial jobs, Lara. Me, a whole branch manager, working in a warehouse? It’s embarrassing."
So he sat at home, waiting for a miracle, while I took the first job I could find—cleaning offices at night. I worked like a machine, scrubbing floors while my husband scrolled endlessly through job postings, rejecting anything he thought was beneath him.
Then the blame started.
"If you had just stayed home instead of insisting on coming here, we wouldn’t be suffering like this!"
"You think you’re better than me now because you’re earning in dollars?"
When he wasn’t blaming me, he was out. At first, he said he was networking, meeting with "contacts." Then, he stopped bothering with excuses. He would leave the house in the afternoon and return the next morning, smelling of alcohol and cheap perfume.
The first time I asked him where