Fixed about my son’s graduation

Biggie,

Of late I have been following graduation ceremonies and I am really getting worried. Well, I went through the process in those days at the Chirunga Campus but the dilemma I am facing now, as my son’s day to put on the gown and the mortar board draws close.

Tell you what, it’s not that I was doing the guerilla kind of thing often with the one who became my husband but we got so close as we met at the College God loved the most as we were meeting in our economics and sociology classes.

As fate would have it, we got married two years after graduation. It was all rosy until things started getting out of hand if you know what I mean. When we got the divorce processes finalised, our son was only four.

Now, my son is soon going to graduate. I moved on with my life and I am married to another man. My ex is also married.

Please help me, should I invite my husband to my son’s graduation? For that matter, can his father attend that auspicious occasion with his wife? Besides all that, can the four of us have a photo with my son? Or should it only be me, his father together with me.

I am just lost and I feel like Oliver Twist.

Via Whatsapp

Dear Olivia,

Why should a mother like you feel like a twisted Oliver? By the way, happy Mother’s Day to you. Be proud you brought a son into this world that is moving into the echelons of success. Enatu ana awo akungokhalira bibida!

I have seen better days to know that this kind of quandary happens. It is a question that can be raised at weddings and funerals as well. If your child was a daughter and she was getting married, would it be her step father or real father walking her up the aisle? What if you were dead, would you shake in the grave if your ex was on the list of those laying wreaths?

But then, your story has some blank spaces. In the first place who was paying your son’s school fees? If you went through the normal process, how was it settled about issues of alimony? If you tell me you don’t know what alimony is, I will ask what were you doing in college to still use the child support terminology?

All things being equal, as you also learned in Economics 101 about ceteris paribus, the child has a right to know and be respected by both parents. Now he has a set of four parents!

This, in all simplicity, means all of you can attend the graduation ceremony. Your concern seems to revolve around the photo session. While we are at it, can they start telling these photographers to be paying some fee to the university to take these HD photos?

But I digress.

The problem of a photo session is simple to solve. Having the four of you with the son in one photo would be a complicated complication. You can talk to your ex how that can be arranged. But then, your current husband will wonder why you too are getting into touch again!

So there. It will all depend on how your two families will take it.

You can have four shots. One featuring the boy with your ex and his wife. Another one with you and his step father. And yet another with both sets of parents. For memory’s sake. And that will make the son inspired never to get divorced to avoid this kind of trauma and calamity.

The bottom line is: Talk about it. Wina asadzadzidzimuke.