The Vow and the Long Road: A Memoir of Marriage, Mistakes, and What I Want My Daughter to Know (eBook)

He has been to the altar three times. He has watched all three marriages end. This is the honest reckoning with why ? written so his daughter never has to learn the same lessons the way he did.

Titus Macharia grew up in Kenya, surrounded by marriages that simply did not break. His parents are married to this day. So were their parents, and theirs. He carried that inheritance into adulthood and across an ocean ? and then married, and married again, and again, and could not make any of it hold.

The Vow and the Long Road is his unflinching account of how a man can love sincerely and still get love wrong. It moves from the marriages he was born into, through three of his own that ended ? across cultures, through grief, through the loss of a brother and the long road back from his own darkness ? to a therapist's chair where he finally learns the lesson beneath all of them: you cannot heal a person who has not chosen to be healed, and you cannot fix another into being ready for you.

Honest about his own failures, generous toward the people in his story, and grounded in his Kenyan roots and his faith in plain human decency, this is a memoir about the difference between saying a vow once and choosing it every single morning. Above all, it is written for his daughter ? so that one day she can measure the people who come for her against the best of what her father learned, rather than the worst of what he did.

It ends, as the Rooted series always does, on hope.