The Trey Walters story of infidelity and redemption – Part I

Trey Walters was a married father of two very young sons in 2019 when things started to spiral downwards. He was in his sixth year of marriage and, while there were the usual bumps, there was nothing to say that the marital bond would break any time soon. Still, he found himself in a “valley” – the most difficult time in his life.

He was submerged in debt, there were constant hospital visits with one of his sons, who had an inexplicable illness. His other son had a very serious speech impediment. Then, in 2020, the same year his father passed, COVID-19 swung around distributing the virus all over the place.

Walters was eventually infected by the virus, at a time when there was much tension between himself and his wife. They had hit financial rockbottom, and another immediate family had a health scare. It was now 2021, and COVID-19 was raging, gripping the country, partially shutting it down, and turning people’s lives upside down.

Walters’ life situation , too, was not spared. The marital tension in which he existed heightened day by day to the point where he and his wife did not speak with each other. She was not happy that he could not take care of the family as he used to.

“Things got really dark from 2020 … . Some women handle stress different from men … . Sometimes they put pressure on men to make you feel like you are failing as a man … . You want the support at that time … because that is the time when you truly and really need support. … She was getting frustrated when the bills were not being paid,” Walters shared with The Gleaner. Then he discovered that her friends were telling her things that were dissuading her from remaining in the relationship.

“And this is common, for, guess what? Many women destroy their relationships simply because of what friends influence them to do and, if she is not strongwilled, then that’s that,” he also said. “I think she was more committed to her emotions.”

Things rolled into a “big ball of mess” and they started to resent each other. “Everything was now an argument, the simplest of thing was an argument … I pretty much I felt I was alone, felt like it was me against the world at that time,” he explained. But, there was some amount of joy. That was when his sons would lie on his chest when he returned from work.

But, things were not pretty at work either. Based on the nature of his job he was standing in the sun from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. His demeanour and his attitude however belied the extreme stress that he was undergoing generally, because he was socialised to bear pressure, even though “pressure buss pipe”.

His mental health was now compromised, “shaky”, and he was in the doldrums – an emotional turmoil that embraced his entire being. He tried marijuana, which the seller refused to sell him initially, knowing that he was not a ganja smoker. He confessed, however, that it did nothing for him except to open up his appetite, make him “hungry and still stressed”.

The couple by now were not on speaking terms. And he was trying not to lose his mind when “everything seemed to be tumbling down”. He didn’t want to share what he was going through, so he held on to it, he said. Frequent visits to Kingston’s waterfront spending hours to simply sit and stare at the calm water, was one way to ease the pain.

“I used to ask myself why so many mad men dung a town, and mi realise seh, dem did jus reach a stage wheh dem couldn’t hold it no more,” he shared. “Whatever weight they were feeling, pushed them to a place and they couldn’t find back their way.”

But, did Trey Antonio Walters find back his way? His suspicion about his wife manifested itself. He was a man of God, so why did he not take it to the Lord in prayer? Read all about it next week in Part II.