Nine
On the birth certificate she entered her own surname, and “Baby Boy”
as first name; she would change it when she had a name.
“I didn’t think of any boys’ names,”
she told her mother. “I was so sure it was a girl.”
“Your father will choose a name.”
“Are there any names you like?”
“Chidera,”
her mother said. “But let’s see what your father chooses.”
And under her breath repeated the name—Chidera, this is God’s decision, God has already decided, this is God’s will.
They left the hospital in the early afternoon.
Her mother dressed her son in the yellow onesie she had packed, newborn-sized but still big for him, the sleeves flopping around his tiny arms.
In the taxi, his car seat lodged between her mother and her, felt a wind pull through her, emptying her out.
An intense urge overcame her, to hide from her mother and her son.
Her apartment looked strange to her.
She had left it a person different from who she was now, a person without a child, and she was returning to it with new eyes.
She walked awkwardly because of the pain between her legs, and when she sat on a pillow to help, it merely felt unsteady and uncomfortable.
Everything was uncomfortable.
You don’t know how bristly sanitary pads are until you have worn post-birth pads in the hospital and switch to sanitary pads at home.
She was constipated, and on the toilet she tried not to strain while straining still, tentative, panic in her body, afraid she might tear her stitches.
A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside her and she was spurting fear.
She sat in the warm sitz bath, worried that she hadn’t sat for long enough, even though she set her timer for fifteen minutes.
What if she got an infection? She would need medication, which would taint her breast milk and affect her son.
Her son.
Her son could not latch on to her breasts properly; always her nipple slipped out of his little hungry mouth.
He wailed and wailed.
His cries seared into her head and made her so shaky she wanted to smash things.
Her mother called a lactation nurse for a home visit, a tiny platinum-haired woman who coaxed and cooed and tried to get her son’s mouth to open and close, but he kept pulling back and wailing.
Was it something about being back home? She had breastfed him in the hospital.
The lactation nurse gave her a plastic nipple shield, to place between her breast and her son’s mouth, and for a brief moment he sucked in silence, and then began again to cry.
She pumped her breasts with a machine that vibrated, funnels affixed to her nipples, spurts of thin liquid filling the attached bottles.
The pumping was tortuously slow; her breasts recoiled from the machine, reluctantly giving their milk, as if to say she had failed yet again at doing things the way they ought to be done.
Her son slept in a bassinet by her bed.
At first, her mother slept in the next room, and then her mother pulled her mattress into ’s bedroom and set it by the dresser.
At night, her mother fed her son a bottle of breast milk with a slim curved nipple.
“Sleep, try and sleep,”
her mother said to her, but she couldn’t sleep, she hardly slept, and she could hear, in the silence of her luxury apartment, the gurgle of her son’s swallowing.
Between her legs, her stitched-up tear itched badly.
Her appetite grew with a fury, and she ate whole loaves of bread, large portions of salmon.
Sunlight slanted through the blinds her mother opened every morning.
The tinkly music from her son’s crib mobile.
The frequent flare of sad longing.
She missed Kwame.
She looked ahead and saw a future dead with the weight of his absence.
She thought of getting a new number and calling him, to tell him they could make it work, that he could do as little as he wanted as a father, just as long as he was there.
But she was wearying of his rejection, his ignoring her texts, his blocking her number, and she felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make her come fully undone.
—
On some evenings, she and her mother prayed one decade of the Rosary together, both kneeling by her bed and fingering their chaplets. If the baby cried, or woke up from a nap, her mother always stopped and went to him, as if nothing else mattered more.
“Why don’t I call his parents to inform them? They deserve to know,”
her mother said one evening as she fed Baby.
was startled by the question. “Who?”
she asked foolishly.
Her mother looked at her. “Kwame.”
“No, no,”
she said. “Not yet.”
“Your father was not the first person I wanted to marry,”
her mother said.
stared, afraid to speak, in case her words made her mother stop talking. Her mother had never said anything like that to her.
“When I was at university in Ibadan, there was someone else. He was a Northerner. Both of our families refused. He told me something. He said, ‘I will always put you first.’ That is what he said to me. Religion was a big issue; tribe alone we might have overcome but not religion. The last time I saw him, just before he married, he still told me, ‘I will always put you first.’?”
Her mother placed Baby on her shoulder to burp him. “Very good, my darling, very good boy,”
she cooed at him. She looked up at . “Men say all kinds of things. It is what they do that matters.”
said nothing, feeling a little stunned. Her mother was becoming a person before her eyes.
—
“I’m not producing milk. I don’t understand why I’m not producing milk,”
said, crying, her breasts sore, nipples stinging, stomach aflame with anxiety, terrified that she would yet again fail her son.
“I have to breastfeed exclusively,”
she said. “Studies show exclusive breastfeeding is best for the baby and…”
“, that’s enough. I’ll go out and buy infant formula and we’ll give him formula and he will be fine. In my time we thought of breast milk as a supplement. I gave you formula, and did anything happen to you? Look at you—you have always been so strong, now strong and successful. Look at you.”
tried to hide her surprise. Her mother thought she was strong? All she remembered were critical words like an open flame against her skin, the feeling of never being enough, always aware of the many holes she had dug in her mother’s expectations.
“I could never have managed exclusive breastfeeding when I had you. Your delivery was extremely difficult. I heard that the nurses at the teaching hospital told my story for many years afterwards. I almost died. I would have died if not for my doctor. I was in labor for two days. Which is why I had to have a hysterectomy.”
“You did?”
had never known that.
“Yes.”
“I read about women who had hysterectomies when other things could have been done to save the uterus,”
said, because she was so taken aback she didn’t know what else to say.
“No, I had the most brilliant doctor at the teaching hospital, Dr. Nkanu Esege. He was the best obstetrician in the east; people used to come from all over to beg to be his patients. That man did everything for me. If Dr. Nkanu Esege said there was nothing else to be done, then I was sure there was nothing else to be done.”
Baby began to cry and her mother hurried to him. After she fed him the last bottle of breast milk, she did not continue the story. She called a taxi to take her to the supermarket and said nothing, too, her heart still tender-skinned from the strange sensation of being close to her mother.
A few days later, her mother said, while mixing a bottle of formula, “Your father doesn’t know that I don’t have a womb. I never told him.”
“What?”
“Back then men didn’t come into the delivery ward, and he in particular was uninterested in these things. He used to say we would have many sons, three or four, because their family is full of boys. When it was concluded that I had to have the hysterectomy, I felt a lot of panic. To be a wife without a womb was to be useless. I knew how much children meant to him and I knew I had just had a girl.”
sat up, trying to absorb the words.
“So you didn’t tell him?”
“No.”
“Did you think he would leave you?”
“Your father is a good man,”
her mother said. “He’s not a bad man,”
she added, as if that might be more digestible.
“So…”
paused. “Did your miscarriages happen before me?”
She had known for a long time that her mother had miscarriages after she was born, but now it made no sense, and maybe she had been mistaken when her mother told the story, which she often did on Sundays, with her father present. She told the story with a brave throwaway humor: “By the time I had the third miscarriage, I think Dr. Esege wanted to remove me from his patient list!”
Her mother was shaking the bottle of formula.
“There were no miscarriages,” she said.
was staring at her. “What do you mean?”
Her mother sighed. “There were no miscarriages.”
She was feeding the baby, who was drinking and swallowing in a happy, guzzling rush. lay back down, overwhelmed by an intensely poignant sweet sadness, because a memory had come to her, of both of them at benediction, kneeling side by side in the sparsely filled church on a rainy Sunday evening, their voices joined in incense-scented Gregorian chant. Tantum ergo Sacramentum, veneremur cernui.
—
Chia visited often, holding Baby with reverent wonder, asking to feed him, telling ’s mother about her travels.
“Zikor, Chuka wants to come with me on Sunday to see Baby, and finally meet you,”
Chia said.
And said, “No.”
Her mother, seated nearby, said, “, let whoever wants to come and see Baby come and see Baby.”
Her mother was really saying there was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide.
But she wasn’t hiding, not anymore, or at least not as before her baby was born.
She just needed some time to perfect the face she wished to show the world.
Already she was training her mind to expect the comments of people, whispering to herself the worst of what might be said, to tame their sting, and mute her own future hurt.
“Okay,”
said. Chia’s new boyfriend should be manageable, neutral, and his judgments, if he made them, would not matter so much because he didn’t know her as she used to be.
He arrived holding a gift bag, behind Chia, his bulk filling the door frame. Big, bald, bearded; he was too male, in an instant his excess of manliness suffocated the living room. As if that wasn’t enough, there was his “good man”
luster, polished and gleaming, the respectful, attentive attitude so obvious in his manner. T