Motherhood.

Art by Elena Dibo on Pinterest.

The baby is at it again.

His shriek reaches you from the other room, a scratchy high-pitched noise that claws through the wall separating the nursery and your bedroom until it settles in your head, wriggling about like tiny parasitic worms.

You blink at the glowing red numbers on the bedside clock. 2:47 A.M. The baby has been at it for nearly an hour.

Beside you, your husband snores loudly, as if competing with the crying baby. Segun doesn’t snore, except he’s exhausted to the bones. You study him in the near darkness of the bedroom. A line of drool trails down the side of his mouth, his arms splayed, chest rising and falling in a rhythmic pattern. You wonder how he can sleep through the chaos ensuing under his roof. You wonder how he finds sleep at all.

You raise a hand to wake him, but the shrieks stop at that moment. Silence, so blissful and palpable, descends on the house, unfurling the knot in your chest. You begin to lower your hand, only for the noise to return. The baby’s voice wobbles this time, raw in a way that signifies he has been crying for far too long. You can picture the redness of his face, the puffiness of his

eyes. The baby needs tending. Now.

“Segun,” you nudge your husband at the rib. He stirs and mutters something gibberish. You jab his side again, urgency filling your voice when you say,”Segun!”

He jolts awake. “Yes?”

“The baby,” is all you say.

He looks around, registering things. Then, suddenly, as if his sense has returned, his eyes fly to the nursery. “Christ!”

Segun leaps out of bed. You close your eyes and sigh, listening to his footfalls recede into the other room. There’s a change in the baby’s tempo when Segun picks him up from the crib, a certain softness now in his cries, the balm only the presence of a parent can bring.

Relief floods your aching bones. But it is short-lived. Noise draws closer as Segun brings the baby into the bedroom. As he brings the baby to you.

Your heartbeat quickens. Oh, God.

“Lola,” he says a moment later, standing over the bed, the baby’s voice now nearer, scratching against the insides of your ears again. “Lola, I don’t know what to do with him.”

“Check the diaper,” you murmur against the pillow.

“I have,” Segun says. “There’s nothing there. I think he’s hungry.”

Silence.

“Lola, he needs you.”

There’s a strain in your husband’s voice, a reprimand clearly evident. You sit upright, ready to lash out at him, but when you look at Segun, the waves of exhaustion clouding his face stop you. Your new reality—this funky business of parenthood—hasn’t been easy on him either. And if any one of you deserves lashing out on, you know it is you.

Segun’s eyes, heavy with bags, plead with yours to take the baby. You look down at him—the baby, face red as you imagined—and you know, from countless hours spent at prenatal sessions, that all he needs is your nipple in his mouth.

Yet you cannot bring yourself to take him from Segun. You cannot bring yourself to do what is expected of you.

“Lola, take him. Please,” Segun begs.

This is when you burst into tears. “I’m sorry I can’t,” you finally confess, your teeth clattering, the tears spilling in torrents, “I just can’t.”

---

Teni’s arrival was supposed to mark a new beginning. For you, for Segun, for everyone who has held an audacious hope throughout your twelve-year-long childless marriage.

Your relationship with Segun had started like something straight out of a children’s fairytale storybook. Both of you, fresh out of the Nigerian Law School, had tied the knot after a passionate twenty-four-month-long courtship period.

Your first encounter was in a Criminal Litigation class where the professor had kept rapidly firing questions about a case half the class had not prepared for. Segun had—as you’ll come to find out over the years. He’s always prepared.

After class, you walked up to him to challenge something he’d said. You don’t know why you did that, given you had not even familiarized yourself with the case in question, but you were glad you did. For it led to countless nights discussing the penal code over wraps of suya and arguing the merit of a Supreme Court ruling as you strolled from Motion Ground to Gani Fawehinmi’s Library.

You were madly in love, both of you, and when the time came, neither of you hesitated to say, “I do.” But love was a thing for storybooks, and marriage came with expectations.

Twelve years was a long time to be without a child. And although Segun—God bless his heart—never treated you any differently for it, you hated your body’s inability to do the one thing everyone tells you it was created for: carry a child to term.

Twelve years, three miscarriages. Segun had wanted you to stop trying and consider other options— adoption, surrogacy, the wonders of modern medicine—but you refused. What even is a woman who cannot mother her own child? What even is a woman whose womb rids itself of its fruit?

Then this pregnancy happened, days turning into weeks and weeks bleeding into months. Still, you didn’t wake up to a blood-soaked bed like you had with the three pregnancies before.

You remember the fear, the faith, the nerves; Segun accompanying you to every hospital visit and check-up, even the “only mothers-to-be” ones. Your Segun, he would make a good father—that much you knew.

Slowly, your courage strengthened. This pregnancy, you would carry it to term. This baby, it would live. You’d make sure of it.

You went into labor two weeks earlier than expected. It was the longest forty-five hours of your life; screaming and thrashing and writhing. Neither dead nor alive but made useless by such obliterating pain, the baby tearing its way out of you, leaving you bleeding, your senses reeling, the nurses screaming, the hospital machines beeping.

On that hospital bed, your life flashed right before your eyes, a fast-paced slideshow of memories recent and long ago. Memories of you riding at the back of Baba’s Peugeot 404 to school, Sunny Ade playing on the radio; memories of Mama cooking ikokore to celebrate your admission into law school; Segun on your wedding day, his smile the brightest thing in the universe.

On that hospital bed, as you groaned and moaned, the raging inferno of childbirth consuming you from the inside, life seeped out of you. You would die—that you were sure of. This child, it would kill you.

When you came to exactly three days later, the doctors had said it was nothing short of a miracle you survived. But they were wrong. You did not. Something in you had died on that childbirth bed. For what could possibly explain your hesitation when they brought you Teni? What could explain the fear that lodges in your chest each time you pick up the baby? The fear that somehow, you’d drop him, that he’d stop breathing, that you’d stop breathing—a fear so unreasonable yet so real your heart races till it hurts, your breath rasps till it hitches. What could explain this ever-widening chasm between you and the baby you had spent all your life wishing for?

The chime of the pendulum clock brings you back to the present. You’re curled up in bed, as you mostly have been since you came back from the hospital. The baby’s crib is beside you, and through the space between the bars, you study the sleeping child.

He has his father’s buttoned nose, a dimpled cheek that would make for a heart-thawing smile, and curly tufts of hair. He looks so beautiful, so innocent, so at peace. And in this moment, for the first time, you feel something stir in your heart. Maybe you can make yourself care about this child.

You reach out to touch him but your hand is trembling. You snatch back the hand and tuck it to yourself, embarrassed at another failed attempt at connecting with the baby.

“Food is ready,” Segun announces as he breezes into the bedroom. He stops at the crib and gazes wistfully at Teni, pride and adoration glistening in his eyes, before coming over to you.

“I’m not hungry,” you tell him.

A dark cloud passes over his features. “You said the same for lunch.” He settles beside you, his weight causing the bed to sink. “You’ve not left this room in days. I’m beginning to get worried, ife mi.”

“I’m fine, Segun. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

He leans in and plants a kiss on your forehead, the smell of spices and garlic clinging to his shirt filling your nostrils. “I know,” he says. “But come and eat, please.”

At the dining table, silence is the third company between you two, only punctured by the clinking of cutleries against ceramic plates. The food—yam and fish sauce—tastes fantastic but after a few bites, you settle for pushing the yam about in your plate instead.

“So,” Segun starts, “I was reading this thing online. It’s called postpartum depression.”

Your fork stills against the plate. What is he getting at?

Segun glances at you before returning to his food. “Have you heard about it?” he continues. “They said it’s when new mothers experience difficulties bonding with their child because they’re not in a good state mentally—”

“You think I’m not all right in the head.”

The accusation in your tone takes even you by surprise. Segun blanches.

“No, no,” he rushes to defend himself but stops. He sighs, then draws his chair closer to yours. On the table, he covers your hand with his and gently squeezes it. When Segun’s eyes latch onto yours, all you see is love and care brimming in his deep brown ones. “I don’t mean it like that,” he starts again, “I’ve been reading about childbirth a lot lately. Lola, I can’t pretend to know what you went through giving birth to our child, but I know it was something that changed you. We’ve wanted this all our lives, but you’ve barely touched Teni since we brought him home. Something has changed. You have changed. This endless brooding, it’s not you. You’re not yourself anymore. And God knows it’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you. I just want you to get better. I want you to leave this sunken place you’re in and be who you used to be. Our baby, he’s deserving of love too. He’s deserving of your love.”

You close your eyes, but it doesn’t stop the tears. They leak through your lashes, chasing themselves down your cheeks as you cry silently. Segun squeezes your hand again; gentle, warm, assuring. He’s here for you, he’s here with you—he wants you to know that.

Segun is right. Something is wrong. With you, with this situation, all of it. Teni is deserving of your love, but only when you are better can you give it to him. But who would you talk to? What will they say when they hear you’re a mother who feels nothing for her child?

You don’t realize you’ve said this part out loud until Segun says, “There’s nothing wrong in being vulnerable, Lola. This thing—what you’re experiencing, it’s more common than we think. And there’s nothing wrong with asking the right people for help. We can find someone, a therapist. I’ve seen recommendations online. We can find help, Lola. It’s possible.”

When you reopen your eyes, Segun is peering at you intently. You regard him through a blurry vision, this man whose thoughtfulness never ceases to be a wonder, and your heart soars.

He pulls you into a hug and pats your back. “Will you give it a try? For us?”

Fresh tears prickle the back of your eyelids. “I will,” you say into the crook of Segun’s neck, voice muffled. You have to. For Teni, for Segun, for yourself. You have to give healing a try.