(cover photograph direction: Victor Akhere)
My sister was pregnant.
For four months now. I’m the one who sleeps with Makrina in the same bed, but I didn’t know it until Mama told me. How mothers can tell pregnancy in a flat-looking belly is beyond me. I’m unsure what more to be stressed about — father’s reaction to the matter, or the fact that my sister has completed fourth form four months ago and will start her A levels in three months. In third form and barely fifteen, the weight of the matter sits on my shoulders, heavy as Osmium. I can’t stop imagining what would happen next. Would Makrina’s dream of becoming a pilot go down the drain?
Mama says it’s alright, that she will talk to Makrina in the evening when the girl gets back from her volunteer secretary job at the City Centre Hotel. They will figure out what to do. It scares me, nonetheless. This discordant reality check that leaves me in fear of landing my face on elephant dung and failing my father in the same way. Or I could prove to the soon-to-be heartbroken man that he had one more pawn left, one more daughter to make him proud. One more to wipe off his tears.
Baba learns the truth after Makrina’s belly starts looking a little too big for it to be blamed on the too many plates of sweet potatoes she eats each day for dinner. It’s the way he fumes that makes me hate being alive. It’s the way his eyes bulge with thick veins I didn’t know existed there. His hands clench into fists and he shouts like a madman. He is not the same man who patted my head and carried me to bed when I was little. He is a monster grabbing a knife from the kitchen shelf and thundering towards a screaming, crying Makrina. Mama charges between them, fast and dangerously enough for me to feel my heart stop beating. I wish my college brothers were home so they could hold him down. I cannot feel a bone in me. I am frozen on cold feet, blinded by a wild concoction of rage and horror to feel anything human.
When Mama calms him, I notice I also have a knife clenched in my hand, ready to strike Baba. I drop my weapon when he drops his. I cry. Makrina runs out of the house and we don’t see her again until she is a couple days upon delivery. We learn that the man responsible for her bulge has rejected them. Baba can’t allow her to conceive the baby under another man’s name. But now his anger has subsided. He is no longer ashamed to take the risk.
*
My sister had a baby.
He is the most beautiful little cherub I have ever seen. I find solace in cradling him in my arms, rocking him to sleep. I find purpose in playing with him. His darting black orbs and obscure babbling melt my heart.
Mother names him Immanuel. God with us. But it is this same Immanuel, this same son of an absentee father. His mother, a month after having him, is a school drop-out rushing back and forth to a demanding nine-to-five. She plays the “just because I have a baby now doesn’t mean I will work less, I am a strong woman” game all too well, until it begins to hurt.
Makrina comes back home late at night, the front of her blouse drenched from leaking milk from her postpartum-enlarged titties. She reeks of a nose-wrenching mishmash of men’s cologne and indebted alcohol. It makes neither me nor Immanuel comfortable. She barely grasps my words when I complain about how badly the baby cried for his mother since early evening. I wonder if her extra-shift money is worth her son’s pain.
“Mama, Immanuel doesn’t want me to nurse him.” Makrina knocks on our parents’ bedroom door, her eyes glistening with tears. It’s past midnight. The child will die starving if she doesn’t try harder. Do something. The silly porridge we have been feeding him all day in her mother’s absence isn’t what he is supposed to be eating after all. When Mother fails to respond, Makrina stomps off to sleep, uncaring of the world. Done with the world. Done with Immanuel.
The baby doesn’t stop crying. I am annoyed, not because we sleep in the same room and the little devil-angel doesn’t want to shut up, but because of how a shitty mother my sister is. I want to yell, to ask, to know what Makrina was thinking when she parted legs for that teacher if she knew she would treat a child this way. Why in the world did she not abort the poor child if she couldn’t take care of it in the first place? I hush softly towards Immanuel. He is still screaming, but as soon as I take him into my arms, rock him gently and hum him a song, his cries stop. I grab the bottle with Makrina’s milk pumped in it and stick it to his little mouth. He sucks, his eyes closing softly. I stare at his gorgeous long lashes, at how effortlessly cute his tiny-as-a-mouse face is. I catch Makrina staring from her sleeping position when I bend to kiss his forehead. I wonder why babies have their eyes open like that when they cannot even see.
My sister is half-regretting and half-content about having a baby. Or so it seems. The more days go, the lesser she cares about Immanuel’s existence. Mother and I are now the legal parents of the boy. Makrina is too busy running after money, after men, after alcohol. Being Immanuel’s mother barricades her from the full experience of youthful adventure. Her new habits of attending wild parties, having sex, showing off antic finery, faking an elite lifestyle, and imbibing illegitimate means to make bank prods Mother to shout at her one day. Mother reminds Makrina that she is not some hipster young lady, but a woman with a child. Makrina lets the words go through one ear and out of the other.
Makrina shouts back. She never wanted to have a baby in the first place. She didn’t know a child could be so hard to raise. That this, that that. She cries about how disgusted she is of washing nappies, what a hell of a job wiping babies’ stool is, and how the excessive, loud crying made her want to die.
“Throw him in the litter bin if there’s no one to take care of him. I’m tired. I cannot do this anymore,” Makrina says.
I can’t understand how a mother can’t feel for her baby, how she says she loves her son but does nothing to prove it. All I see in my sister is a careless woman. I feel guilty of my abhorrence towards her, so I swallow the hate no matter how much it chokes and threatens to burst out to freedom. This is the girl I spent a quarter of my life calling my best friend. Someone I had gone on countless thrifting sprees with. The one I stayed up with all night watching K-dramas and fan-girling. Makrina was the one I looked forward to come home to after a long semester stuck in boarding school. She was once my anchor. But it’s different now. She moors me down to death. But wasn’t that how anchors worked? Did they not drag you down deep and bury you?
“One day, Sumayi,” Mama says to me. “When you have a baby, you will understand.”
I will never understand whatever is going on, I say, because I will never have a baby, anyway. Mama almost falls off her kigoda.
“What? Why not?”
The shock in her eyes is bigger than I expected it to be.
I tell her I am good the way I am. Having babies is simply not my calling. She double-topples from the information like I just announced I had grown a tail. Then, as if in hindsight, remembering I am only young, she says, “Oh. Don’t worry. You’re too young to understand right now. When you are older, you are going to feel it.”
I am twenty-one now. When exactly was older? My brows furrow. “Feel? Feel what?”
“The craving, Sumayi. The craving.” She says.
“Craving?”
“Incessant. Deep. Strong. Almost unwaverable. It lives in every woman’s being. The desire of childbirth.”
I swallow back the urge to barf out the chapati I recently had for breakfast, already feeling sick to my stomach at the idea of this “craving.”
“I think it’s called baby fever, Sumayi.” Makrina vomits her two cents, her red-clawed hand on my stiff shoulder.
“No. Isn’t baby fever that thing you feel postnatal?” Mother looks at Makrina.
“No, Mama. That’s baby blues.”
They are speaking another language, so foreign to those who “have never had babies.” The only fever I have is money fever, I wish to confess, but I don’t.
“Oh, is it? I thought baby blues was that desperate yearning to have a child. The one I just talked about.”
“Look at you getting old,” Makrina chuckled at Mama. “Mixing up easy words and all.”
She is enjoying the subject, or maybe enjoying tormenting me with it.
I am confused but content with where I am. I don’t need any clarification. My decision to not have children gives me a sense of safety, one hard to find in my mother and sister’s pressure of a presence. My mind is not present. It has travelled to a distant nightmare where a moustached, fat-bellied man downs a glass of juice on my table while I drown in a well of babies. He lifts no finger. I am only an appendage of him until I’m dead. I lose my blood in the gruesome process of building up his picket fence dream. My female rage exceeds this morbid desire for pain. The man’s belly keeps swelling the more I stare at him. The image sends goosebumps up my arms, rings deafening warning alarms in my ears. Does my mother, sister, or any other woman in this godforsaken age also hear these flaming bells in their heads?
“You have to have a baby, see. Or else you might get womb cancer or something worse than that.”
My mother pulling me back from scary thoughts to an even scarier reality. I suspect one more word from her mouth might bring my biggest fear to fruition, so I stop her. They do not know how cancer sounds so enticing, so much better than carrying around a protruding belly and parting my legs for doctors to see. It’s a lot they do not understand. A lot that is difficult to explain with my feminist tongue. Cancer sounds lovely. Cancer tastes so, so sweet. A delicious banquet to enjoy. Cancer is freedom.
Makrina and Mama keep up the conversation, steering it into an argument I haven’t consented to. I am thrown to the other end of the stick. They yell, they ask, how, why I could be so afraid of childbirth. They say it’s a woman’s super power, her destiny. “It is a cup you have to drink, my child,” Mother says. “Childbirth is a blessing. A little death you shall experience. A chalice you are to drink from and die for as a woman.” Makrina nods along closely, goading Mother’s ludicrous ideas and rubbing them on my face. I have no interest in this ‘price’, for I haven’t willingly bought anything out here and never will. I skip around a field with fire balls plummeting from the sky. I struggle against an endless stream of generational trauma.
I tell them how miserable the world already is, how rude it is to bring a child into this mayhem. I tell them how raising a child is a lifetime dedication and I had no time to belch my ova when there were a million other, more interesting things to do. I continue about how I can barely wash my own clothes or take care of myself. I don’t point out how I find women, not men, desirable. Women cannot get me pregnant. Worse yet, we have barely enough food for our big family and you want to add another mouth to feed on the table?
That last one sends Makrina into a temper. She enrages at me for calling Immanuel, god among us, another mouth to feed, another luggage to carry. But in truth god is never with us. If he was, he would have guided Makrina away from fucking her Mathematics teacher for a better grade. If god was amongst us, he would not have let such man exist to take advantage of teenage girls. If god is with us, he would have deleted cancer.
*
Sometimes, Immanuel called me Mama.
“I am auntie, not mama.” I correct for the thousandth time, and it’s not even midday yet. I don’t need the title.
“But you wipe me after I poo. You wash my clothes. You sing me to sleep. You cook me food and you feed me. Anande’s mother does that for her, too.”
I ignore his defence and tell him his mother is in the city and will be back home soon. Mama stops me, saying it’s not good to be honest and point the child in the right direction now. She says I should let him be happy, not depressed that both his parents were not here for him.
“It’s not my fault Makrina left her child here and ran after a high-paying job. She knows the price,” I say.
“She had no choice.”
*
I can’t figure out what I want to do with my bachelor’s degree, so I am left to play mother to Immanuel for longer than I plan. And it fulfills me. The way Immanuel runs crying to me when he stubs his toe, or jumps into my arms when he craves safety. I become his playmate, his confidant, shifting my schedule to fit his non-existent one. He reminds me of little old me, roped up tight by my parents’ rules. “Don’t do this, don’t do that.” I don’t want him to suffocate. He’s under my watch, so Immanuel – god not with us – blooms away into blue skies. He runs like a wild horse and gets lost in innocence and naivety. Immanuel is a beach. I am the lighthouse. I observe the way he grows, measuring him by the door with a ruler and telling him he would be taller than five-foot-two me if he eats more greens. Baba is no longer tensed around the boy. Immanuel is a running, comedic relief. Whenever he is awake, the temperature around shoots to fun and mirthful, and when he sleeps, Baba asks about him. Every second with the boy teaches me that I would do anything for him. With him, for the first time, I don’t mind being alive. I love being alive. With him, air doesn’t feel like it’s choking down my throat. It’s not so hard to breathe anymore. He prods excitement in me for whatever is to come.
I bend to the title of Mama. The word sparks a strange joy in the center of my gut. I figure it’s love.
*
“She’s not coming back,” Mama says the day I learn what to do with my life.
I want to be a children’s caretaker. Nanny? Kindergarten teacher? Babysitter? I am not sure yet, of course. I am only sure that something along the lines of spending time with children makes my heart jolt with life. Everything but being an actual mother.
“Who?” I ask.
“Your sister.” Mama speaks in measured strides. I can tell she is hurt. “She sent me a message saying she has gotten married to a new man and they are having their own kids. Immanuel can’t be in the picture anymore.” My mother cries. I don’t.