Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Now I would die in this hospital room with its rolling table and its picture of faded flowers on the wall, and become a tiny nameless dot in the data, and somebody somewhere would read a new report on maternal mortality and mildly wonder if it was Black women who died more often.

I caught my mother’s glance, that icy expression she had when I was a child and did something in public where she couldn’t slap me right away as she would have liked.

When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.

He had a boyish quality, which was not, as in some men, mere cover for immaturity; he was a grown-up who could still touch in himself the wonder and innocence of childhood.

She had settled. She had been living at home after university graduation, working as contract staff in telecom customer service, the kind of middling job that asked little of her and promised nothing to her.

“I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.

“It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”

It was a sweet-and-sour time, a time of exquisite paradoxes. I raged at Nature but wanted to appease Nature, to secure the safety of my pregnancy. I obeyed the rules, dutiful and seething.

I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold.

Ours was an ancient story, the woman wants the baby and the man doesn’t want the baby and a middle ground does not exist.

The world these days sees the other side too. Men want babies, women nit so sure, and this leass to interesting situations and conversations.

If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

True words. The biology expects very little from man, while woman goes through all the pains of making a child. However, when a man and a woman are united for life, does the man's role becomes a little bigger?

I was suspended in a place of no feeling, waiting to feel. I could not separate this moment from the stories of this moment—years of stories and films and books about this scene, mother and child, mother meeting child, child in mother’s arms. I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I did not know how I felt. It was not transcendental.

Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable: babies would easily slip out, and mothers would remain unmarked and whole, merely blessed by having bestowed life.

I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces.

Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.

Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals. It was my mother who sat beside my father at weddings and ceremonies; it was her photo that appeared above the label of “wife” in the booklet his club published in his honor. Respect was her reward for acquiescing.

How do some memories insist on themselves?