Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It was something like pain and different from pain.

It sat like fire in my back, spreading to my thighs, squeezing and crushing my insides, pulling downward, spiraling.

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.

“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.”

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

“Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,”

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.

How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,”

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 believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.

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.

Boys can so easily go wrong, girls don’t go wrong,”