Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I’d read somewhere that maternal mortality was higher in America than anywhere else in the Western world—or was it just higher for Black women? The subject had never really interested me. I’d felt at most a faraway concern, as though it was something that happened to other people.

What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.

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.

“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.

I’m not saying a child is like body hair. I’m saying our relationship with body hair is similar to our relationship with pregnancy. It could be the thing we most desperately want and also the thing we most desperately don’t want.”

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

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.

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