Stay with Me

by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

Moomi told me that before asking God to give me a child, I must ask for the grace to be able to suffer for that child.

Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.

I did not know what to do with the screaming girl whom we were already pleading with, every day, every moment we called her name: Rotimi—stay with me.

I was too shocked to cry at my father’s funeral, but you had tears in your eyes even though you did not let one of them fall. I held your hand while you sniffed and blinked rapidly. Akin, who will hold your hand today if you cry silently?

I didn’t know what to say, but my body responded to the utter despair in her eyes with the sting of tears in mine.

Tears blurred my vision because of the lonely little girl who had become the woman whose hand I held as she bent over to throw a handful of sand on her father’s coffin.

“You were both inside me,” she cried, slapping her belly. “The two of you sucked these breasts that are on my chest. Was my breast milk not sweet? Is that the root of wickedness in your heart? Was my breast milk sour? Akin, answer me. Can you not hear me? Are you now deaf?”

I did not want to tell her tales, I wanted to heal her, save her.

It would take a while for me to realise that each of my children had given me as much as they took. My memories of them, bittersweet and constant, were as powerful as a physical presence. And because of that, as a bus bore me into the heart of a city I did not know, while my last child was dying in Lagos and the country was unravelling, I was not afraid because I was not alone.

I should find words to break the silence, but all I can think of is how beautiful you are to me,

I understand how a word others use every day can become something whispered in the dark to soothe a wound that just won’t heal. I remember thinking I would never hear it spoken without unravelling a little, wondering if I would ever get to say it in the light. So I recognise the gift in this simple pronouncement, the promise of a beginning in this one word.