The moment we arrived at the hospital, I was admitted straight into the High Dependency Unit. Three days later, the doctor came bearing the worst news. “Folasade,” he began softly. “Your body is shutting down. If you decide to keep this pregnancy, you will be dead by tomorrow.” But there were already seven graves in our oko, I couldn’t imagine an eighth one.
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The first time I buried a child, the women in our village told me not to cry too loudly.
“It scares away blessings,” one of them whispered as they lowered my tiny son into the red soil behind our oko in Awgbu.
I remember staring at the small white cloth wrapped around my child and wondering how something that had lived inside me for nine months could suddenly weigh less than a sack of flour.
Chukwudi and I married when the world felt bright and promising. He was a strong, ambitious man who ran a successful local garage. He loves me deeply, but grief changes people.
By our fifth year of marriage. After three pregnancy losses, the protective wall around our marriage began to crack. My mother-in-law, Nneka, stopped greeting me with warmth. She began bringing bitter herbs brewed from roots pulled from the deep forest, forcing me to drink them while she watched with critical eyes.
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“A home without children is just a dark cave, Folasade,” she told me one afternoon. “My son did not pay a heavy dowry for a shadow. If your womb cannot hold his seed, you must step aside.”
By the tenth year, our losses numbered six. There were the silent, early ones that occurred while I was washing clothes at the river. Then there were the later ones, where I actually felt the faint, fluttery kicks of a life that would never see the light of day.
And every time, the village found a new reason to blame me.
Maybe her womb is cursed.
Maybe she was promiscuous.
At church, women stopped inviting me to baby showers. Mothers pulled their daughters away from me during funerals as if infertility could spread through touch.
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And the worst part is that I watched the devastating transformation of my husband. He changed from a tender lover into a cold, distant roommate. He began staying out late at the trading center, returning home smelling cheap beer, turning his back to me the moment his head hit the pillow.
Then came Ngozichukwu. He was our seventh pregnancy, and he became the permanent anchor of my grief. Against all expectations, I carried him to the third trimester. When the labor pains started early one night, Chukwudi rented a taxi to rush me to the local clinic.
Ngozichukwu was born alive. He was tiny, his skin so translucent I could see the fine network of veins beneath it. The clinic had no incubator or modern technology.
I pulled his fragile, shivering body to my bare chest, weeping and screaming to God to take my life instead of his. He lived for exactly four hours.
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Every single day for years, I walked past Ngozichukwu’s grave at the edge of our oko. To the village, I was permanently branded Folasade the barren woman. To myself, I was simply a walking graveyard.
When the test strip turned positive for the eighth time, fifteen years after our wedding day, I didn’t celebrate. I collapsed onto the kitchen floor and begged Almighty God to cause a pregnancy loss immediately if the child was not destined to survive. I knew my mind could not survive another third-trimester funeral.
But the first month passed. Three months. Five months. Six months. Chukwudi completely refused to acknowledge the pregnancy. He wouldn’t touch my belly and strictly forbade me from buying a single item of baby clothing.
“We don’t buy baby clothes before the child is born alive, Folasade,” he said one morning over breakfast. He had been hardened by a decade of communal shame and financial drain.
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