These Mothering Seasons – Zainab Omaki

The tap water is tepid. You stand at the sink, running a soapy sponge over a glass plate trimmed with hibiscus flowers. At your side, your son has his arms wrapped around one of your legs. He is screaming. Deep from his little fist-sized diaphragm, he is screaming and bumping his forehead against your thigh over and over. Every few seconds, he alternates between this and digging his teeth into your thigh without stopping his screams. The sound comes out muffled.

In your sixth life, you pried him off you when his teeth dug particularly deep into your flesh, shoving him to the ground with more strength than you meant to. His head bumped against the cream-speckled tiles, a stunned look covering his face. You were stunned too, and horrified. Abandoning the plates in the sink, you ran to him and tried to comfort him, but he started screaming again and burrowed into a corner. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, he would not come out. He screamed halfway through the night until, exhausted, he fell asleep. In your ninth life, you were trying to be more patient when it came to these outbursts that always seemed to arise during your chores. You stopped washing the dishes, pried him off you firmly, but gently and tried to talk him through his emotions. You are okay, you said. We can go see the dog later. You want to see Nana’s dog? We can go out and see it later. Just stop crying now. You are a big boy. Big boys can be patient, ko? It did not work. He screamed and screamed until you retreated to the bathroom, locking yourself in there. In your thirteenth or fifteenth or seventeenth life you cannot remember which, they’re blurring now – you stopped attempting to do dishes while he was awake, other chores too. But that life, for reasons you cannot be sure, he slept so little that you were essentially living in filth. Plates piled up in the sink. The house went unswept and unmopped for weeks. You had to start doing it again, enduring the pain of his teeth while wearing headphones to block out the noise.

Now, you move the sponge round and round the plate, and set it down. Move it over the wet glass of the cup, set it down. Pick up a fork and clean the tines thoroughly. You focus so intensely on these small tasks that your vision begins to blur, and you cannot see the specific items in the sink, only their outlines. If you do not blink long enough, it gets this way, and you grow lightheaded – lightheaded enough that everything starts to feel far away: the pain in your leg, your son’s cries, the cramped atmosphere of your kitchen. It all starts to fade, and you are granted a small break. 

Not for the first time or the tenth or the hundredth, you wish you could die. But that would be pointless. All of this would just start again.

*

The first time you became a mother, it was through violence. You and your husband, Ahmed, had not been using contraception for a while. When you first got married, you would get injections every three months to stop you from ovulating. But that would cause migraines that would last so many days you would not be able to go to your boutique, and it made your previously trim figure balloon by two sizes. You even noticed your husband wincing as he watched you pull on the sparkly, sleeveless tops he used to love you wearing. You saw his eyes graze the flab of your arms, the stretch marks spiderwebbing across your light brown skin. You could not take it, so you stopped and insisted that he would just have to wear condoms instead. You did not care that the sensation was not the same, that he liked “feeling close to you.” 

“If you do not do it, we won’t do it,” you had insisted one evening while serving him dinner, and he had caved. 

But the argument came back within two months. I just want to feel close, I just want to feel close, I just want to feel close. The refrain would not stop until you finally acceded, agreeing to try the pull-out method alongside cycle tracking. It felt ridiculous in 2024 to be using the pull-out method of all things, but you consulted several blogs online and, on discovering that many women did this – a lot of them also at the behest of their husbands – you felt a little better. You were not alone. 

The pull-out method and cycle tracking worked for over a year to your relief. No more fights, no more worrying about the chemicals floating through your body (you lost the weight, too). But what you did not foresee was what this mode of contraception would allow: your husband snatching the choice of whether or not you became a mother from you.

You see, three years ago, when you first met, and even two years ago when you got married, you and your husband had agreed that you would not have children. A wild concept for a Nigerian couple, and a Northern Nigerian couple at that. Children were blessings from God; everyone knew that. One did not get married and not have children unless one could not. But you had always known, all your life, that you did not want kids. Not because you had a poor childhood – you had a normal one; like you, your parents were traders, and you had fond memories of running up and down the narrow, muddy aisles of open air market outside their shop. It was not because you experienced some trauma when you were older, either. You simply did not want children. You enjoyed visiting friends and cooing over their newborns, smelling their yummy heads. You were good with children, you ran into one on the street. They always wanted to smile and play peekaboo with you over their parents’ shoulders. But you had never felt a yearning for this yourself. It is why when you met your husband at the Ministry of Commerce while applying for a license for your second boutique, you told him after just two dates that you never wanted children, and that you would never change your mind.”

You were in a noisy restaurant in central Kaduna, a highlife band playing Afrobeat on the stage across the room. At your confession, your future husband grew thoughtful. Then, leaning across the table, he shouted over the music: “Aren’t there enough children in this world? Why must all of us contribute to this grand population effort sef?”

You had been surprised at first, then laughed, the knot in your chest loosening as relief washed over you. You really liked Ahmed – the first man since university you could honestly say that about. You liked his smile: broad and bright, with not a crooked tooth in sight. You liked the grandad collar shirts or kaftans he always wore – so, so sexy; what was it about a nice, elegant neck? You liked his narrow features because you had always wished your face was not so round. If you could not have it for yourself, why not for the person you were with? You’d been so afraid that this liking would peter out early, as your last few relationships had once the men had learned your stance on children. Finding out it would not feel like God himself had reached out and touched your head with his grace.

You were married a year later in a grand ceremony of peaches, blues, and so much tulle that, for weeks after, when you closed your eyes, it was what you saw. And those first two years – except for the contraceptive argument – were wonderful. It was true that Ahmed did have more of an aggressive side than you had thought before you got married. One time, you surprised him at work and found him screaming at his subordinate for sending the wrong document up to the department head. Each time, he slapped the table he was seated behind, his subordinate flinched like he’d experienced this many times before and had PTSD. Ahmed had reached for the pencil holder on his table, and the young man had braced himself as though he was afraid of being hit with it. But that was work. He was never like that at home. Ever.

Even when he suddenly brought up the subject of children one evening – while you were eating roasted fish on the verandah of your house, fanning yourself with a plastic fan because there was no electricity, and the heat was unrelenting – you were not worried. Sure, he made it sound like a decree, not a question, but you were not concerned he would force you.

“This house will be filled with children soon,” were his precise words as he looked up at the sky, feet propped up on a stool. 

You had snorted. “Are we going to steal them?”

Ahmed was quiet for a long time, long enough that you turned to look at him. You’d been staring at the sky too. He must have felt your gaze because he turned, the moonlight catching part of his face.

‘I am serious,’ he said. ‘This house needs to be filled with children soon. It is getting too sad with how quiet it is.’

At first, you were shocked. Then, once the surprise wore off, the loudest and most vicious argument of your marriage began.

“What do you mean this house needs to be filled with children? What children?”

“Our children, of course. I know you said you did not want any, but cannot you see how depressing it is with just the two of us? Aren’t you tired of hearing children laughing from the houses on the right and left while this one is quiet?”

“Are you mad? No, seriously, are you mad? Or are you someone else? Didn’t we talk about this? We both agreed, no children.”

“Please, that is just a thing that young people say, and then you get over it and grow up. You do what your parents did, and what their parents did – what generations have been doing since the beginning. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”

“If they didn’t, I wouldn’t be—” You threw your hands up in frustration. “What? What are you saying? Where is all of this coming from?”

“I want children. Is that so crazy? Is that so insane? It is not a revolutionary concept.” 

You did not talk to him for the rest of the night or the day after that. You did eventually reconcile when he apologised, acknowledging that you did have the discussion when you first got together, but he also shared the need deep within him to procreate. 

“I want a baby,” he kept saying. “I want someone who looks like me and carries my blood, carries my name. I want babies, in fact.”

This conversation marked the beginning of the cajoling period in your marriage. It was when Ahmed began taking you to visit couple friends with cute, well-behaved children, giving you pointed looks whenever the kids were actually being cute and well-behaved. It was when he invited the imam over, though he rarely went to the mosque himself, and you hardly prayed, to deliver an hour-long lecture about the gift of children, assuring you that if you had them, the Almighty himself would help raise them. It was when he took you to see his father. You adored Ahmed’s father. Unlike his mother, who kept you at arm’s length, his father had a booming laugh, called you ‘my favourite daughter’ in front of his three actual daughters, and – despite being a retiree – sent you money at random, though you were 28 and owned a successful business. He reminded you of your own father in some ways.

On the stroll he insisted you take around the neighbourhood, trees throwing shadows onto the path in front of you, he pleaded with you to have one child, just one child. You felt a wave of sadness at turning him down, especially because he was so frail from battling hepatitis. But you could not give in. Your entire life was at stake, after all. 

And that was when your husband did it. He stopped cajoling, stopped mentioning children for weeks, making it seem as though he had let the matter go, resigned, even accepting. And then one night, when you made love, instead of his usual grunt and withdrawal, he wrapped his arms around you, trapping you in his grip. He thrust into you hard, as if determined to leave every drop of himself inside you, as if, even though it was just before your red window, sheer force could make the sperm linger long enough to conjure a miracle. 

You were stunned afterwards, curling on your side at the edge of the bed. You felt him behind you, heard his loud breathing slip into the steady rhythm of sleep, while you stayed awake. The next day, neither of you talked about what happened. And though your first stop should have been the pharmacy for a morning-after pill, you could not make yourself go. To do so would mean admitting that your husband – with the perfect teeth and beautiful, narrow face—was capable of this. You pretended it did not happen, comforting yourself that it was out of your fertile window, and you would be fine. A month later, when your period did not come, you were shaken. Six weeks later, after it was confirmed at the doctor’s, you vomited in the parking lot for reasons that had nothing to do with hormones. Your husband was ecstatic when you delivered the news numbly. Could you have gone to a hospital to get something done about it? Yes. Even if it was not legal and hospitals were dangerous, you still knew people who had braved the risks and done it anyway. You could have inquired through the grapevine about a clinic. But socialisation was hard to override. When your body holds a child, you have the child – your mother told you that your whole life. Only prostitutes and wicked women did not. You swallowed visions of the life you thought you would have – just you and your husband, your business thriving, your horizons opening with travel – you swallowed it and accepted your lot. This baby would come into the world.

*

That first life (and all the rest, for that matter), the pregnancy was easy. You watched your stomach swell and swell until one midnight, pain wracked your body, and you were lurching out of bed with a screech so inhuman you could not believe it emerged from you. Your husband jerked out of sleep, rushing you to the hospital. You had secured a private room, and, for seven hours, you twisted and turned, writhing and praying for the baby to come out, while at the same time wanting to hold it in because you were acutely aware that your life, from thereforth, would be split into the pre-motherhood version of you and the post-motherhood version. The former woman would be dead, and a small part of you could not stand the thought that you were the one who killed her by willingly pushing the baby out into the world. But, like other parts of womanhood – periods, the dreaded periods – you could not keep it in, and the baby slid out of you a little after 7am amid doctors and nurses screaming, “A baby boy! A bouncing baby boy, Madam. See him, see your son!”

Despite all your reservations about this moment, the old wives’ tales were true. The second you saw him, you loved him. He was a slick toffee-colored bundle with a scrunched face on the cusp of a wail, and all of you – spirit, soul, senses – latched onto him with such a fierceness that you snatched him from the nurse’s grasp, though you were weak. You had difficulty relinquishing him back to the nurses, though they kept saying over and over that they needed to clean him up.

That love buoyed you for the next few months. It wiped the slate clean between you and your husband and kept you through the exhaustion of the many, many sleepless nights. Like someone had taken over your body, you found yourself saying things like “Maybe this was for the best. I mean, sometimes we think we know what’s best for our lives until something happens that forces us into a new direction, and we realise we were wrong. I just did not know there was another way.” The former version of you would have slapped you for so casually dismissing her firmly held principles, but she was dead, so what did she matter? 

You and your husband were never more connected than in those first months of your son’s life. There was a lot of laughter in your house at the smallest things he did: the disgusted frown he sometimes had when you sang off-key, the way he timed his pees for nappy changes, the way his head and bottom bounced whenever you played Fireboy DML’s ‘Playboy.’ For someone who had made such a fuss about wanting to be a father, your husband left most of the caregiving to you, only occasionally doing the work of bathing and comforting your son. But weren’t mothers simply more nurturing, especially when children are so young? You did not make a big deal about it. He did other things after all – he had men come in and build a swing in the backyard of your bungalow by the rear fence. One side of the swing had an adult seat that one of you could use, and the other side, a high back bucket child’s seat. None of your other friends’ spouses had done such a thing – conclusive proof that everyone just loved in their own way.

Nine months. It was around the nine-month mark that things began to disintegrate between your fingers. At a standard check-up for your son, your doctor, Mrs Chinelum, examined him through squinted eyes. 

“Ali,” she called him, trying to make him follow her movement with a light. “Ali, look at me.” 

She asked questions afterwards. Was he always like this, not making eye contact? Did he show any response to his name when you called? What about baby noises? Other than crying, which he did a lot of, like most children, did he make the typical sweet babbles or endless cooing?

“No, no, and no,” you replied tensely to each question. “Is something wrong?”

Deep down, you knew there was. You’d noticed these things yourself when you took your son to your friends’ home and saw how different their children were, but you’d stuffed down the fear with the words ‘no two children are the same.’

Mrs Chinelum stared at you. You had a feeling this was the worst part of her job, delivering news parents did not want to hear. 

“It is not… they are not the best signs. But we will run some tests and observe the situation. I might be worrying about nothing.”

Three months later, her expression was intensely sad as she confirmed it was most likely that your son was on the autism spectrum. Six months after that, when he was not making any attempts at speech, still would not make eye contact, screamed furiously when almost anyone was around him besides you and your husband, and confined himself to the corners of the house playing with the same two red and yellow blocks, it was even more confirmed. Mrs Chinelum, with whom you were on a texting-basis with at that point because of how often you had questions for her, began sending you videos of pastors in Lagos and Benin who had healing services with captions that read ‘You never know; what man can’t do, God might do.’

Your husband was obliterated by the news. In all the years you had known him, you had never seen him so demolished. He cried for weeks, spent a few more asking with an accusatory gaze, “But where did such a thing come from? There is nothing like that on my side of the family.” And then, he slowly began to peel away from you and your son. Before this, most evenings, he could try to be home by 6pm. With this new development, you barely saw him until the moon was full. When you complained, snapping at him that Ali was not only your child – he had wanted a baby, now he had one and had to step up – he would not look at you. It did not matter how many times you complained to his parents or asked other people to talk to him; he did not change.

You could not tell if it was psychological, because you now knew that your son was not like other children, the difficulty of caring for him seemed to increase exponentially. The tantrums were… endless. If his pap was not the same thick consistency and fed to him in the same plastic bowl, tantrum. If you did not take him out to the swing every afternoon at precisely three thirty, tantrum. Other children on the spectrum, you read, often avoided contact, but your son craved constant contact. If you spent more than 30 minutes without coming to his corner and touching his arm or cooing about his blocks, tantrum. It made work impossible. You had someone managing your stores. But you saw the monthly returns. They were stealing from you, and there was nothing you could do about it because you could not be there in person. Ali would not let anyone else care for him. He barely tolerated it when other people were in the house.

Shortly after his second birthday, which you marked with a singular cupcake topped with an unlit candle, your husband carefully broached the subject of his moving out.

“I can’t concentrate here,” he said, dusting imaginary specs off the blanket covering his lower half. His back was propped up against the headboard. “The boy is always crying. I’m going to work tired every day. Do you want me to be sacked? How will we eat? At least at my parents’, I will be able to focus.”

“Do you think I’m able to concentrate easily? Or don’t I have other things that require my attention too?” 

You reminded him of your own work and asked about your own life, how you were supposed to manage Ali on your own. It was not like your husband did much, but, in your head, at least he was there, so you were not alone. Now, you were being abandoned to this house and to the care of your son. You had a sudden image of being sealed within these walls, never again to smell fresh air or see sunlight.

“What about me?” you asked, grabbing your husband by the front of his nightshirt and shaking him. “You can’t leave me o. You can’t!”

Still, he did, and though he framed it as living separately so he had the wherewithal to continue providing for you, you knew that your marriage was over. That before long, he would say the words ‘I divorce you’ three times to sever the chord of your relationship. 

In his absence, you walked around in a fog of tears and depression. The migraines you had not had since you were on those contraceptive injections returned, and you found yourself either crying or screaming at your son whenever he was screaming at you. It felt like the hands of the world were around your neck. Friends and family visited, and they tried to help, but they inevitably left at the end of the day. The responsibility of your son was not on their shoulders; it was on yours. You were the one who was being crushed under the weight of it.

One afternoon, you were in the garden, pushing him on the swing. You were standing in front of him the way he liked it, fingertips gently connecting with the gray bucket seat of the swing on each of its returns. Ali was fussy that day. Typically, he was silent during his swing time, his features twisted into the most intense look of concentration, but he was crying during this one.

“Please stop, baby na,” you cajoled. “Please, ko?” You were trying to keep the seams of yourself from splitting beneath the sweetness of your voice, trying so hard. “Please, please, please,” you said, and then you couldn’t help it: you came apart. “What is it?” you shrieked. “What is it, ehn?” 

You shoved the swing with your palms instead of your fingertips, and you knew the second it connected that it was a horrible mistake. Your son swung too far back, and his head connected with the unplastered rear fence. It was funny – the soundtrack of your home at that time had been screams and shouts, but now you couldn’t summon one. You simply watched in horror as your son returned to you, the limpness of his body, the splotch of red on the fence, betraying what had happened before you even touched him. You found your scream at last.

*

So that was your first life. Your first experience of mothering. Your first experience at nurturing a being you brought into the world. Given the horror of your first time, one would think that in your second life, you’d evade marriage and motherhood as fiercely as you could, but you did not return with your memories of your first life in your second. At puberty, when your breasts began to fill out, and you got your period, you did begin to experience flashes, but they were vague – like déjà vu. One day, you’d be standing outside your parents’ fabric shop, and you’d see a woman struggling with her wailing, squirming child who had thrown himself on the dirty market floor, and you’d have the strongest sensation of a child in your own arms, squirming, fighting, yelling. Your hands would tighten automatically – the same way women lactate at the sound of baby’s cries – and you’d turn away quickly to be free of the feeling.

In this life, too, you had no intention of being a mother and doubted you’d marry. But, like last time, you met your husband at the Ministry when you went for a permit, and he charmed you with his progressive views on family life. You were married in your grand ceremony, and, for a year, you were happy, but then came his steamrolling desire for children, and the fights were daily. I want a child. I want someone to carry my name. I want someone with my blood running around the house. Not my nieces and nephews nau, my own child!

It never got to the violence of your previous life. Your husband did take you to his parents’ home, and you did go for the walk with your father-in-law. He was frail, walking beside you under the stretch of shadow-throwing trees. 

“Are you afraid of the pain of childbirth?” your father-in-law asked. “I’m not a woman. But from what I know, as painful as it is, it’s worth it in the end. You experience a love that is above anything you have ever felt.”

“I…appreciate that, Baba,” you said. “It’s not that. I really just don’t want children. I know that is hard for you to understand, but I cannot explain it better than that. I just know I do not want them. I never have.”

Your father-in-law tried to convince you to have just one, and you were not swayed until he grew shaky and had to lean on you for support. You suddenly saw how fleeting the time left he had on his clock was, and you read the pleas etched in his face. Your love for him was what broke your resolve. One child, you said to your husband later. 

“We will have one and only one.”

You could not have known how difficult even one would be for you. Your pregnancy was easy, and the birth was done in seven hours. The first few months were wonderful, but then came the doctor’s visit and the maelstrom of your son’s tantrums and your husband’s decision to leave. You were being punished for going against your instincts, you thought, a million times a day. You loved your son, how dearly you loved your son, but you had always known you were not meant to be a mother, and because you had ignored the truth of who you were, you were being punished with this situation you did not know how to handle.

At the swing, you pushed your son gently, and, as your patience frayed, you raised your palms with too much strength. At the last moment, a wave of déjà vu caused you to step back before your hands connected with the swing. You felt sick. How intensely sick you felt. You doubled over, somehow smelling the scent of blood and shuddering at the sound of a crack you did not hear. You understood how terribly things could have gone. Not merely because of the déjà vu, but because when you straightened, you could see that if you’d pushed with strength that had been coursing through you, your son would have slammed into the fence with similar consequences as if an egg had been hurled at it.

Afraid of yourself, you strapped him into the car and sped over to your parents’ home. You handed Ali over to your mother, saying you had errands to run. She’d come over a few days ago, but she could not be at your place often because she handled all the accounting for the shop she owned with your father, freeing him to focus on sales.

You drove straight home afterwards, crawling into your bed and covering yourself with the blanket. This was the most silence, the most peace you’d experienced in some time. Lying there, you did not cry for yourself and what your life had become. You did not think. You barely moved. When your phone began buzzing later in the evening, you did not pick up, though you knew it was your mother calling to find out when you would be back for Ali. You turned your phone off around midnight when the buzzing would not stop, staying in bed, late into the next day, trying to crawl your way back to yourself. 

Around midday, a banging on the gate reluctantly drew you out of bed. Weak with hunger, you still made your way through the house and out into the compound around your house to the gate. You opened the pedestrian entrance. Your father was there, worry covering his face.

“Where were you? Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” he shouted. He was huffing and puffing, his wide chest rising and falling as though he’d been running, but his car was parked right behind him.

“Sorry,” you mumbled. “I was…”

He interrupted you by bellowing that you did not answer your phone, which prompted your mother to attempt to bring your son back to you this morning. There was an accident. On the highway. 

“Is Mama okay? And Ali?”

You did not need him to speak to know that they were not. That they would never again return. 

*

Darkness. At puberty in your third life, you remembered everything. You remembered the happy childhoods of your previous two lives, you remembered meeting your husband in his office, you remembered becoming pregnant, and the gruesome endings of those two lives. You also remembered the darkness that precipitated each new life you lived. After you died, like a breath exhaled, for a moment, two, three, you were in utter black before being spit out into each new iteration of living.

You remembered all this as blood flowed out of you and cramps wrung your stomach. Clenching the soft flesh of your lower belly and squirming, you felt tears leak from your eyes while your brain ached like it would explode. Memories on top of memories on top of memories stacked onto each other until you were not sure what was real and what wasn’t. Your mother, perched on the edge of your bed, trying to help you through this new womanly experience, was frightened as you told her everything. Day after day, you told her about the shops you owned, the man you married, and the son you birthed.

At first, she snapped at you to stop saying such things – did not you know saying horrible things was inviting bad luck onto yourself. But, after your period was long past, and you were still terrified of all life, refusing to leave your room and describing swing sets placed behind modest bungalows, she grew worried that there was something seriously wrong with you. Your mother took you to the imam of your local mosque. He prayed for you, then stencilled some Qur’anic surahs onto a wooden board with edible ink, washed it into a bowl with questionably hygienic hands, and poured it into a bag for you to take home and drink for seven days. Even at the end of the seven days, when you shut your eyes, you still saw your previous life, and you continued to tell your parents about them, so your mother ignored religious boundaries and took you to a pastor 13 hours away in Lagos. You had both seen his mega healing ministry on TV. Men and women who were born crippled suddenly able to walk. Children with congenital heart diseases healed. Your mother, convinced that you had gone mad, camped out with you for three days on the grounds of the massive cream-coloured church before you were allowed access to the pastor – for a fee. He wore a white suit with white shoes and had a white pocket square peeking out from his suit jacket.

“Is this the girl?” he asked your mother as they walked toward you. You were sitting in a chair by the door of his massive office while your mother was across the room at his desk, filling him in on the situation. 

“Yes, sir,” your mother replied. “This is her. This is my girl.” Desperation coated her voice. Even with all the memories making it difficult for you to concentrate on anything, you’d seen how trying the last three months had been for her. Her collarbones were showing over the neckline of her blouse.

The pastor walked up to you and placed a hand on your head. At his holler, two other men entered the room and stood on either side of you. Together, the three of them prayed, demanding that the demon that had taken over your body leave at once.

You prayed too. You wanted to be free. You wanted, for the first time in a while, for your head to feel less full. It did not work, and when you returned home and stopped sleeping, spending your nights peering into your own memories trying to sort them out, your parents had no choice but to commit you to a psychiatric clinic.

Kaduna Psychiatric Hospital was a three-story yellow and brown building in Barden Yana. The moment you stepped inside, your father, behind you, holding a bag containing your belongings, you felt the sadness clinging to the drab walls. You were turned over to nurses who situated you in a blue room that held three beds, two of which were occupied by two girls around your age. You did not talk to either of them much, though one of them spent a great deal of time talking to herself, and the other spent so much time crying, it felt like you were in constant conversation with her sorrow. When you were not at meals, being fed medicine that dulled your access to your memories, dulled all your thoughts, in fact, you were contained to your room where you watched nurses, doctors, and visitors come and go through the window. You did not mourn your inability to join them. That would suggest an ability to feel much, and you did not have that. Sometimes you listened to the patients screaming from the other rooms, and it triggered memories of your previous lives – the screams of a child. You retreated into yourself, gripping the foam of your mattress, or the skin of your hands to anchor you in this life, in this moment. 

Six years after your commitment, when you were 19, you were finally released back into the world, and that became the trick you used to push all those other lives away. You pinched, you felt, you smelled, ran your tongue over coarse spines of books and smooth walls to keep grounded in the world around you. And… it worked, slowly, you began to feel like this life was a journey you could undertake. The years you had left did not have to be as hellish as your initial two decades. 

You began lessons to allow you to write JAMB and WAEC so you could hopefully go to university. You became friends with the neighbours in your area who were not perturbed that you were once in a mental clinic. Because, above all else, you yearned to be a normal girl, a girl whose mind was not cluttered by shadows, you waited until your parents felt comfortable leaving you home on your own on a business trip to pull out your sparkliest top and tightest jeans and go to a club you found on Google.

The music, so deafening and engulfing! The bodies, so energetic and sweaty! The drinks, so warm and pleasurable! You danced in the crush, not worried about people pressing into you from every direction. When a man in a tight polo shirt offered you a drink, you accepted it, not thinking about what could possibly be in your glass besides your margarita. 

You were wooly, in and out of consciousness, as a warm body manoeuvred you out of the club and into a car, then onto a bed. You pushed weakly against a chest as a man’s lips and chaffing beard brushed your cheek. There were other voices, at least two more, followed by their bodies and breaths over you. When the last man was on top, you managed to pry your eyes fully open. Seeing the face you’d witnessed in your head so many times pulled into the real world, you screeched and began to fight, but you were weaker than you knew, and he pinned you down easily to finish what he was doing. 

In the morning, you woke up with your head hurting in a hotel room. You were shaken and nauseous as you made your way home. In your own room, on your own bed, you cried. You knew, even though it was too soon to reasonably tell, that a seed had taken root in your body, and you were hurtling toward the same destination as your previous lives. You threw up at the thought, cried a bit, threw up some more, and cried again. In the kitchen, you selected your mother’s favourite knife. The blade was sharp. It always cut through yams and meat easily. The skin of your wrist did not struggle against it. It split open easily.

*

The third life, done. Then came the fourth life and the fifth and the twelfth and the twenty-seventh and the forty-first. Then came lives where, like the third time, you remembered everything at puberty but were smart enough to no longer tell anyone and survived by using the anchoring trick you’d learned on your third go-around. 

In these lives, you learned a lot of things. You learned that whatever you did, you still ended up pregnant with your son. You could avoid your husband, try to be with other people, lock yourself up at home, take birth control, attempt a hysterectomy; it did not matter how far you ran and in what direction, you always still ended up under your husband, and you always ended up pregnant with Ali. Around your fifteenth life, you realised that the more you tried to evade the pregnancy, the more brutal the conception, so eventually you stopped running. You submitted yourself to meeting your husband, marrying him, and getting pregnant when he wanted you to. It was excruciating. Each new time you met him, you were enveloped by a visceral hatred that you had to keep under the surface, smiling and kissing and whispering ‘I love you’s.’

Rather than trying to avoid this inevitable sequence of events, you spent your lives attempting to break out of this loop entirely. Why was this happening to you? Had you done something wrong? Did some divine power want you to learn something that you were not understanding? You spent a great deal of time in witch doctor huts and the offices of religious figures. You pursued scientific intervention, communicating with physicists in various parts of the world. You spent whole lives being very good – giving to the poor, refusing to say anything bad about anyone, maintaining the cleanest carbon footprint that you could manage. You became a fervent member of one religion in one life and another in the next. None of it worked, and then you realised the obvious: motherhood. It had to be about that. It was the one constant of all your lives, no matter what else changed. 

After your first two lives, you would not say that you were a particularly good mother. You performed all the tasks associated with it – feeding your son, clothing him, tying him to your back while you pursued various potential avenues of breaking your cycle. But you never felt emotionally connected to him anymore. You approached him as the albatross he felt like, doing the needful while nursing a bitter resentment at being forced to mother him over and over. There was still love there, but it was submerged beneath feet of sand, too deep to reach on most days while you managed those horrendous outbursts that cropped up during your chores. You were mostly gentle in each life. You held him and tried to reason with him more than you were impatient with him, yet you were aware of the performance of your actions. You were starring in the role of mother and not really being one. 

Maybe that was what all of this was about: mothering your son well. For just one life, guiding him through to the finish line well, as a good mother would. In your fifty-third life, you devoted yourself to this. You studied your son’s illness extensively. Nigeria did not have the diagnostic or medical facility to accurately pinpoint your son’s precise type of autism or offer him proper care, but in an early life, you’d deduced, through research, that he was between a Level 2 and a Level 3 on the DSM-5 scale. Now you made that mean something. Ali was nonverbal, so you learned speech-language therapy skills by watching hours of online videos. You imported expensive communication tablets from abroad and introduced a picture system to teach him life skills instead of the careful repetition that had been your previous method. 

There were no good schools for children like your son, so in addition to managing your struggling business, you became his teacher when he was old enough for school – in all his previous lives, either you or he passed before you got to this point, making it a non-issue. Now you created a detailed Individualised Learning Plan, including social skills to make him more accommodating to people other than you and your ex-husband, the few times he came around. 

In Ali’s adolescence and adulthood, you focused on personal hygiene, basic cooking, and handling money. He liked animals – was obsessed with dogs – so you helped him secure an apprenticeship, then a job at All Pets, the high-end veterinary clinic in Angwa Sarki. Later, you got him a roommate from among the group you’d joined of mothers with similar children and hired a worker to provide them both with the assistance they needed.

It felt good to watch him begin to live life on his own. You had spent so much of this life teaching, planning, and trying to bridge the gap between him and the world that, when it worked, you were overcome with pride – and delight. In this life, more than any other, you’d learned how to enjoy your son. Though you had never wanted to be a mother, you came to see him clearly, as someone whole and separate from you and his conception. You laughed together at The Devil Is a Part-Timer and Ranma ½, the anime he loved. You spent even more time curled up together on couches and beds, sometimes you stroking his hair, sometimes him stroking yours because he liked the way it felt. How could you not be delighted to watch him thrive?

By any measure, you had succeeded in your purpose in this life. And because of that, you felt certain it would be your last. It was a sense in the pit in your belly that told you to soak up every moment you could, because you would not have more. When you eventually died – thrust into the darkness at 71 from a lower respiratory tract infection – you went without fear, prepared to either pass into unconsciousness finally, or move on to another place. You felt the breaths, the darkness heaving, one, two, and then you were spit out into the world again. A second before sunlight hit your skin, you were engulfed by a shock and rage so encompassing you would have screamed if you could. 

At puberty, when you remembered this, you wondered if some of that anguish was tucked into your first scream as a baby. Surely, your body remembered all that it had been put through. 

*

So here you are, your fifty-third life. You stand at the sink of your home, slowly scrubbing your plates. Your son is shrieking and sinking his teeth into your thigh, shrieking and sinking his teeth into your thigh. 

You are numb. You have not forgotten the lessons of life 51. In your fifty-second, you once again stewarded your son to the finish line, and you will in this life, too, but you have moments like this where you are disintegrating. On the outside, you are here, present, but on the inside, you have folded up into a ball. 

You finish the dishes, then crouch to your son’s eye level and calm him down, convincing him to take a nap. Once the house is quiet, you head to the bathroom where you peel off your trousers and peer at the bloody bite marks on your thigh. Your skin is riddled with healed-over teeth marks. You take out the bottle of iodine and Band-Aids from the box in the corner, sit on the edge of the bathtub, and carefully apply the purple liquid with a cotton bud, covering it with a Band-Aid. When you are done, you screw the cap back on, put the rest of the Band-Aids back in their white box and remain on the bathtub’s edge. 

Outside the small window behind you, children’s happy cries reach you from the street. You picture their mothers close by, calling out in playful tones to slow down, to stop plucking caterpillars from the dirt. Even in their scolding, there’s light caught in their voices. Tears prick your eyes. Are those women living their first and only lives? Is at least one of them living the same crushing existence over and over again? You’ve given this some thought – the despair braided through most of your lives. Even if the women outside aren’t all living the same life repeatedly, you wonder if there is someone, somewhere who is, except she has been afforded the opposite fate: all the lovely parts of motherhood. You wonder if the world needs witnesses. A person to record the inestimable joys of raising a child, and a person to record its inestimable sorrows. You just drew the short straw. 

The thought is still with you, children’s jubilant cries washing over you, when your son wakes and begins to fuss in his room. You rise to tend to him.

Zainab Omaki is a Nigerian writer. She holds a PhD and Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and University of East Anglia. Her essays, fiction, and literary criticism have appeared in Five Points, L.A. Review, Passages North, Transition Magazine, and The Rumpus, among others. Her work has been supported by the University of Bayreuth in Germany, the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, and the Nebraska Arts Council. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart, the Best of the Net prize, and the Amelia Gray Short Story Award.

*Image by Barbara Verge on Unsplash