I knew so little about my body, pregnancy, and childbirth that despite the signs, it never occurred to me that I could be pregnant. I missed my period, was perpetually tired, nauseous, and throwing up every morning, but I just thought that I was just sick; sick of my current situation and sick of my sorry life. Of course, I had known that at some point, I would have kids for my husband, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon, and I wasn’t particularly thrilled that I was pregnant.
My current life was so miserable that I wasn’t sure I wanted a child brought into the situation too. So, when the doctor told me that I was expecting, I was numb. What was my life going to be like now with a baby? Will it bring me some joy? And what about me? Will I be able to give it joy? Could I give a baby what I didn’t possess? What if it was a girl? Was she going to grow up to the same fate as me? I didn’t want to be pregnant, but there was nothing I could do about it. Like much of my life so far, it hadn’t been my decision, but I was stuck with it.
Of course, my husband was happy I was with child. He told me that he was pleased that I was going to do my duty and bear him children, and he hoped that it was a boy. I hoped that it was a boy too, not because I wanted a boy child, of course, but because I had realised by then that life was much easier and better for boys. I did not want to give birth to a girl who’d suffer like me.
Two months into the pregnancy, my husband changed. He seemed to be more irritable than usual, and nothing I did pleased him. His food was either too hot or not warm enough. I was either being lazy by not cleaning his house properly, or cleaning too much and jeopardising his son’s life. There was always something I was doing wrong to complain about. However, I had seen that kind of behaviour before from my father, so I was not perturbed. Like my mother, I never talked back or defended myself. I just apologised and promised to do better. That had not been enough to please my father, and it was certainly not enough to please my husband either.
The first time he hit me for a perceived wrongdoing, I was not surprised. I had been expecting it. This man that my father had married me to, was just like my father and the other men in my family. So, yes, I had expected the physical abuse. The second time, it wasn’t just one hit. By the time he was done, my face was swollen, my right eye was half-way shut, and my body was in pain, but I didn’t cry. I was in so much pain, but I couldn’t cry.
The third time he beat me up, he was drunk from a night out with his friends, and had lost at a game of cards. He came home ranting about how much of a bad luck I had been to him. And somehow, it became my fault that he gambled with his friends and lost. That beating was how I lost the baby.
For a long time after losing that baby, I felt a lot of guilt. Not because I thought it was my fault for getting beaten to the point of a miscarriage, but guilt because I was relieved that the baby was gone. That made me a terrible woman, didn’t it? As I recovered from the clinic, I was too numb to even feel the pain. The overwhelming relief that I no longer had my husband’s child growing inside me overshadowed the pain. I felt guilty for being relieved, but the relief still overshadowed the guilt.
Some of the nurses gave me pitying looks, and they were kind to me, so I liked being there. The only person that made me uncomfortable was the midwife who came in at some point to speak to the doctor. She gazed at me in a way that felt like how my husband stared at me when he was looking for a reason to be angry.
When I was fit enough to return home, my husband and I went to see the midwife in the small consulting room at the clinic. There was a desk, which she was sitting behind, and two chairs that had seen better days in front of the desk. She gestured for us to sit and watched keenly as I stood for my husband to sit first and tell me to sit before I gingerly dropped my still-aching body onto the chair.
“At least she has some respect and knows her place,” the midwife said with raised brows.
My husband shrugged. “I suppose she’s okay, but you know why we’re here.”
The midwife nodded. “Indeed, Baffour. She seems a little fragile though,” she said, talking about me with my husband as if I was not there. “Are you certain she is from good stock and can bear you the sons you desire? Did you investigate her background well enough?”
I could tell from the conversation that my husband and this unkind woman knew each other beyond this clinic, but I knew better than to ask how.
“I think she’s good enough,” my husband said generously, and years of keeping mute kept me from reacting or making a snide comment.
The midwife gave me a sharp look as if she could read my mind, and I looked quickly away. I was afraid of her, more so than my husband, because I knew what to expect from men already. Women have been generally kinder, although many, like my mother, tended to be complicit. But at least they didn’t hurt me for no reason like the men did. This woman looked like she could hurt me on purpose, and her next words proved my suspicions to be right.
“If you say so. I was just wondering because a strong woman does not lose her baby just because of a little beating. Well, perhaps it is because she is so young.”
At that point, I was very glad that I was looking down, and I kept my head down.
“That’s part of the reason I am here. I want to have an heir soon. So I hoped that after she lost that baby she could have another one soon. I agree that I didn’t expect her to lose the child over that incident. I should be more careful with her stomach area since I want a child by next year.”
“If you want her to get pregnant again quickly, I can help you with that. Ideally, for girls of today, they will say she should rest before you try for another pregnancy, but I believe she will be fine. Some of these young girls are too spoiled.”
“Good. I trust you to make it happen, Beamah.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
Again, I kept my head down. I didn’t even have the energy to react because in the few months that I had been married to him, I had experienced being treated as an object and discussed as if I was not present when his friends or family came to visit. So just like I did all those other times, I kept quiet and acted as invisible as they were acting I was.
I had a dream that night. In that dream, I was wearing a floating, flowery dress and shouting in unbridled relief and joy. As I watched myself in the dream, I couldn’t help but stare at myself in awe. I had never felt anything remotely close to joy, so seeing that expression on my face was staggering. And when I woke up, I wondered what it would be like to feel that way in truth.
Just a month after I lost my first baby, I became pregnant again. After two months, I lost that pregnancy too. He did not beat me as much as that first time, but I miscarried anyway. Beamah gave me more concoctions to drink so that I would get pregnant again sooner, and it worked. This time, he was careful not to hit me, limiting his abuse to verbal and emotional. He let me know in many different ways how hopeless, useless and lazy I was. I had heard those words so many times already that they didn’t bother me anymore. I wondered if that was how my mother had felt. I asked her once, during one of her few visits, if that was the case. She had looked away, unable to meet my eyes, and lied that she had no idea what I was talking about.
When she asked me why I wasn’t pregnant yet, I didn’t bother to tell her about the two I had had and lost. There was no point. I didn’t feel bad for losing those babies, because I still didn’t want to have any children, and I didn’t want to have that discussion with a woman who had been living in a prison of a marriage for longer than my years on earth. There was nothing she could do to help me escape my situation, and even if she could, she wouldn’t. As far as she was concerned, my current life was my lot as a woman, and it was normal.
