by Uwaoma Eizu

God please forgive me but this fetus in my stomach need not see the light of the day. So I thought while I signed the pregnancy termination and risk undertaken and then I lay dressed on the hospital theatre, clothed in the hospital gown and a shower cap. Clinging on to the bed sheet, I laid in fear.  Although the anesthetics made me not feel any pain but the cry of the baby in my womb that I was about to murder made my soul bleed. But really, if I didn’t, then how could I look at my strict and hypertensive clergy mother back in Nigeria who was the head of the catholic women wing for the movement against premarital sex and teenage pregnancy? How do I disappoint my professors by dropping out of my IVY league school in America that I got on scholarship? Plus the boy who left me in this condition blatantly told me off when I told him that I was pregnant.  I had a future of a better life to protect, so I thought.  So I chose my life over that of the unborn baby.

At twenty one, my hands were already soiled, how could I have taken the life of my own first born? She could have been a smart girl with a lion heart like her stupid father, or perhaps an emotionally gullible Gemini with a cute dimpled smile just like me. Every June 23^rd, my instinct tells me that it would have been the birthday of the child that could have been and every time I look at my baby niece, I feel him ask why I did what I did to his cousin.  Would I live with this guilt forever? I’m scared.

I am scared, and ashamed of myself. How could I have paid for the murder of a part of me as I feel myself die more every day simply by the thoughts of it?  These thoughts are killing me.  What words do I use to describe my baby; ‘I’, ‘he’ or ‘she’? , that’s how bad it is. I had no guts to even know the sex before I killed it.  No guts to even smile to its ‘goo-goo-ga-ga’ baby language, I didn’t give that baby a chance to play and get dirty with other mates and in his/her school clothes till I’d get mad at the dirt stains.

Well, let me explain, there’s no use making anyone see the million excuses why that foetus, had to go.  But I was young and scared in the light of what I shouldn’t have started, sex.  The truth is, I’ve made my biggest mistake by letting my action invoke someone from heaven into my womb only to take it back almost immediately back to heaven again.  I took a baby from its ending to another ending without letting it begin in this place of time and space. The truth is, I was so scared and unready to become a mother, the guilt and consequences of that fear, even till today is yet to disappear.

Now I am in a cross road of not being able to give birth again, so the doctors says after over ten years now, who cares as having a husband is not even in my agenda. I swore to myself never to love any man again but at times I wish I had a child, preferably a daughter, one I could teach the tricks of the trade. Then I’d draw her closer to me with a guiding light, too bright for any mortal to take advantage of, like I was. Maybe someday I will, but for now, am stuck. Stuck with this marijuana, bottles of gin, a great career and my lesbian friends I can relate with. Loneliness, sin, guilt, fear and uncertainty is what I leave with, the consequence of aborting a part of me and my next generation.

This girl needs help. Help through your comments.

Oluwapelumi