I Thought I had Baby Fever...

The other day, I was chatting with my best friend and I randomly just told him, “I’m having baby fever, I want to have a baby.” The poor boy first rejected it for me, and then he asked why.Now, you may be wondering why he was asking “why.” I mean who needs a reason to have kids. But asking me why I wanted to have kids is very on brand if you know me well enough.I’ve written articles implying that I don’t want kids or that I might have them later in life. I’ve been very vocal about it. I’ve even said in public, several times, that if I got pregnant now, I’d abort it.So why all of a sudden did I start craving children?Well, it didn’t just dawn on me one day, like a light bulb moment. No, it was more of a gentle awakening, a feeling that just creeps like all those plants that grow on walls. So, I’m supposed to have graduated last year, but I’m not even graduating this year, I’m like two years behind my set. But my parents have been supportive throughout. In fact I started my final year last year and I’d already paid my fees in full before I had to leave school again. Automatically, that semester’s tuition — millions of naira — down the drain. And my dad hasn’t once complained or blamed me. What I’m trying to say with all this story is that my family is very, very supportive, and they have a rough draft of how they expect my life to go. This means marriage almost immediately after school. A few babies. Church going, respectable Christian girl. And at first I was against it vehemently. I even told my parents that I don’t believe in the christian god anymore. They didn’t take it well.But the more understanding and loving my family was, the more I began to admit that maybe the life they’d planned for me wasn’t so bad.The easier life looks like this: a wedding my mother plans down to the aso-ebi color. A husband my father approves of before I even fully do. Church on Sundays, not because I believe, but because it costs me nothing to sit there and everything to not. A baby, then maybe another, and a version of me my aunties can hold up as an example without hesitation. I’d be loved out loud, publicly, without conditions attached — because I would have already met them. And I think I could be happy in that life, a little. Not miserable. Just muted. Like a room where you’ve learned to speak more quietly because it keeps the peace.The other life doesn’t have a script, which is exactly the problem. I can’t picture a Sunday in it the way I can picture a Sunday in the first one. I know it involves telling my mother something true and watching her face do a thing I can’t undo. I know it means my father might stop introducing me to people the way he used to, or might not stop, and I wouldn’t know which for a long time. I know it means being loved with more effort, by fewer people, out of choice instead of inheritance. It might be the realer love. I don’t actually know, because I’ve never had it tested.That’s the part I keep circling: I’m not choosing between happiness and unhappiness. I’m choosing between a love I already have and trust completely, and a love I’d have to go find out about.I’m so used to being loved by my family that I don’t know what would happen if the love stopped. I don’t know how I’d cope. So let me actually go there — the specifics I keep replaying at 2am like a tape on loop.I think about telling my mother I might not be straight, and I think about the silence that would come first, before whatever she decided to say. Not anger, necessarily. Something worse, maybe a recalculating. The same way my friend’s face changed when I told him about the baby, except this time it wouldn’t be surprise, it would be grief. Grief for the version of me she’d been planning for over eighteen years.I think about my aunties on the phone with each other, not to me, about me. I think about the specific Nigerian genius for disapproval that never has to raise its voice. The visits that get shorter, the invitations that quietly stop including me, the cousins who are “busy” when I ask to see them. I don’t think anyone would sit me down and say stay away from the children. It would just happen, the way weather happens. And I’d know exactly why, and no one would confirm it, and I’d have no one to argue with because there’d be nothing said out loud to argue against.I think about my father, who paid for a semester I didn’t finish and didn’t say a word about the money. I think about what it would cost him — not financially, but socially, spiritually, in the specific currency he trades in with his own siblings and his own church — to have a daughter who is queer, who isn’t a Christian, who says no to marriage on purpose. I don’t think he would stop loving me. I think he would love me and be ashamed at the same time, and I don’t know which one I’d feel more.And underneath all of it is the thing I actually can’t say out loud yet, even here: I don’t know if I’m strong enough to find out. I have never once, in my whole life, tested whether my family’s love has a floor. I’ve always stayed comfortably above it. And some days I think the bravest thing I could do is find that floor, and other days I think the bravest thing I could do is never look for it at all. Just marry the nice boy, have the babies, and let the question stay theoretical forever.

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