Mine is a simple and short story.
I needed to share because I need to hear my own thoughts.
I started out on this journey by not thinking. I wasn’t thinking when shortly after I separated from my husband of 20 years, I hopped into bed with a crush from secondary school.
Who does that?
What was I thinking?
What did I think would happen?
Well, I’ll tell you what? I wasn’t thinking, when I reconnected with him at one of our school reunions.
I was out of a job and he helped connect me with a company that I now work for. He helped me get a new apartment, stabilize me the first few months after my separation from my husband. It was help but you know, help became someone I could talk to, seek his advice…when he invited me to a guest house, I didn’t think anything could happen…but it did.
I am almost 50 and I have a new born baby. This is sad, my last born, the one before this baby is in his final year at the secondary school. Yeah, that’s how deep a shit I buried myself in.
Can you imagine, a woman nearing 50, still getting pregnant?
I wanted to get rid of the baby. It would affect my job, my relationship with my kids, my family…I have no energy left for a baby at this stage of my life. I sought to remove it but twice, couldn’t summon up the courage to go, why? I kept having dreams of me dying in the theatre. And when I told the guy I was pregnant for, he kept reassuring me I would be fine and that I shouldn’t remove the baby.
I went into hiding immediately until I put to bed!
How would I have defended myself from people? They would say I had been having the affair while still married. Nothing can be further from the truth but who cares for the truth these days? Who cares?
When I told my guy I was pregnant, he told me not to worry; he had always wanted a child of his own; at 55, he had been married for about the same length of years I had but had no child with his wife. When I told him I wanted to get rid of it, he begged me not to, he promised to help me raise the child and indeed, he has been a doting father
Thankfully my baby came out healthy, which was also a surprise to me because the way I willed the fetus to die was deep. Anyway, my dilemma is this; the father wants his child; he says his wife doesn’t have any children for him, the children they are raising as theirs are children of siblings and other relatives; he had told his wife about me and she has agreed to have my child and raise him as theirs!
I told them they are both mad!
He said he thought because I never wanted it, he could convince me to hand the baby over. These people are mad o!
So now, he has stopped the support he has been giving me and my kids and is asking me to give him his baby…I have told him to come and collect her, if he dares!
(Series written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories)