When A Mother Needs Mothering

The hospital room in Nigeria had white walls and fluorescent lights that never softened, even at night. The sharp smell of antiseptic clung to everything: the coarse sheets, the humid air, my sweat-damp skin. Each time I tried to shift my weight, pain tore through my lower abdomen so violently that I gasped. My head throbbed. My back burned where the spinal block had entered my body. When I attempted to roll onto my side, a cry escaped my lips before I could stop it.

I had never undergone surgery before that unexpected C-section. The knowledge that strangers had cut me open and stitched me back together hung heavily over me. And yet, when they placed my baby beside me, relief moved quietly through the pain.

Daria was finally here, my beautiful daughter.

She lay on the narrow hospital bed beside me, a tiny, beautiful extension of myself, with faintly arched eyebrows and a broad nose shaped exactly like her father’s. I wanted to gather her against my chest, to hold her close enough for our breathing to become one rhythm, but my arms felt heavy and foreign. My body refused me. All I could do was look at her, suspended between fierce gratitude and an exhaustion I did not yet know how to name.

My husband was in Japan when I gave birth. He had left Nigeria shortly after our wedding to begin a three-year graduate program he had already been admitted into before we married. By the time I went into labor, he had been there for months, and because of visa restrictions, academic commitments, and travel constraints, he could not return for the birth. We remained in constant video calls, moving between time zones and days. “I can’t wait to see you,” he would say, as if longing could shorten distance.

We had planned for me to join him in Japan, but immigration delays made it impossible before I gave birth.

My mother had arrived that very day, abiamo tooto, a true mother, just as the labor began, but in the sterile rush of the surgery, I was still swimming through the fog alone. She had traveled for hours by bus, carrying exhaustion in her face and the lingering fear of nearly losing both the baby and me. She had not been physically with me through the long months of the pregnancy, because I live in a different state away from my family and that of my in-laws; it was my neighbors who had watched over me daily, and my mother-in-law who visited on holidays, but now my mother was here, looking at what the pregnancy had left behind. She did not ask questions when she entered the room. She simply looked at me and smiled. “Ku orire,” she said. Congratulations.

A nurse came in, adjusted my sheet, and left without looking at me for long. Time moved without me.

On the fourth day, when I was discharged, I could not walk upright. The incision pulled with every movement, a hot, burning ache that seemed to split through my abdomen whenever I tried to straighten my back. I shuffled from the hospital room to the door, one hand pressed against my stomach, the other gripping the wall whenever I could. Each step toward the parking lot felt as though something inside me was tearing open again. The hot weather hit my face, but I was too exhausted to notice much else beyond the pain.

At home, I lowered myself onto the bed inch by inch, bracing for the sharp sting that came whenever I moved. Standing required planning and courage. I avoided drinking water because I dreaded the trip to the bathroom. Most days, I lay still, listening to my newborn’s cries from the next room, waiting for the pain medication to dull the ache enough for me to rise. Even holding my baby against my chest felt heavy. My body had brought a child into the world, yet I felt fragile, as though I had been broken open and stitched together too quickly.

Two days after the birth, my mother-in-law arrived, olokan ire, a good-hearted soul. Feeling excited to see her first grandchild, she said, “Ah omo baba ni.” She looks like her dad.

 At home, I did not recover alone.

The house never stayed quiet. Voices entered before the doors closed. Someone was always cooking, always checking on the baby, always asking, always arriving without awaiting permission. Neighbors came without invitation, their presence filling the rooms before they could feel empty, flasks of pap, steaming bowls of soup, hands already adjusting what I could not reach.

My closest neighbor became a steady anchor, calling out each morning through the door.

“Mama baby,” she would say. “We have not seen your face since this morning. Are you okay?”

Even my rest had witnesses.

Friends from work came in waves, bringing laughter, errands, and steady companionship. One checked on me daily. Another brought Nigerian food whose familiar aroma softened the strangeness of recovery. 

They lifted their hands and proclaimed, “Oun t’oju ri ma r’ere.” May your labor bring forth good fruit. Another said, “Aku ewu omo.” They admired my daughter’s deep brown eyes, praised my strength, and called me brave. But strength, in those moments, felt strangely close to disappearance.

Daria was passed from hand to hand while I stayed where I was. Mama Fikayo, my amazing neighbor, lifted her blanket and smiled at her face. “Look at her eyes,” she said. No one asked if I was in pain. They could see it, but it did not interrupt anything. My mother-in-law tried her best, stepping into the kitchen to cook for me, trying to fill the house’s quiet spaces with meals. But even with the mothers there, the celebration belonged to the new life, while mine felt suspended.

My husband remained in Japan after Daria’s birth, waiting for the paperwork that would allow us to join him. Yet distance never diminished his presence. He called daily, spent hours on video calls watching her grow, and often said, “I can’t wait to hold her someday.” I could see the longing in his eyes each time the screen lit up, but the distance between us could not be wished away.

One afternoon, my mother was away at the market for groceries. It was evening time, and the visitors had already left. The front door clicked shut. The house grew still beneath the heavy June heat, and I found myself alone with a crying newborn and a body that no longer felt like my own. Later that evening, my mother returned. The bedroom door opened quietly, and she walked in.

“Ah,” she said. Not a question. Not surprised. Recognition.

She came straight to me and touched my shoulder. “Let me see you,” she whispered.

I tried to sit up. My face tightened before I could finish the movement.

“Don’t,” she said immediately. “Don’t move.”

Before my mind could fully register her presence, my body surrendered to it.

She set down her bag and went to the kitchen. I heard water running. Pots shifting. The sound of something being made without instructions. When she returned, she did not ask what I needed. She began adjusting things: my pillows with practiced tenderness, my legs when the stitches pulled too tightly, the cloth under me, all without pausing to explain herself.

Warm bowls of pepper soup appeared before hunger could even form into words. “Eat small small,” she said. I ate because she was there.

In the early mornings, I woke to the sound of water running in the kitchen and the soft clatter of pots. Daria’s cries no longer reached me first. My mother did. By sunrise, my baby was already bathed, wrapped neatly in patterned cloth, her skin scented with powder and shea butter. My mother moved through the house humming low, familiar songs: no announcement, no explanation, no need for recognition.

Sometimes, I woke to find her sitting beside me, watching my breathing as if it mattered more than anything else she had to do. I stopped hearing the baby first. I stopped counting how long I had been alone. Months later, my daughter and I joined my husband in Japan.

Years later, my husband’s academic pursuits relocated us from Japan to the United States. Months after our arrival, I found myself once again beneath surgical lights, this time at DCH Regional Medical Center.

The operating room was bright and meticulously clean. The narrow table pressed against my shoulders. Above me, fluorescent lights glared so intensely that I could not look directly at them. Machines hummed steadily in the background while nurses moved with practiced efficiency around me, another child entering the world.

My son arrived on a Monday morning—a beautiful boy with flushed pink lips and cheeks so round they made the nurses laugh. My husband was present at the moment, and he stood beside me the entire time, exhaustion and joy glowing across his face as he held our daughter’s hand in one arm and cradled our newborn son in the other.

“Demilade is here,” he said, looking at me. “He’s actually here.” Afterward, he kissed my forehead gently. “You did it. You’ve been through so much.”

And I believed him. He meant every word. His presence was a gift.

We went home to an American apartment that my husband, a very intentional man, had cleaned and arranged.  No one entered without permission. No footsteps fell in the hallway that were not ours. At first, it felt like rest. Then it became something else. The silence was not restful. It was vast. 

The refrigerator hummed in the background. The microwave clock glowed against the dark kitchen wall.

No one entered, because they knew I could not yet stand for long. Care was offered differently in the US, with respect for my privacy, my personal space, and the possibility that I might not want company yet. It was not a lack of kindness; it was kindness to ask permission before entering. But in Nigeria, friends and extended family show up without asking for permission. Doors open and close without an announcement.

Eventually, support arrived, but in unfamiliar, scheduled forms. Friends from my community checked on me. Messages. Calls. Visits arranged in advance. Meals left at the door and then gone again. Help that came and then returned to its own life.

“Abi,” one friend said, “I’m bringing food over. I don’t know if you’ll like it, can I be on my way?”

“If you’re overwhelmed, you can bring Daria to spend time with me,” another motherly friend offered gently.

“Do you need me to do anything for you?” another asked.

But no mother moved through the space as if my recovery belonged to her, too.

There was only me, standing in the middle of the kitchen with two children needing my body at the same moment. My husband was still in the house, but asleep after days of carrying most of the care alone while I recovered and still tended to our daughter.

“Mommy, water,” Daria said, tugging at my skirt.

Behind me, Demilade let out a sharp, ringing cry from his bassinet.

I turned, but I could not finish turning. Pain tightened across my abdomen, still healing, still remembering the scalpel. This time, the recovery felt heavier than the first: slower, more demanding, with no extended family nearby to step in.

The cup slipped slightly in my hand but did not fall. My daughter pulled again. The baby cried harder.

Then something in me gave way.

The counter took my weight as I leaned into it, breath breaking unevenly. I tried to steady myself, but my body no longer obeyed the urgency of the moment. The first tear came quietly. The second followed without permission. Then everything collapsed into sound.

A sob tore through me so sharply I did not recognize it as my own.

My husband came instantly.

“Go lie down,” he said urgently, but gently. “I’ve got them. Just rest.”

And I believed him. He was already moving, already doing everything right.

But as I stepped away from the kitchen, moving slowly down the hallway, each step something I had to negotiate, I understood that what I was missing could not be arranged or divided or scheduled into rest.

I was not only tired.

I was unheld.

Back home, I would have been noticed before I broke. My mother, my family, and my community would have been standing beside me, taking the weight I was not yet able to carry. Here, in the United States, help was an unfamiliar, distant offer that arrived through texts, scheduled visits, and offers to help that required my approval. I understood these were expressions of love, too, but they came with a quietness and a loneliness that felt empty.

Some mornings, I would stand in the kitchen long after the children were fed, listening to the quiet hum of appliances and the small movements of a house that did not know me well enough to anticipate my exhaustion. In those moments, memory would arrive without warning, not as thought, but as sensation: the touch of my mother’s hand instinctively adjusting my leg; the sound of water in the kitchen I did not have to enter; the feeling of being held.