Like a Gorilla in a f*cking zoo,

I am gawked at,

Expected to perform tricks for treats… or their amusement.

I married Maroof suddenly on the 28th of January 2024. It was unplanned, that’s why I used the word suddenly. Or maybe that word doesn’t quite fit this narrative? Anyway, it was a rushed affair. We didn’t even know we’d end up married that cold, dry Saturday morning. What was supposed to be a simple introduction turned into a Nikkah after a series of mutterings and deliberations between the two families.

“Since he will kuku be traveling to America soon, let them get married now,” his uncle, Alhaji Taofeeq, suggested.

I wished I had put more efforts into my outfit. I should have worn a lace fabric. I never envisioned myself wearing a flowery boubou for my wedding. I hesitated. But my sister leaned in and whispered, “Shebi, you will marry eventually? What else are you waiting for?”

The sadaki was paid, and everything was completed before Asr. I almost felt a slight pang of guilt for feeling so light, so free, rather than breaking down in tears as everyone had predicted when it was time to say goodbye to my mother.

But to hell with the tears.

My mother can keep breaking her back at odd hours trying to please a man who wouldn’t do half of it for her. She can keep waking at 4 a.m., running bath water, cooking, sweeping, picking things up, while my father wakes up for Fajr, finishes leading solat, and goes right back to bed.

Damn the tears revolving around my father and his consistent incompetence as a husband that rendered my mother a glass-wearing, worn-out woman at 55. Why should I cry for leaving a house where it was repeatedly drummed into my ears that the best thing that could ever happen to me was marriage, a home of my own, and a lifetime of slaving away for my darling husband?

“How can you expect Maroof to help you watch the baby while you cook? A man? Your husband?! Auzubillahi!” my mother would exclaim, as she picked ewedu leaves for my father’s lunch.

“You really want Maroof to join you in the kitchen and help out? Agbakan! Too much oyinbo film o! Bwehehehehehehe!”

My dad’s sister had laughed in my face the day I told her cooking wasn’t worth the stress.

Compliments about my skin from visitors and relatives always ended with my aunt sneering as she added, “Wait till she starts having children. All that her yellow pawpaw will come down.”

I often wonder why so much pain, chaos, and stress is experienced and expected from marriage and childbearing, and yet we’re still pressured into it. My aunt, by the way, is a well-known loser. Who bites the nose of her husband’s mistress and ends up in jail for a week? Who fought a female tenant two decades younger than she is because she said the lady was rolling her buttocks in a tempting way towards her husband? Who pushed her teenaged daughter into the waiting hands of a manipulator who impregnated the girl and cut her off from family and friends? A bitter woman.

I saw the discontent on her face as I stood up, dry-eyed, after my mother finished praying for me. That discontent shifted into a smug smirk as Maroof and I walked towards the car that would take us to their family house. Maybe the thought of me slaving away somewhere warmed her bitter heart.

We will see.

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It’s been seven months since Maroof left for America for further studies and greener pastures where the fields are well-watered and the taps don’t run dry.

I was, unfortunately, as my mother-in-law would say, not “heavily pregnant” yet, and I am still as flat as a board.

“A woman is expected to fill out after marriage. How would people know you are married? Do you want them to think we are starving you?” she would say. As if her constant goading wasn’t enough, his sisters and other relatives have turned me into some kind of exhibit.

They stare at me like they’re waiting for something to crack. Like maybe their gaze will make me add too much salt to the efo riro, or mess up the amala so it turns into a lumpy paste.

“We will see,” their eyes seem to say.

Some days, they gossip behind doors thinking I can’t hear.

“Whatever is wrong with her will leave once Maroof marries another.”

“Maybe it’s Oyinbo he will return with.”

“Why is she always looking like that and then bursting into tears because of simple correction?”

“Asunkun rojo…”

I was suffocating. It was hard stepping out to sit at a restaurant to breathe in air not stifled with the sweat and murmurs of different women who seemed to know what was best for me. I couldn’t even go to my seamstress’s house anymore, as my mother-in-law now insists the lady comes to the house instead. They don’t understand me going out to hang out by myself or lounge and have some mocktails with friends.

“That was what you were doing with your husband and that is what you should do with him if he was around. A married woman going out by herself?” They would cluck their tongues and shake their heads in pity for what they perceive as an abnormality. My husband often steps in, and when I eventually step out to go and enter a waiting Uber after he manages to convince them, they would turn their lips downward in disapproval and whisper that Maroof is now a Dayooth – a lily-livered man, and I, his wife, washed my menses inside the pot of egusi I cooked for him before he left Nigeria. If only they knew Maroof cooked the egusi himself. How I have missed Maroof.

On cold nights, when I turn off the fans because the chill is making my legs ache, and Maroof knows how to softly massage the ache away. Mixing shea butter with Aboniki balm and then tugging at the straps of my nightie soon after. I miss him on the days I get consumed with intense rage from another backhanded comment by one of his relatives. Maroof would have steered me gently inside and given whoever it was a proper talking-to, even his mother. He would calmly explain to her that I was his wife and not a maid from Cotonou. Now here I am, pacing back and forth like a trapped animal, not knowing how to unleash my anger. And there they come, the other minions, one by one like spies sent to monitor a traitor, pretending to come check on me.

“Iyawo wa!” they would say brightly, while knocking the door and their eyes scanning my belly as if I might be hiding a pregnancy somewhere beneath the folds of my wrapper as soon as I open it.

“Iyawo wa!” they barge in when I forget to lock the door. No apologies, even if I’m undressed. Their eyes flick around like searchlights, looking for something out of place, a cloth unfolded, a man’s leg sticking out from under the bed.

“Iyawo wa!” they arrive in packs, standing around the room, conversing with themselves and excluding me, while I am made to sit in the middle, watching, waiting for them to leave and carry their musty armpits with them.

My mother would call at 6 a.m. the next day, on the verge of tears, telling me how my in-laws complained about my aloofness and insubordination. She would plead with me not to let them send me back to her.

“What would people say?”

“What they want to say.”

“Haaaa, iwo omo yiiiii…” then she would launch into a monologue about what it means to be a good wife and a good woman living with her in-laws. She would remind me that my aunty, her sister-in-law, is waiting, like a gossip perched behind the shadows waiting for a scandal to unravel. Waiting to proclaim, “I told you so.”

“Hmmmmmmm,” was all I would say. I didn’t care. I was already in my husband’s house, so my mother cannot threaten me with a lifetime of spinsterhood as a punishment for my nonchalance. All she has left is pleas for me not to unravel the well-woven image of a perfect daughter she had curated with my marriage to Maroof. They all bore me. The stories. The talk. The advice. The noise.

On nights I manage a long video call with my dear husband, I try to share my frustrations with him. He brushes my concerns aside with soft reassurances.

“All of this will soon be history,” he says.

“When I come to Nigeria for you… you’ll see.”