Don't Do It...

I had just walked into my room when my phone rang for like the umpteenth time today, everything in me screamed not to answer it but I reasoned it could be an emergency, so I did! It was a friend on the line and she was hysterical. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what must have gone wrong that she went ballistic but I just told her I’d be at her house in 15 minutes, grabbed my purse, put on my shoes and ran out the door, I even forgot to lock it. I got to her place and she was a sight to behold. She was bent over on the floor her body racked with sobs, her hair was disheveled and her eyes were completely wild. I sat there on the floor next to her and just held her while she cried. At some point she lifted up her head, looked right into my eyes and said, “I’m pregnant.”
It was right at that point I understood why people drink. I couldn’t say a word; I just sat there and continued to hold her. My mind was in a hundred different places; who was the father? How did it happen? What would she tell her parents? What would happen to school for her? This was just a total nightmare. I started to cry for all that was, for all that was never supposed to be, and for all that never would be.

It’s been about three years now and I’m sitting at her kitchen table in the two-room apartment she has with her husband as she cooks up stories of how wonderful they are all doing but I can see beyond the layers of make-up that one eye is slightly more swollen than the other. I can see the gait in her walk that she tries to hide but doesn’t do so well. I can see the pain in her eyes that makes me know that all is not well. As her little boy toddles around, I look at him and I wonder if he’ll ever know the circumstances that surround his birth, I wonder if he’ll ever know the pain and suffering that has brought him into this world. The little sweetheart looks up at me and he smiles with his arms outstretched. I lift him and set him in my lap as he giggles and I think back to that unforgettable day on his grand-parents living room floor.

“Laide, I’m pregnant. What am I going to do?” she was sobbing uncontrollably as her eyes pleaded with me to find a way out for her but I couldn’t, I was still reeling from the shock of it all.
“Tope, I don’t know. I really don’t know, but everything is going to be fine.” Even as I said those words, they sounded hollow to me but I believed them with all my heart.
I had to bring myself to ask, the first thing we could do rested solely on the answer to my next question, “whose baby is it?”
“Oh my God, I’m dead. Everybody is going to hate me but I didn’t mean to, I really didn’t” she had dissolved into another fit of tears and at this point I was confused, what did that have to do with the answer to my question?
I didn’t have to ask again; in fact I don’t think I could have formed any words after hearing the next thing she said; “Its pastor Tolu’s baby.”
She was hysterical now and all I could do was just rock her and try to calm her down whilst trying to wrap my mind around the disaster that seemed to be unraveling around me. I just couldn’t. This couldn’t be happening, could it? She didn’t just say that the pastor of the biggest fellowship on campus had gotten a member of his flock knocked up, did she? But she had and I heard her all too clearly.

Now, three years later, holding her little boy in my arms I see the miracle amidst the chaos and there is chaos, a whole lot of it too.
“Tope, stop! I’m okay really. I came here to see you not to the drinks you’re laying out or the food you want to stuff me with. So how are you? And don’t lie to me.”
“Laide, you want me to tell you the truth. The truth is I can’t complain. For a girl who got pregnant when she was 18years old and had to marry a man who wasn’t much older than her, I have the best life I can possibly have, I cannot complain.”
She says those words with so much conviction, like she believes that the rest of her life is penance for a mistake she had made, albeit a careless one.
I look at the little boy sitting in my lap, ignorant of all that has happened in this life and I look back up at her and say, “Okay, no problem, you got what you deserved, but what about your son? What about Temi here? Why should he also pay for the mistakes you made?”
Her eyes blur with tears and she looks away.
I don’t mean to come off sounding harsh but I’m quite upset that she’s allowing a mistake that she made 3 years ago pattern the rest of her life. It just seems like she has conveniently forgotten that the fault does not lie with her alone. I mean, for crying out loud she didn’t get pregnant all by herself did she? I see now that there is no point in mentioning that, it would only fall on deaf ears. After all this while, I wonder if she still sees her darling husband as infallible because I remember a time all too vividly when she worshipped the very ground he walked on, it’s what got her into this in the first place. I know that because it was all part of her woeful tale from 3 years ago.

“Tope, how? I mean, I don’t mean how because I know how but… how?” I asked her after she seemed to have gotten her composure back and we moved to a chair.
“I love him. He loves me too. It seemed right. He said it was okay, that we weren’t doing anything wrong and I believed him. He said God told him it was okay and God speaks to him all the time, I believed him.” The look in her eye had me worried.
“And do you still believe him?” I had a feeling that I already knew the answer to that question.
She looked at me squarely and said, “Yes! I believe him. He wouldn’t lie to me. He’s a man of God. He knows what he’s doing.”
“So Tope tell me, if you believe that why did you call me, why not him? Why did you sit on this very floor and almost cry yourself to insanity? Tell me, why?”
“I don’t know. I just panicked at first, I’m sure when I tell him, he’ll be thrilled and everything will be okay. Yes, I’ll tell him… That’s what I’ll do, you’ll see, he’ll be thrilled.” She was so enthusiastic now; I could see the excitement in her eyes as she picked up her phone to call him. Somehow, I knew she was about to get her heart crushed. 

Now, I’m looking at the woman she has become. All her lofty dreams of her perfect Tolu still burning in her heart contrary to the proof of the character he shows her everyday. She goes to church on Sunday mornings and sits with her deacon of a husband. She attends every church meeting, every luncheon. She goes on the mission trips. She gives from a pocket that he has never sowed into in all the time they have been married. She always has a smile when he brings his guest home without notice. She manages on a cot in her son’s room when he puts her out to help someone in need. She takes the tongue lashing that bruises her heart and the blows that bruise her body along with the mental torture she inflicts on herself carrying guilt she has no business feeling. She knows of all the women on the side and tells herself it’s because of her inadequacy he has to look elsewhere. He leaves her every morning in more ways than one and comes back home at night, when the other women bore him, in a drunken stupor yelling obscenities at her; the same things he yelled all those years ago.

“WHAT IN THE WORLD DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE PREGNANT?”
He had arrived in mild annoyance at having to come all the way down to her place just to talk. On finding out the reason for the visit, mild annoyance quickly escalated to rage in its magnificence. He looked at her like she was his prey and he was just about ready to tear her apart.
“Uhm… I… uhm… I’m going to have your baby, pastor Tolu.”
“Whose baby, tell me tope, whose baby are you going to have? Because that baby you’re carrying is definitely not mine.”
She moved in to touch him and he recoiled like she was a snake.
“Pastor Tolu, honey…”
“Who is your honey? Who? All you carnal girls, you think you can sleep around and then stick your bastard children on someone else, right? Someone foolish, like me, right? You think I’m stupid, that I’ll fall for all this crap? You better go and look for another fool to stick your child on, nonsense.”
With those words, he stormed out, leaving Tope standing there; her dreams shattered.
Other conversations that followed were peppered with accusations and insults. He never hesitated to reiterate how she was trying to destroy his life with the baggage that would be their child. He stood by the fact that he had been led by God to do all that he did and in no time, the truth of all the other girls God had supposedly led him to came tearing out. He openly claimed that it must have been something Tope did to make things go awry. I couldn’t imagine why their parents were so adamant about them getting married after he said such absurd things. I guess they just couldn’t see past the immediate embarrassment.

Now that the embarrassment has faded and the true colors are glaringly obvious, where are her parents to pick up the pieces that he’s chipping away from her? Where are the people that told her the best thing she could do was marry him and have a family? I know where they are, they are moving forward with their lives, building dreams that they can build meaningful lives on. Its funny how pastor Tolu was the only dream she ever had. He was the foundation on which her entire life would have stood tall upon. He would have been her immoveable rock; the one she could depend upon. After all, he was the one God always spoke to. He was the one who got up on pulpit every service and delivered the heart of God with such charisma. He was the one who spent hours, drenched in perspiration, praying for the good of the land. He was the one who scolded her when she missed meetings even for class and showered her with appreciation when she showed up on time. I look at her now as she looks up at me with the sadness pooling deep in her eyes and I finally get it, after all this time I get it! Even I have been fooled all this while. All that time I thought the light in her eyes was sourced from the joy she found in God’s presence, but it never was, the light was always about him and when the time came, he put out that light. And now, it just might be gone forever.