ESTHER
Esther stood at the kitchen counter, Dara balanced on her hip, phone in hand, waiting for the kettle to whistle. The scent of boiled yam still lingered faintly in the air from breakfast.
She had finally, finally posted her Day in My Life video, and now she couldn’t stop refreshing her Instagram and YouTube notifications.
She actually felt productive today. She’d done a bit of research (well, TikTok) since Dara was starting solids soon. She was torn between traditional weaning and baby-led. She planned to create a whole series of content around his transition to solids, so she needed to be sure which way modern-day mothers were leaning. What did the numbers (read: TikTok) say?
Her sister had advised her to start simple; purées and mashed food, since Dara didn’t have any teeth yet. But Esther had seen somewhere that babies’ gums were strong enough to handle real food too.
She’d already joined three Facebook groups about weaning, and she planned to ask Cleo what she did with Axel and Amanda. Maybe even Tara, although Tara seemed like the kind of person who made all her own baby food from scratch.
Speaking of Tara, Esther was curious about her relationship with food. There was a story there, she could feel it. Tara was buxom, fuller-figured, and Esther often wondered if it was baby weight or her natural build.
Still, that Mother’s Day conversation had been the most honest they’d had since meeting three months ago. Esther smiled to herself at the memory. She admired Cleo; two kids and a healthy sex drive? That felt like a miracle.
“What are you smiling about?” Kunle’s voice broke into her reverie; an unwanted interruption.
“Am I not allowed to smile?” she nuzzled Dara’s chin so she wouldn’t look her husband in the face.
“You’ve been…” he hesitated.
“What?” she said flatly.
“Nothing.”
“What? Just say it.” She turned to face him now, brows raised.
“You’ve been…I don’t know, distant.”
“Wow. How insightful of you,” her voice dripped with sarcasm.
“What’s wrong? What did I do?”
“Nothing, Kunle. And that’s the problem.”
“Whoa. We’re calling each other by name now?”
“That,” she said tightly, “is the least of our problems.”
Dara began pawing at her old, oversized Preston College T-shirt she’d thrifted, its fabric stretched soft and thin from years of wear. She sighed and shifted him to the other arm, too riled up to breastfeed.
“If you have something to say, say it but I won’t let you disrespect me.”
Esther laughed, a dry, bitter sound.
“I have a meeting anyway, let’s talk about this later,” Kunle said, slipping his headphones on.
Esther wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something, anything. Instead, she repositioned Dara on her hip and stormed into the nursery he didn’t sleep in, sat in the rocking chair and began to breastfeed.
They had designed the nursery together, curled up on the couch night after night, pinning inspiration from Pinterest boards with the kind of earnestness that felt important at the time. They’d debated over paint swatches and crib styles, obsessing like it would all matter in the long run.
Blue was out of the question—too basic, too cliché. They wanted something softer, something more intentional. Something that said our son doesn’t have to wear blue to be a boy. They wanted him to grow up with a rounded view of the world, to understand that masculinity didn’t need to be rigid or loud. That boys could love sage green and sunshine yellow too. That softness wasn’t weakness.
Esther had even done a whole video about the nursery design. Shot in soft morning light. Talked about how they were ‘redefining the way we raise boys.’
Stupid. Stupid.
Everything about that time, every pastel curtain and bamboo mobile, felt like a joke now.
***
Later that evening, the air in the kitchen was thick with the savory smell of efo riro simmered in palm oil. Esther had made rice and beans with efo and now she and Kunle ate in silence. Dara sat in his bouncer nearby, gnawing noisily on his rubber giraffe.
Esther wanted to return to their earlier conversation, but the words dried in her mouth. These days, conflict cost too much. She was always tired. It was always a choice between sleep or another argument.
After dinner, she waited to see if Kunle would load the dishwasher. Instead, he wandered into the living room and sank onto the couch with his laptop.
“Can you load the dishwasher please?” She called out.
“Okay,” he said, eyes still fixed on the screen.
She left him and dragged the laundry basket to the bedroom. Nobody told her that having a child meant that there was an endless stream of laundry. No matter how much she washed and folded, there always seemed to be more.
Thirty minutes later, the dishes still sat in the sink. She gave up and did them herself, the warm water stinging her dry hands as she scrubbed bits of leftover vegetable off the plates.
When she had first had Dara, Kunle’s mother had come for the first six weeks; well, technically, four. Dara had arrived late so her mother-in-law had already spent two of those weeks waiting.
Those final days of the pregnancy, Esther had watched her fawn over Kunle.
Oko mi, what do you want for dinner?
Oko mi, have you ironed your clothes?
Oko mi, I made pounded yam, your favourite.
Esther had been too tired to comment on her behaviour: it was the first time she was spending time with her in close proximity and it alarmed her that she hadn’t noticed this before.
She’d always known Kunle was close to his mother as the firstborn, but she hadn’t realized how deeply coddled he was.
Maybe it wasn’t entirely his fault. But wasn’t she enabling it too; picking up the slack, carrying the weight, doing what he said he would do and didn’t?
And what about her? Esther, who was pregnant and swollen and tired, had received almost no care from the woman who doted on her son. Not even a “how are you feeling?”
She found herself aching for her own mother, her gentleness, her presence. The tenderness she’d been raised with. Her mother, who had been strong but soft, the kind of woman whose presence calmed a room. She had her own stall in Alaba Market, selling Ankara and lace fabric. Esther remembered the humid Lagos afternoons when she and her sister would stop by the stall on their way home from school, the scent of dust and fried puff-puff hanging in the air. She remembered sitting cross-legged on a stool at the back of the stall, leaning over the plastic chair, her mother beside her, still in her wrapper and blouse, brow furrowed as she tried to help with Maths homework, despite only finishing secondary school herself.
But her mother was gone. Killed in an accident on her way back from the market, when Esther was just fourteen. It was the kind of loss that splits a life in two; before and after.
After her mother died, everything crumbled. The home, once careful and orderly, spiraled into disarray. Her father struggled, and eventually her aunties stepped in, sent her and her brother off to boarding school in another state while her older sister started university.
Her relationship with her father had never recovered. Distance turned to silence. By the time she was grown, their conversations were reduced to logistics:
What time will you be home?
Can you fix the computer thing?
There’s rice in the fridge.
And maybe that’s why she had fallen so easily for Kunle. His softness, his closeness to his mother, it had felt like proof of something warm. Something safe.
She’d been wrong.
He wasn’t emotionally unavailable. He was emotionally stunted. A boy dressed up as a man. And that terrified her.
She had given everything to become a mother, everything, because she believed they were doing it together. But they weren’t.
Even when she drank the pap her mother-in-law made in industrial quantities, it wasn’t about her. It was about feeding Dara. Boosting milk supply.
And meanwhile what did Kunle do? He slept at night; for hours, through Dara’s night wakes and feeds.
Everything, every single thing, had become about Dara.
So when that DM arrived later that evening, blinking at her from the screen: Hi Esther, we love your page and would love to discuss a potential collaboration…a little bubble of joy began to rise in her chest.