A career mother’s worst nightmare

Something happened three weeks ago that gave me an agonizing two weeks. It was two weeks of sleepless nights as I agonized what mess I had got myself into. I thought I was pregnant again yet my baby is barely one year old.

How could I be pregnant again? Troy was just nine months old. I kept cursing. Do not ask me how a mature, sober and educated career woman was caught up in that mess. Blunders happen and family planning fails and even good old coil. Ask the gyno.

So here I was after realising the blunder that just happened, I had to wait for two weeks to confirm whether my worst fears were true.

As the two weeks dragged on, so many thoughts flooded my mind. What would I tell my boss? Another maternity leave in a span of a year. Wololo! What would my colleagues think of me? I was sure my colleagues would start referring to me as “that mama who is always pregnant” (reminds me of my Class One teacher who was always pregnant as long as I was in primo. I still remember her in her sky blue maternity dress.)

I imagined a situation where I would pass by a group of colleagues and the gossip button would go off. “That lady is pregnant again. Si just the other day she was heavily pregnant.”

“I think she wants to exhaust the maternity cover for every year,” another colleague would say.

What about my nasty sisters-in-law? I could just imagine how they would comment upon hearing that I was carry baby number three yet baby two was barely a year old.

“How can she give birth like a rat like that? She wants to impoverish our brother by making him pay hefty school fees for her brood?”

Those are the thoughts that flooded my mind as I waited each day for a sign that it was a false alarm. (I was too freaked out to take a home pregnancy test.) Luckily for me, it was a false alarm.

But I can just imagine what women who find themselves in that mess go through. Society is so critical and judgmental; yet it is none of their business. But why do people make such harsh judgements yet Baba Watoto has repeatedly pleaded with Nerea that he will take care of the pregnancy.

The stigma and shame that comes with finding that you are pregnant for the second time within a short span is sometimes what makes women make those drastic irrational decisions like abortion. I have said this before and I will say it again, society needs to let pregnant women be. Whether I get pregnant every year or not, should not be anybody’s business except mine.