I’ve lived my life in fragments, handing a piece to everyone who knows me and perhaps when I depart from this earthly realm, like a puzzle they’ll put the pieces together and it will all make sense. Maybe not, I’ve reserved elements of my true self to myself untainted by unwarranted opinions.

I morph into whatever form they want me to be but when I’m alone everything they can’t see or touch becomes apparent, free of judgement, on display for me to see and revel in its beauty. You see I’m a woman, what I am has been impossible to handle in its raw form. I have to cut, chisel, refine, make myself digestible to fit in and make everyone comfortable.

This is not unique to me, every woman has a box locked up somewhere with secrets and desires she dare not divulge if she wants to avoid being burnt at the stake, crucified for expressing a desire not to be seen as other but as human like her male counterparts. Everything is scrutinized, studied closely with a lens. Why does she laugh like that? What is she wearing? Who will want her? Some of us learn to live evading these questions, we sacrifice ourselves for a myth, settling for the same lives dissatisfied housewives’ centuries before us were forced to endure because it was easier, better, more ideal.

to marriage and child rearing, these things are fine and I am not against either but men could be husbands and inventors, pioneers while women have to deal with being labeled bad mothers if they want to combine these roles with having a career. You have to excel at one better than the other, they tell you it could be both but it’s not true. You are held to a higher standard; you must be exceptional. Nothing less will be tolerated and your failure will be celebrated, used as a cautionary tale to other women who dare to want it all.

You are supposed to want nothing greater than the label of wife and mother, above all else, even your sanity and safety. He hurts you and he cheats on you but it’s okay since he comes back to you at the end of the day. You are overwhelmed and your husband could care less about participating in the upbringing of the children you both made but it’s okay, it’s your job anyway. You should be lucky there’s a man in the house even if you can’t depend on him. 

You should be lucky there’s a man in the house even if you can’t depend on him.  

So when I tell people I refuse to be a ‘helpmate’ or the “woman behind a successful man”, they look at me crazy. Their eyes say you’ll regret it, they don’t know the thing I fear the most is giving up my potential for a man, losing myself raising his children like it’s all I’m good for. Living out someone else’s dreams because mine had to be shoved aside. I learned to shut up about it to avoid being committed to a social asylum.

Once, when I was twenty-one with a sharper twinkle in my eyes, I expressed to a male friend my fear of never living up to my potential, and he said I didn’t have to worry about all that because if things didn’t work out I could just get married. I was stunned and frankly hurt, it dawned on me that it was what I was thought good for by virtue of being born female, that it didn’t matter the heights I aspired to reach and even if I did reach them, it would never be considered as good as my ability to attract a man, marry him and have his babies. How insulting!

Sometimes I wake up so angry I want to scream into the abyss because the more I fight back against these suffocating unwritten rules, the more I feel like the walls are closing in on me. It hurts even more when it’s other women gobbling up and spewing this garbage, limiting themselves and moving like dolls wound by men who only want to add them to their collection and still collect more when they’re bored. I see the things the men get away with and still they are lauded as heroes in death, but one mistake and a woman is left with a huge scarlet S she can never wash off. You hear about men who were ruined by women but you never hear about the women who were driven to to madness by men because, they were already thought to be crazy so, the men get a pat on the back for letting them go. Was your mother screaming all the time because it was in her nature or was it because she had to attend to your every need, while your father got to be the fun parent because all he did was drop off basic necessities while participating in none of the other stuff that was needed to raise you?  

So much is expected of us and we are not granted enough grace when we make mistakes, we are made to feel like sin itself. We learn to censor ourselves early, put the need of others before our own, giving and getting no thanks in return. Right from childhood, I questioned the role that was expected of me as a girl; to be silent and obedient, I was getting groomed to make my whole life revolve around what a man found acceptable and the older girls I saw who refused to live by these rules were punished for it. They were branded prostitutes and were cursed to die without children and a man because they dared to be the main character in their story. I didn’t understand it, those were the women I found inspiring and when I got older I realized even more that there’s nothing better than not needing anybody to complete you and not needing validation from a man to function.

History rarely looks kindly on these women and they are used as cautionary tales to warn young women about what happens when you choose yourself (watch any Nollywood movie about a “bad girl”), the resurgence of that era in Nollywood is giving them the respect and admiration they deserved.

So no, I refuse to be a woman who sits quietly and takes whatever is given to her, I refuse to let my identity get tied up with having kids and a husband. I want to live loudly and on my own terms doing things for myself without guilt and with reckless abandon (why does the man get to and I don’t?) I want my happiness to be mine and not someone’s idea of what it looks like for a woman. Look at your mother, she was a girl once. You don’t know the dreams she shoved aside just so she could raise you and cater to your every need. You only know her as “mom”.

It was Virginia Woolf who said, “For most of history, anonymous was a woman”. The only titles we were allowed to take on were mother and wife. We are not doing that again, we are expanding our horizons, our “bad” foremother's didn’t endure suffering and ridicule for us to be silent, obedient women. We will be seen and heard and we'll tell each other’s stories in a way that centers us not as extensions of men or nurturers of children.