3. SINGLE MOMS

 Before I had Ari, I lived in a stuffysingle room in Kasarani with Steve, my boyfriend at the time. Steve and I hadbeen dating for six months, and what wonderful months they were. He was aquiet, reserved man who spent his days writing academic papers for studentsabroad. I was a nail technician in a salon in town. Steve paid for the houseand bought the food. I did everything else. It was a harmonious life we had. Itwas still harmonious in July 2022 when my period did not come as predicted inmy Period App. I waited two more days before purchasing the pregnancy urinetest.

When I dipped the strip into a tumbler with my bright orange pee, I was not expecting the two lines to bloom, even though I had been suspicious. I took the test again two days later. On day five, I had to tell him. He was sitting on the four-by-six bed that also served as the couch when I got home that evening. There wasn’t enough room to fit a couch, not like we could afford one. I took off my bra, threw it into the promotional bucket we used as a laundry bin, and joined him on the bed. He paused “Red Notice” on his laptop and pushed it aside so I could lay my head on his lap.

 “You look tired,” he commented.

 “Bana! So much traffic.”

 “Fridays,” he agreed. “Do youwant me to unzip your skirt?” His hand reached down to the back zip.

 “Haha! Not all things are fixedwith stripping.” I slapped his hand away.

 “I just wanted you to breathe.”

 “Yeah.”

 “I am glad you are home.” He leaned in, as if in prayer, and kissed my forehead.

 “I think I am pregnant.”

 He sat up, very straight. I satup too and waited for his face to melt into some sort of normalcy.

 “Did you test?”

 “Yes.”

 “Where did you buy the kit?”

 “Why?”

 “You are right,” he got off the bed and stood at the foot, scratching his head and muttering silently.

Later, we took two more tests. With each, the lines seemed redder. There was no denying -- I was pregnant. I was happy when Steve climbed on the bed and kissed my forehead three times. I was happy when we made love, ‘to add legs to the baby,’ as he put it, that night. We made love way more after discovering I was pregnant. Two months later, with the morning sickness and mood swings, we started bickering a lot. It was the money that was dwindling. Thinking about a baby and how expensive it could be, in fact, made our savings look like cents in a beggar’s cup.

“I got a business deal in Karatina,” he once told me. “I will be there for two weeks.”

I packed his black suitcase for him the day he left. He wore his favourite sneakers, black Pumas that he had bought off the streets from a pile of used shoes. It was still in great condition. He kissed me, right on my lips, before leaving the house.

That was the last time I saw him.

I called and called his number, only to hear an annoying Safaricom lady tell me the subscriber was unavailable. I did not have any other contact to call. Not a brother or a friend. He was a very private person, Steve, and when he left, he took his whole world with him.

I could not go to work for a week. I was in the house, crying day and night, peeing in a basin, and refusing to eat. The phone buzzed and buzzed with calls from work, but I could not pick it up. The only call that I needed was Steve’s. It was Ann who found me a week later. She banged on the door till I had to open it.

“Oh my God, Mercy!” she exclaimed whenI opened the door. “What died in here?”

I sat on the bed, weak and ashamed as she cleaned up. She made me some porridge, which I took reluctantly. Later, we talked about Steve.

“I am very sorry. But you need to live until you finally get your answers. You cannot lie in bed and kill yourself,” Ann told me.

I nodded weakly, my head starting to throb.

 When I resumed work, my boss, a no-nonsense Kamba lady, was not very impressed with my disappearing act, but she sympathised with my situation and let me keep my job. Two of my clients had quit on me because I missed their appointments. I went back to work like a zombie. Through the months, I moved about like a ghost, waking, working, and going home to sleep. I only ate enough to stay alive. One evening, when I was six months pregnant, I got a message from a new number.

It was Steve asking me if he could call me.

My hands were trembling as I called him, afraid that any second now, he would disappear again.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mercy,” he said, sounding calm. Like he was not at all bothered that he had left me pregnant for months without explanation.

“Where are you?” I tried not to sound confrontational, but my voice broke with each syllable.

“I am sorry I left, Mercy. I justfreaked out.”

“It is fine. Where are you?”

“You deserve a better man than me. You are such a good…”

“Where are you, Steve?”

“I have never wanted children. I did not know how to tell you, and I did not wanna tell you to get rid of it, you know?”

“WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, STEVE?” I yelled into the phone as every emotion that had been pooling up in me broke the banks of my reserve.

“I am sorry,” he said, like that was supposed to fix anything. Like he could feel sorry for the pregnancy away or my pain away or the fact that he had left me for months. Months!

“Where are you, Steve? Where were you? Where have you been…?” I cried into the phone. I was still crying hours after he hung up.

I tried the number again. It was off. He was gone.

 “We will handle this,” Ann reassured methe following day when I told her about Steve. “He was no good, that man.”

His goodness and badness did not concern me. It was the future I was worried about. I started going leaving the salon to hawk my services to passersby. It worked. I've secured more clients than before, and I've saved as much as I could. I was working till the day I delivered. I had to go home a little early when my back started aching, and on the bus ride home, it felt like someone was sawing my back in half. I called Ann as soon as I got home. When she arrived, I was nearly blind with pain. We took an Uber to Mama Lucy Hospital, where they immediately admitted me.

Ari was born two hours later, a bouncing baby girl with the most beautiful eyes and hair I had ever seen on an infant.

 Ann took leave from work and stayed with me for a week after the delivery, taking care of the child and me.

“You need to tell your parents at least,” she told me afterward. I was afraid of the shame I would put on my mother, telling her that I was a single mother now. No one in my family knew, not even my sisters. I could imagine what the aunties would say if they learned of the situation.

“Not now. But I will,” I assured her.

“There is no good time, you know.”

“I know.”

 When she left, it was just Ari and me. I did not know the first thing about being a mother, so I consulted Google, ChatGPT, and YouTube. Ari would cry till I almost ran mad and just sat in bed with her, crying. Money ran out fast! Diapers were barely holding. I started borrowing money from friends online. Some sent me some cash, while others blatantly shut me down. I could not afford Sh5,000 rent. When the janitor knocked, I tried to convince him to give me a few more days. He agreed reluctantly.

“You have till the end of the week,” he warned me.

 I started texting everyone in my contact list, asking for money. Anything at all. In the morning, one of the contacts I had sent to a client I had met a few months earlier had texted me back. She sympathised with my situation and sent me two thousand shillings. I was so happy I called to thank her. As we talked, she asked me to recommend a house helper for her on short notice.

“I am really desperate, Mercy. My househelp left without notice, and I have two days to report to work!” she explained.

“I know one, but she has a child,” Itold her.

“How will that work? How will she work with a child?”

“She is very effective, and the child sleeps most of the time, anyway.”

“How old is this child?”

“Almost two months.”

“That is too young.”

“The child is very peaceful, and the mother is very hardworking,” I persisted.

“Send me her number. I will call her,”she sighed.

“It is me, Mama Aden. I need a job. Iam losing my house, and I can’t work at the salon with a baby, but if you giveme a chance, you won't regret it.”

Mama Aden took me in reluctantly. She lived in a massive three-bedroom house in Utawala with her four-year-old son, Aden. I was given a room and shown around the house.

“We are only trying this for a month.If it does not work for me, I will have to let you go, okay?” she warned.

“Okay.”

I woke up at 4:30 am each morning, and by the time the family was up at 7:00, I had finished all my morning chores. Aden was picked up by the bus at 7:30, and Mama Aden left by 8:30. Ari woke up at 9:00 to breastfeed, then mostly napped till 11:00. I did my duties between her naps, and most of the time, I even had time to rest. After school, Aden would play with her in the living room while I cooked dinner.

When Ari turned three months old, Mama Aden bought Ari a walker. I would put her in it so she could watch me while I did my duties during the day. Aden would read her his story books in the evening, then they would rest on the sofa and watch “Miss Rachael” or “Peppa Pig” on YouTube. I did not even know it until Mama Aden commented on how fluent Aden was becoming in his reading.

Some evenings, when the children went to bed, Mama Aden and I would talk while I cleaned the kitchen or while we sipped hibiscus tea. I told her about Steve and how he had just left me.

“You know, Mercy, when people see asingle mother, they immediately think that she must have made wrong choices inlife, she told me. She said she was an A student in school.

“I did not have a boyfriend in high school or even kiss a boy until I was eighteen!”

She was a Sunday school teacher, and the girls' parents told their little girls to emulate her. When she was twenty-three, she fell in love with one of the church's congregants.

“He used to speak in tongues; youshould have seen it.” She laughed at their memory.

They courted. All their dates had a chaperone, mostly a woman from the church. The first time they kissed was in front of the congregation during their small wedding. The members had contributed enough for them to catch a bus to Mombasa for their honeymoon. They stayed in a small guesthouse somewhere in Miritini, but she could not have been a happier bride. That night, they tried to consummate their marriage.

“It was too painful.” She laughed at herself. They couldn’t do it. They slept. The following day, her newly wed husband left her in the room and did not return until evening. He was intoxicated. She did not know that he was drunk! He said he was frustrated because his wife was denying him his rights, and so the devil had exploited his weakness.

“I prayed for him, showered, and cameto bed,” she said, lost in thought. “It was excruciating! I just lay there ashe grunted till he was done. He fell asleep right after.”

They were together for two years. In the two years, her tongue-speaking, spirit-filled husband got into many temptations. There was the bhang, the alcohol, and then, when she became pregnant, the woman. She prayed and prayed till she turned dark with bitterness. It was this bitterness that burst through her when she looked through his phone one night and found all the messages he was sending to other women, some from church.

“We fought that night! He beat me up so bad I thought I was going to die.” She shook her head.

When she reported it, she was remindedthat a foolish woman had torn her house down with her own hands.

“Pray harder,” his mother advised. She confided in her that his dad had been just like that, but with prayers and patience, he had stuck around. She prayed till she gave birth to Aden. It was Aden who changed her. She could not stand him smoking in front of the baby, or how he came home drunk just when Aden had finally gone to sleep, startling him awake or how he grabbed her tired body, trying to exercise his rights on her body. When Aden was three months old, she announced she was going to visit her parents.

“I never returned.”

She called him immediately, got home, and divorced him on the phone. The papers followed years later. She stayed home till Aden was six months old, then left for Nairobi.

“I was working as a secretary in this company, earning barely enough to afford my own needs. Aden stayed with Mom fortwo years as I got my life in order.”

She was later promoted to theadmissions office, at which point she sent for her son.

“A lot of people talked. A lot are still talking. I hid a lot of the problems I was experiencing from people, so they think my ex-husband did no wrong, and I failed at keeping a family, but you learn to choose yourself, as a mother and a woman, Mercy. Our children deserve a peaceful family more than a picture-perfect family with violence and chaos,” she emphasised.

When I went to my room, I calledmy mom. I told her about my pregnancy, birth, and how I had gotten a job. Icried on the phone when she started sobbing on the other end.

“I would never have judged you, Mercy,and you know it,” she told me. 

We went with Mama Aden to visit my mother that weekend. We found her waiting for us with three thermoses full of tea, mandazis, chapatis, a slaughtered goat, and bags of farm produce that she insisted we take home. Mama Aden, not used to so much attention, blushed and tried to refuse the gifts, but Dad was already standing by her car, demanding that she open the boot. Mama spat on Ari’s head, blessing her and warding off any spirit of rejection from her soul. Dad stood by her, nodding gravely to her chants and prayers.

“It is very important for the spirit ofa child to be welcomed home,” she said after the prayers. “So, welcome home,Ari Mwende.”

Ari giggled up at her, as if accepting the name, and I sighed, trying not to cry from the relief that washed over me—all the months I had spent in Nairobi, afraid of my parents’ reactions, had weighed on my soul. The fears had made me forget how much I was loved at home.

We left for Nairobi that evening, with our car dragging from all the food we were carrying. Mama continued to send us food, despite Mama Aden’s protest. I was saving as much as I could and started buying equipment to start my own nail salon. Every month, I buy something. Mama Aden would sometimes give me bonuses, which would go straight to my savings. I started doing her nails for a fee, and when I had time, I would also do some of the neighbours'. Mama Aden was very excited about my progress. After two years together, we sat down and agreed it was time to open a salon. We were both nervous. Aden protested vehemently to me leaving and taking his ‘sister’ with me.

 “I will come with you,” heoffered.

 “What about Mom? Who will lookafter her?” I challenged gently, my heart breaking as memories of theirrelationship played in my head. Ari was so fond of him. She would giggle andstart bouncing excitedly the minute he burst through the door from school.

 “Then leave Ari here!” he protested.

 Mama Aden found another househelp, a lady her cousin had recommended.

I found a bedsitter in the pipeline. It was ample enough for Ari and me. I had enough clients to make house calls before I could get a good shop. I still went to visit and occasionally did her nails. I finally got a shop. It was a small one that sold perfumes. The owner, a sweet Gikuyu lady, let me bring in a table and work from there as I helped her sell perfumes. That is where I work now, and the shop has grown to sell more than just perfumes.

We have shoes, beauty products, and clothes too. She has trusted me with the sales, and I do my nails on the side. It pays my bills and Ari’s daycare. Mama comes to visit once in a while. When she does, she brings two parcels of food. One goes to Mama Aden, who still protests even though she knows it is futile. That woman saved my life, and I will forever be grateful to have met her.

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