She wondered lovingly as she slowly and gently rubbed over her flat stomach. She smiled an inward smile of joy, pride, and happiness… all the wonderful feelings rolled in one. That is how she felt at this exact moment in time. She wished she could shout it out loud to the world that she was happy. She wished she could dance for joy, and scream to the top of her lungs about how happy she was. But she couldn’t. It was ….. Oh no her life is complicated.

Sandra was a beautiful, twenty-six years old banker. She was born Sandra Uju Ogbuji to her wretched parents in a little town in delta state called Ekuinu. Her father was the headmaster of the village school and her mother a petty trader. They had being married for two years and  the in-laws where getting impatient with the delay in producing offspring that they had begun the usual rituals of marrying a new wife for Mazi Eke on an Affor market day in the Egbuna family compound. Akunna- Mazi Eke’s wife suddenly began feeling dizzy in the heat of the occasion. She rushed over to the back of the house and began puking profusely and retching as well. She puked for hours on and off, and by the time it was over, she was done, she was exhausted and could hardly stand. She rushed into the small part of the family house she shared with her husband through the back door, what her in-laws and some of the guests at the wedding saw as rudeness.

However, when Ngozika, Akunna’s sister-in-law went into the room to confront her she was shocked at the shape Akunna was in. but when Akunna rushed out to puke for the umpteenth time, Ngozika knew that she had made the wrong decision by getting her brother a new wife. Now, that decision had to be undone. That was how the new marriage was nipped in the bud right before it blossomed into a plant. Nonetheless, Akunna’s problems weren’t ending. Her problems were beginning.

She gave birth to a chubby and beautiful little girl nine months later, to the dismay of her in-laws. In the tradition of the people of Ekwuni, a man’s first child being a girl was seen as a taboo and as such was not treated lightly. According to their native laws, the child had to be sent to her mother’s family until a son is born into the household. Thus, once Sandra was born her fate was already sealed.

The problem in this case was that Akunna had no relatives. She was an only child to parents who were only children as well. Thus, there was no relative for her little unnamed daughter to be taken to, but tradition had to be followed. Akunna cried and begged her husband and in-laws to take the baby in, but they totally refused. About a month after the birth of the baby, the child was charted away by the female members of the Egbunu family in the dead of a cold rainy night and taken to Late Mazi Nnadi’s empty weed overgrown compound.

The helpless baby was left out in the cold night crying and wailing for her mother’s gentle touch, and several miles away, her mother sat on the bare floor of her mud and thatch house crying and wailing as well as she felt her breasts heavy with breast milk meant for her suckling baby. She had no friends to console her save her equally grieving husband. So she wept and grieved for days and nights on end. She stayed indoors for months and didn’t eat any food during this time. She wept for the innocent little child she had brought into the world to suffer at the hands of fate and tradition.