I am transported in an emergency vehicle, my fiancé in the front seat as the spirit within me dies.
I’m admitted to the maternity ward, my miscarriage treated a labor. I push out a creature that cannot breathe. I deliver a body I cannot take home.
I write Mother on paperwork at the hospital and at the funeral home where we pick out a tiny urn for the baby that could not live.
My body takes the necessary two weeks to stop bleeding, just as if I had delivered a living child. I pass pieces of my placenta. I produce milk like other mothers, but there is no crying baby to latch.
Afterward, I pay attention to every stroller I see and make notes of the one I would have added to my registry if I had completed it. I notice strollers the way some people notice cars and track their specs. I decide on the stroller I want though it will no longer be for the baby I was carrying.
I still need to pay for the genetic testing that told us the baby’s sex. The ambulance ride to the emergency room. The ER and delivery ward hospital fees that arrive in our mailbox. I must pay for the death I ushered into the world.
I cry on my due date. And on Mother’s Day. And on a random Tuesday afternoon when I stumble across the ultrasound with the word Baby! written on the envelope while cleaning. I cry on many Tuesday afternoons.
I quietly thank God that my own mother happened to be in town passing through. I thank God I did not bleed out and die on one of the scariest days of my life, that I was not arrested—in Trump’s America—for what is medically known as a spontaneous abortion.
A piece of me dies with my angel baby. I leave an offering at the mouth of the ocean. I love my fiancé, my soon-to-be husband, more than I have ever loved anyone.
I replay the memory of holding a small, red fetus. The baby that could not survive. I give her a name and send her to be with my grandmother on the other side.
Spirit Child, 2025
Baptist High School, Saki. My dad’s school
National Museum of Lagos
A month after I lost the pregnancy, I returned to Nigeria with my family for the first time since my parents left when I was three years old.
In the dark hours of the early morning, on our way back to Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, after a week of finally seeing how and where my parents grew up and fellowshipping with my extended family, I saw a crowd of heads in a bus driving in front of us. Something about seeing their backs driving off into the darkness of new day moved me. I drew the image in my journal and a child appeared. So, even though I’m not a painter, I tried to paint them to life.
A few days after I lost the pregnancy, I dressed myself in a haze of grief, packed my journal, and went to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Uptown Charlotte to see something, anything.
There, I discovered Clare E. Rojas and her exhibit “Past the Present”. For a few hours, I suspended my own surreality and lived in hers. I witnessed Fractured Rainbow Through Her Forest and located myself right at the edge of woods: stripped, barren, and searching for a rainbow—for possibility refracted into infinite realities for me to escape.
Pauline Tea Bar, 2024
When I first got pregnant, I was overcome with anxiety about whether I was ready for the sacrifice motherhood would require of me. I met a friend—a mother—who I admired at the Pauline Tea Bar and we talked for over an hour about how children change you for the better, how they arrive at their own time and exactly when they are meant to.
At Pauline’s, you pick out a teacup and the barista brings out a teapot for you.
I was still in my first trimester, not even close to showing at this time. But, this was the teapot I received. I took it as a positive sign, that yes, I could do this. I was ready for this.
And yet.
For Halloween last year, my husband and I dressed up as Smoke & Annie from Ryan Coogler’s Academy Award winning film “Sinners.”
Besides the fact that each character was a force in their own right and together shared a beautiful and powerful love, they too had suffered a loss.
Halloween was October 31. The anniversary of our loss is November 3.
Dressing up as them was fun. The buzz around the movie made it all the more exciting, but it was also deeply personal.
I would find out a few days later that I was pregnant with our first.
Halloween at Su Casa, Charlotte
Halloween 2025 as Sinners’ Smoke & Annie
Isle of Palms, South Carolina 2024
After my first miscarriage, my dad shared a Yoruba proverb with me: “Omi lò dánù, àgbè ò fọ́,” which translates to “The water has spilled, but the gourd (or pot) did not break.” This proverb is offered as encouragement to those who have suffered pregnancy loss or stillbirth; that though something vital has been lost, one’s own life persists.
In her essay, “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison wrote that “All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
So, a few days after we lost the baby, my husband and I drove down to the ocean.
I cried, I picked up shells, I wrote a letter to the baby we lost. I honor her today and every day. And I thank her for making me a mother when she did.