Still A Mum brings to life the story of Akeyo who gets married to her soul’s twin, Mark. He’s a dashing lawyer, an army man and a dockside poet who becomes the object of her undying affection.
Book review: 'Still A Mum' is a touching story of loss, redemption
Sheila Ajok Lubangakene’s companionable novella, Still A Mum, is a riveting read which, in equal parts, is intimate, informative and inspirational. Which is to be expected since it is about female fertility and the challenges it poses to marriage.
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Star-crossed, they fall in love and attempt to take on the world, and everything in it, together.
However, their marital bliss is quickly shaken to the core when Akeyo, thirteen months pregnant, suffers a miscarriage. Which, we learn on page 23, is also called an incomplete abortion.
Soon after, she quits her job at the bank. In part, because her colleagues keep whispering in the shadows behind her back about her miscarriage.
Largely, however, she quits because the tragedy leads to her continued requests for bed rest brought on by an overwhelming feeling of loss resident within the innermost recesses of her being.
Akeyo and Mark soldier on (pun unintended) and try again. But tragedy remains the midwife of their attempts to give birth as, in the fourth month of Akeyo’s pregnancy, she suffers yet another miscarriage.
Her condition then tumbles down the ravine of “severe hemorrhaging, low blood pressure, prolonged disorientation and overwhelming physical weakness.”
Harriet Onega, her mother, and Mark are terrified that she might die. Mercifully, by dint of God’s hand, she pulls through and survives.
Akeyo and Mark then try again with another doctor who they see during a retreat to the Mafia Islands, Tanzania.
He’s a fertility doctor who recommends In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). This time, they have a daughter, Hannah.
“On day five, the doctor told Mark that Hannah’s heart would stop beating. I can still remember the sound of his scruffy, soft, sympathetic voice. And he was right. Her heart did stop beating,” Akeyo shares, ever so heartbreakingly.
She retreats within. Everything hurts. “It hurts to sing in the bathroom, to wash clothes. Food tastes stale. Colours have no meaning. Music is boring, and memories are painful.”
These are telltale signs of severe depression. However, she manages, again through prayer, spousal support and familial love, to come out the other side.
Then, as if this is not enough, Mark grows distant and starts drinking, hard. Their marriage is convulsed when she finds that he saved her name in his phone as “Free Sex”.
Although Mark’s emotional distance is closed by the physical violence he inflicts on her as he beats her up, they rise above the ruins of a sinking marriage.
Mark stops drinking, they pray together. Then, after yet more miscarriages, Jacob is born.
Akeyo gets a new lease on life, she also gets a new job helping women with personal stories similar to hers living in the war-ravaged north.
Throughout this deeply touching 76-page novella, one can’t help but think that this story is a Roman à clef, a book in which real people or events appear with invented names.
Akeyo and Sheila have similar stories. Both have suffered miscarriages and both have three children.
Moreover, the emotional awareness and narrative intimacy Sheila writes this book with makes one wonder if it is fiction or simply a fictionalised account of her life.
As regards to style, Sheila employs a lot of three-line sentences as if she is telling the reader “I love you” in code.
However, on closer inspection, the three lines which underline every line in this book are the words of hope to all those women who suffer infertility reminding them, in three little words, that they are Still A Mum.
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