Mrs. Mary Abah is a lawyer, banker and wife of a former Minister of Interior, Mr. Humphrey Abah. She shares her experience with FRIDAY OLOKOR on her challenge of being in marriage for 23 years without a child and the support she got from her husband
Congratulations on the arrival of your baby 23 years after marriage. Did you ever think it was going to be like this?
Before I got married, my view of the
marriage institution was that marriage was a sanctuary; a place where a
woman could actualise her dream together with her partner. I understood
very early that marriage usually gives some form of security and the
expectation was that in it, one should blossom, be fruitful and multiply
generally as the Bible says. That was basically how I saw marriage in
my youthful age because I finally married at the age of 27 and I was
still quite young.
In essence, you did not anticipate the challenge of having a baby…
No, I didn’t anticipate it, the truth is
that as a young child who was brought up by a very strict mother, I saw
life as a bit of calculation: a sort of ‘1+1 =2 and 2+2=4.’ So if you
get married, you expect that after nine months, as they say, you will
have a child or children. My challenge has made me very sensitive to
what parents and well wishers normally do at wedding ceremonies. During a
wedding, people start talking about gathering again for a naming
ceremony after nine months. They say it as a joke but that is the
genesis of pressure on married women. So, if yours doesn’t happen after
nine months, there is a question mark there and you begin to fret and
other problems come in.
Did you have any health challenge when you were growing up that could have delayed your giving birth?
Not really, it was much later in life
that the health challenge came. I have been a banker since 1987 when I
undertook my National Youth Service Corps. I served in a bank as a
lawyer. I continued to work in the bank thereafter. Because I ended up
in the banking industry, I decided to update myself in everything
related to the industry.
During these trying moments in your life, did you feel that somebody somewhere was responsible for your predicament?
The truth is that in the whole of the 23
years, I refused to focus on such things. I didn’t worry about who it
was, what it was, where it was or how it was. I did not want to get
myself involved in what would cause me anguish for the rest of my life.
You are from Cross River State while your husband is from Kogi State. Was there resistance from your parents when you initially wanted to marry Mr. Humphrey Abbah?
The way we met each other
was very peculiar and our marriage was also peculiar. Our families did
not actually affect us. They were not there when we met and when we
started courting. Our families were not so involved and when it came to
the decision of marriage, we took that decision on our own but involved
our families later. My husband is not somebody that you can force to do
something which he doesn’t believe in. So, even when we got married,
that was already established in his family . When he said this was the
young lady he wanted to marry, I don’t think he had too much opposition.
If there was any at all, it was very insignificant. The truth is that
my father-in-law was a very lovely person; a gentleman who had a lot of
respect for his son. By the time we got married, his mother was late
and my parents were late too. So, his father was the focal point and the
cordial relationship they had made it easy. The rest of my family and
the elders gave us a little bit of tough time as you would expect in
inter-cultural marriages. But it didn’t take us time to be able to woo
them to our side and that was it.
At what stage did you begin to get worried?
My first signal was when I was 30 years
and three years in my marriage. At first, it didn’t really worry me
because as a career person, I felt we should take it in our stride. I
was already beginning to make waves in the banking industry and the
demands of the job were already telling on me. Also in my innocence, I
didn’t really feel it was an issue. But by the time I was 30 and nothing
had happened, I asked myself, ‘what’s going on here?’ Then I began to
be conscious of it and started making deliberate efforts to get
pregnant. Before this time, there was no real effort. When the pregnancy
was not forthcoming, I began to suspect that there was a real problem.
But as usual, I went to the doctors, they said there was no problem and
suggested that I should give myself time because I was a busy lady. But
after about a year, I went back and they gave me one or two
interpretations as to what could be wrong and we started tackling it
from there and it came to the point that by 2011, the doctors were
saying nothing could be done.
Which was your first point of call, church or hospital?
By 1991 when we got married, we became
born again and the church had become a focal point and integral part of
our lives. We were praying and fasting; good relationship with the
leadership of the church had become part of our daily lives and so the
church was always there for us. The church was never against consulting
orthodox doctors. The only no-go area for us was to seek help outside
God. So I think that was why very early in the journey of this crisis,
we knew that anything outside God was not an alternative to take at all.
During these periods, did the idea of stealing a baby come to you?
I can say that I never really had the
thought of doing that. The advice I had was different; it had to do
with visiting witchdoctors. But the idea of stealing a baby never came
to me; it never crossed my mind. I think sometimes the friends that you
have determine the kind of advice you get. For me, I never had that
category of friends. I did not even have a lot of friends. I can
actually count them on my fingers. But the rest of them were my
professional colleagues and church members. I surrounded myself
critically with those I felt could help me in my journey in life. I
didn’t have that crowd that could really derail me in that sense. But
there were general advice of ‘a Baba somewhere,’ ‘a doctor
somewhere’ and many others. There were times, through text messages,
out of their concern for me, some of the women politicians would make
suggestions that one Baba somewhere could do it. Most of the
time, I would politely decline and smile. But I would never take it
against those people because somehow I felt they were just trying to
help. But I needed to communicate to them that such help didn’t suit me.
When they realised that it was ‘a no-go area’ for us, most of them
backed off. For us, we knew that we needed to shut out the world to be
able to succeed in this journey.
Did you try IVF?
Yes, I did it many times. By the sixth
time, it was very obvious that it could only be God that would help us.
If you look at the Bible, you will realise that God uses what he has
created to solve problems. At first, it was a problem for me coming to
terms even with IVF and particularly when I had done it once, twice and
three times and it failed, I was thinking that maybe that was how God
wanted me to go. Sometimes I would agonise over it, sometimes I would
pray and sometimes I would even face the battle with my God because I
also understood that faith was also very important and faith also
involves work. I understood clearly that you needed to activate your
faith and so when I began to see the failure of IVF, I felt that was
part of it. I would pray and I would move, but each time it failed. I
was actually confused because in your journey as a Christian, you grow
little by little; you don’t just become a mighty woman overnight. It is
from the experiences and how you exercise the word of God that you
become confident in what you are doing.
During these times, did you lose
interest in having sex with your husband as most women who had faced
similar experiences in the past would do?
You see, if you read the Bible clearly,
there was only one woman who had a baby without sex and that is Mary,
the mother of Jesus. I only said there is only one Mary, the mother of
Jesus Christ. All of us can’t be like Mary. So where is your action and
where is your faith? You must work with your faith; there’s nothing
about faith that is easy. Because you understand spiritually that the
physical aspect must be part of that journey, then you must keep that
fire burning, you must keep trying because without it, you cannot be
pregnant. So you will find ways to make sure that it keeps going and
with that, what you are asking from God will materialise. If not, you
are wasting your time and you cannot blame God who had said ‘I have made
man, I have made woman for creation’. Out of it, the next generation
will come and you are sitting down to say you have lost interest, then
don’t blame God at the end of the day. You will work and whether you
like it or not, find time to make way and the Lord will see you through.
I think He has shown us that it is good not to give up.
There have been cases where, due
to pressures from in-laws, some women are forced to marry wives for
their husbands. Did you contemplate this?
No, not at all. As beautiful as child
adoption is, my husband refused it. That is the only area of thought
that came to me. Not because I felt I needed to give up hope but I felt
it might calm the atmosphere because I had also read situations where
adoption preceded the gift of children in families. For me, adoption was
not a problem; I was willing to do that if it was going to calm the
atmosphere. I also understood that the atmosphere that you are in could
either help you or scatter everything. You needed to be calm, have a
good home and you needed to enjoy marriage for these things to happen.
If you are in a tense situation, it would only prolong matters. It was
only adoption that we considered, but my husband said no and kept
saying, ‘ours will come.’ We didn’t think of another woman. But the
beautiful thing about it is that God kept him away from that decision. I
am an Efik woman from Cross River State and my husband is from Igalla
in Kogi State. We used to joke that he crossed many rivers before he
could find me. But a lot then believed that I probably gave him ‘love
potion’ to be able to keep him and his faith surprised me.
Was there pressure from your in-laws to get another wife for your husband?
As I said, there was no room for that.
Nobody could look into Humphrey Abah’s face, whether in my family or his
and make such suggestion. The only person who could do that was my
father-in-law. He backed off after bringing up the issue of the delay
initially in our marriage. It will be a lie for me to say there was no
pressure from my family or his family. They were only concerned about
how things would be better for us through the efforts we were putting
in. Outside of that, there was no pressure at all.
How did you feel when you were told that you were pregnant?
When they told me I was pregnant, I
screamed and cried in the hospital and everyone present rose up and gave
thanks to the Lord. Since then, the story has been one testimony after
another. But that was not all, when I was to put to bed, I was told
there might be complications as a result of all the operations I had
done. They said that might make it a very difficult and dangerous birth.
Yet, the Lord saw me through. It feels great and I thank the Lord for
wiping away my tears and making me a mother at last. It is a dream I
have had since I married at the age of 27. Now, I am more than 49 years
old, it has taken a long time but the Lord has done it for me. I have
shed a lot of tears. Our story is like that of Abraham and Sarah. I am
already in menopause but I told God that if He did it for Sarah and
gave her womb the strength to conceive, then He would give my womb the
same strength. Even when doctors in London told me in 2011 that nothing
could be done, I knew that it is only Him (the Lord) that could help me.
I focussed on the Lord and He did it for me.
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