Dear monthly visitor,

I expected a different knock at the doors of my womb, I looked out for nausea and dark areola’s, cravings and morning sicknesses; but you tickled my vanity and soared painfully like fat raindrops between my legs.

We always glare at each other every month, but this time I expected another visitor, my personal arsenal wants to flare up at the unusual fatness shooting at the expectancy of a child.
I want to feel a child strapped at my back, feel the clinginess at my breast as I feed my child, I want to form a coherent thought of being called “mother, mama or mom”. I agree that you’re a monthly visitor but I want to reach my sunset, I solicit for a space of nine(9) months, nine months for my pregnancy to scream outside as a label, dancing and dangling in the eyes of those that called me barren, in the eyes of my mother-in-law, to shut her rhythmic screams of not giving her a child for five years.

I hope you understand, I would definitely see you after I bathe my child in a washed sky and kiss the color rising from her cheeks.
I am not desperate I’m just a woman, it is my eternal purpose to bring beauty to the world, the world spins faster in so many ways, bagging my child and dancing up in the sidewalk of the sunrise is one moment I want to spur around…
There’s not a lot of time to think beyond the moment. I hope you understand.

Yours faithfully
Black woman.

Mercy Edmund Harold is a writer and a poet, presently doing NYSC in Osun state. Mercy is a womanist indulging in everything that concerns the growth of women in Nigeria. She studied Mass Communication from NTA college, Jos.