Culturing Care

By Amantle Gabolekwe

You’re 10 minutes old and I am exhausted.

The midwife places you on my chest and steps back to continue tending to me. put my hands on you, one on your back, one cupped under your head, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I’ve seen it in films. I hold the position carefully, like I’m being watched.

Pain spreads across my abdomen. I watch your breath – the small rise and fall – it’s uneven. Each time it pauses, even for a second, I count. One. Two. Then it comes again. I keep counting anyway.

I am a biologist. My whole life I have studied life under microscopes and in petri dishes. Cells dividing. Genes translating. I have spent years learning how life works and none of it is useful right now, with you on my chest, with your breath that stops and starts, with my hands in a position I found in a film.

Doubt winds its barbed fingers around my ribcage, constricting. I made a mistake. What do I know about motherhood? Of keeping a fragile life thriving when my own seems barely tethered. I had dreamed of holding you close, of feeling your tiny fingers wrapped around mine, of watching your eyes light up with wonder at the world around you. I wanted you, make no mistake. The smile on your father’s face when I told him of my pregnancy made me want you to be here even more.

I called him when I went into labour. The call didn’t go through.

Each sound and smell of the birthing room envelopes me – antiseptic cleanness battling the musk of labour. I stare at you, waiting to feel myself love you. I don’t. I force myself to take deep breaths.

It isn’t your fault, of course. You are almost perfect in every way – ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes, a head of soft, dark curls that already hint at the person you will one day become. You’re so perfect. But something inside of me is broken, and I can’t fix it. I thought motherhood would feel … more.

“Hello little one,” I whisper.

You don’t reply. Of course. You’re ten minutes old. But I had imagined – I don’t know what I had imagined. Something. A response. Some sign that you already knew me, that the nine months had counted for something, that I wasn’t starting from zero.

The midwife comes back and adjusts my left arm. “Support her head a little more,” she says. Not unkindly.

I adjust.

You’re 30 minutes old and the midwife says you’re an easy baby.

She checks your vitals with maternal care, gently prodding and praising your robust health. I observe your tiny chest rise and fall, none of the procedures disturbing your sleep. You sleep through all of it with a completeness I find unnerving. The mothers in the ward say: what a peaceful one, you’re so lucky. They say it to me like I did something right.

I smile. I don’t know what I did.

Before the midwife leaves again I ask her to pass me my phone. The screen is clean. No missed calls. One message from Abioye’s sister: congratulations, we’re praying for you both.

I put the phone face-down on the sheet beside me.

The nurse is still watching. “Is there someone we should call?” she asks. “Someone to sit with you?”

“My husband knows,” I say. “He’s travelling.”

She nods. She has heard this before, I can tell, the particular way she nods. She pulls the curtain halfway around the bed and leaves us alone.

I pick up the phone again. I put it down again.

You sleep.

You’re a day old and your grandma doesn’t touch you.

She peers at you with those cold eyes of hers. Your grandma is like that, you see. She’s a matriarch. Restrained kindness and cold smiles. But there was relief in her features when she saw your pure mahogany skin and dark eyes. What she did not say, my sister-in-law says on her behalf.

“She is truly brother-in-law’s child. I told you, mother!” She strokes your face with a bejewelled finger. Your tiny fists flutter at the gold glinting near your face.

I watch your grandmother’s expression change. Something loosens, not warmth, exactly, but the absence of suspicion. I understand. I have always understood what they thought of me. I just don’t say it out loud.

Your father does not arrive that day. Or the next.

Abioye Zadzisai is a renowned geneticist whose work carries him across continents. Conferences, collaborations, research projects. When you were born, he was already in Barcelona presenting a paper.

He sends a WhatsApp text.

I hope you and the baby are well. Name her Aziza.

That is all. Aziza.

Your grandmother adds Winnie. Your aunt adds Mariama. I add Wame, because in Setswana it means mine. Aziza Winnie Mariama Wame Zadzisai.

But when I hold you, you are simply Wame.

You’re a day old and I tell you how amazing your father is.

I trace your perfect features gifted through his cells. Your father is a brilliant man. While his mother is tradition and order, he is power and command. Intelligence and wit. Abioye Devon Zadzisai, dreadlock mane and hard eyes. He is a superhero. And I know that you’re small, but I need you to understand that’s a big thing. He cures the incurable. Your father. So, you must understand that he’s a very busy man. He can’t come see you even though I am his wife, and you are his first-born child. It would be selfish for us to expect that.

Don’t be selfish.

You’re two days old when Evan Thatayaone visits.

He has been my friend since our University of Botswana days. Bioinformatics graduate, city accent, terrible timing. He should not be here.

The Zadzisai family already suspects him because, years ago, long before Abioye, Evan and I were…. something. We ended it when I started seeing Abioye, but suspicion is stubborn.

Still, he arrives with flowers and awkward tenderness.

He places the spray on the table and peers at you with open fondness. “May I?”

I should say no. Instead, I watch him lift you from my arms, careful, unhurried, and hold you against his chest. Your fists open. Your eyes find his face.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I finally transform my anxiety into words. You’re so calm in his arms and I hate it. I wish you would show repulsion at being held so lovingly by a man who is not your father.

His eyes don’t leave yours. “I know.”

“If his mother finds you here –”

“I don’t care if Thandi finds me here.” Evan squeezes my hand. “I came for you. And also, the baby.” He smiles. Silence follows. I want him to stay leave.

As Evan continues to talk to me and admire you, I can’t help but feel a sense of insecurity creeping up inside me. I know Evan is kind, but what does he think of me? Does he see me as just a young, naive girl who has gotten herself into a mess? Does he know how alone I feel in this family, where I don’t quite fit in?

And why does he make loving you seem so easy?

Once again, I am betraying your father.

“She seems quite taken with you,” I observe. You two look like a family. But what will others conclude witnessing this scene? But yet, I say, “Will you…stay? Just for a while.”

He leaves only when the nurse tells him visitation is over.

You’re three months old and your father is in Egypt.

After Barcelona, your father had to drop in at Oxford, then Egypt, then Nigeria hosted him and at last, South Africa. He said he will be gone for a long while. He is an important man, your father.

He calls more often now. When he talks about his work, his voice loosens, opens up. When he asks about you, he sounds like someone reading from a script he hasn’t quite memorised yet.

“How is she?”

“She rolled over yesterday.” Each milestone – rolling over, grasping toys, flashing gummy smiles – showcases your vivacious charm. Though I cherish witnessing your growth, your father’s prolonged absence, both physical and emotional, weighs heavily on me.

“Good.” A pause. “Good.”

I hold the phone after he hangs up. Through the doorway, you’re on the play mat, examining your own hand with total seriousness. Evan has sent you a stuffed bear. You have pulled one of its eyes off and are holding it up to the light.

I should send it back. I don’t send it back.

I hold you close, fighting tears. Since when has a mother required validation? We’ll thrive without the fickle affection of men. Right as that thought forms, a chime signals Evan’s daily message. I am cheating on your father. Evan messages me and my fingers fly to respond. When he sends you toys, I accept them even though your father sends money for them each month. I shouldn’t be doing that. But you don’t scold me either.

Days bleed into each other, comforts and stresses in a constant tug. I try to devote myself to you, yet crave adult company, relying on Evan’s prudent advice and cheer. Your growth outpaces worries, giggles and babbles, lifting my spirit higher than any text or gift. Still, guilt shadows joy.

“You’re so perfect, Wame,” I say softly every night to you. And myself. “You’re born into a great family, with so much love and support around you. You’re going to have everything you could ever want.”

You will one day wonder where my people are.

Why no maternal grandmother comes to kiss your cheeks. Why I am not forcing you to be best friends with my best friends’ babies.

So, I tell you now. Your mother has never been a social person. Female friendships are taxing, one missed birthday and you are cut! When I married your father, I missed several. I was cut.

My mother died when I was young enough that her face blurs in memory. Afterwards I was raised by an uncle in Selibe Phikwe. It was supposed to be a steal: urban life, food, school, my own bed.

But inside the house, it was something else. Hands that lingered. Deep stares. Doors never felt enough.

I left home when I was accepted for boarding school and never went back.

So, when I hold you now, you should understand something important. You are not just my daughter.

You are the first family I ever chose.

You’re 10 months and you finally meet your father.

The whole family fills the sitting room to welcome him. You’re learning to crawl, and your cousin encourages you to crawl to your father. Your aunt smiles at you while rubbing her tummy. Twin boys, the scan says.

As relations swarm eagerly, my focus remains transfixed on his reaction.

Ever stone-faced, Abioye sweeps you into strong arms. I bite back my anxiety. He doesn’t hate you. That’s impossible. He wanted you. Needed you. But your father has always been a statue of a man. You reach for his dreadlocks, babbling. Reaching, it’s what babies do. Then comes a grunt from your father – you’ve pulled on his thick dreadlocks with chubby fists!

The room freezes in shock.

A deep rumble builds and bursts from within, laughter lifting heavier spirits than his broad shoulders ever could.

“This is why I called you mighty.” He continues to laugh. I haven’t heard his laugh in a long time. It’s so contagious that soon we’re all laughing.

There is much difference between your father and me. Our nationalities. Our intellect. Our 12-year age gap. Even after knowing your father for years, every conversation felt flat. But now, conversations flow with uncharacteristic ease.

I watch him settle you against his shoulder every night and think: this is the version of our marriage I thought we were building.

Seeing you bridge our divides through innocent joy lifts lingering doubts, filling my whole being with buoyant hope for our future as a family. It makes me brave.

You are one year old when I say-

“I want to get my master’s.” Out the words come, like blood gushing out of a wound.

Your father puts you down and looks at me.

I keep talking. “We can get a maid. And it will only be part-time.”

“Do you think you can manage?”

“Yes.”

“Then go for it.” He returns to you.

You’re still a year old when the argument happens.

Evan and two other researchers have come over to work. I serve scones. Refill tea. Carry dishes. Your grandmother has given the staff the afternoon off and called my name instead, and I have answered, because I am a wife in this house.

From the kitchen, I catch fragments: funding structures, collaboration models, methodology. The kind of conversation I would want to be in.

One of the researchers finds me at the sink when they’re leaving. “Your husband is fortunate,” he says. “My wife is too busy with work to host like this.”

I smile the way wives I supposed to smile.

When I come back, you are with Evan. You don’t smile for everyone, you’re your father’s daughter in that way, but for Evan you always reach up your arms. He’s tickling your stomach, calling you Wame. Mine.

Abioye appears in the doorway.

He watches for a moment. Then: “My sweet Aziza.” He lifts you from Evan’s arms, kisses your forehead. His eyes, over your head, find Evan. “Quite the charmer with other men’s children, Thatayaone. Mind you don’t let fantasy distract from your own life.”

No one says anything. You babble, unaware, pulling at your father’s collar.

Evan picks up his bag. “Goodbye, Mrs. Zadzisai.”

After I close the door, Abioye is waiting in the kitchen.

“Keep your corruption away from my child.”

The word sits between us. Corruption. I think of everything I have not done. Everything I have only wanted.

I don’t answer. I go to bed and lie there while the ceiling does nothing. At two in the morning, you call out. Not words. Just a sound, one you make in the dark when something has disturbed you. I lie still and listen to it. It comes again.

I count to ten.

By eight, the sound has stopped. You’ve settled yourself back down, the way you’ve learned to do. You’re good at that. You’ve always been so good at not making too much trouble.

I stare at the ceiling for another hour. I don’t know which is worse, that you needed me and I didn’t come, or that you stopped needing me so quickly.

In the morning your father gets up with you, and I hear you laughing in the kitchen. I stay in bed until it’s been quiet for a while.

You will one day ask how I met your father.

I will tell you a story of a laboratory that smelled permanently like ethanol. Of an undergrad student and a visiting researcher whose conversation shifted from molecular biology to their own biology.

He used to tell me what a brilliant woman I am. Now I am just a wife and a mother.

You’re 20 or 25 months old, or is it 23? Heavens, I can’t think. You’re too much.

You are your father’s daughter, Wame, and I hate that about you. You’re all potential and kinetic energy, broken sentences, and questions. The world excites you. Even your nanny, with her 10 years of experience, can’t handle you.

When you knock on my door, I feel a chill down my back.

“Mama, I want play, mama, I want play.”

“I think you have a visitor,” a classmate on Zoom jokes. I want to stab his eye out.

I force a smile. “Excuse me, one moment.” I mute the call. “Aziza! Mama’s busy!”

“I want play!” You shout back, still banging on my door.

I have a presentation in two days. I don’t even want to think about my thesis. “Enough, Azi.”

You only pound harder. “I want play!” Something inside me snaps – a primal instinct to escape this torment overwhelming reason. “I said ENOUGH!”

Grabbing your arm, I thrust you towards your room, your frightened shrieks grating my final threads of control. I slide down the wall. My face is wet. I press my hands over my ears, and it doesn’t help.

Please be quiet.

“Amanda?” My head whips up to see your father looking at me.

I force myself to my feet “Abioye.”

By the time his papers have hit the floor, he has pushed me aside and flung open the door. You cling to him like a lifeline. My heart shatters into a million pieces, each one etched with your name. I move towards you. You flinch.

Your father picks you up, muttering reassurances. I want to apologize. I take a step forward. Then I take 10 more back to my room.

I drop two months later. Abioye says he is proud of me. I love him and hate him for it. But who needs another degree when you have a child? That’s what Abioye said. My husband who is always right.

You are four years old and a terrible human being. You and your cousins stand in a mess of paint after I asked you to be careful. You have paint on your hands and handprints cover our walls, the floor and your grandma’s white leather couch. I was gone for a minute, just to go to the loo. A minute. You can’t even give me that. I speak sternly to you, but don’t shout; your father has forbidden me to speak harshly to you. You stare at me with my own eyes, defiant.

“Azi, are you listening to me?”

“I hate you,” you whisper. The floor falls away. A mother’s love is boundless, yet vulnerable. Your hot tears are mirrors that reflect my failures at me, accusing in their transparency. I turn away, composure fracturing.

The floor moves. I stand up. I go to the kitchen and wash dishes that are already clean, and I think about my mother, whose face I can’t find anymore, and I wonder if she had a kitchen like this, a task to put her hands in while the rest of her fell apart.

Later, you come to me. I am still crying in the kitchen. Forgive me, your mommy is weak. Guilt and uncertainty crowd your small frame.

Wiping my eyes roughly, I take a shuddering breath. “Aziza…come here.” My voice cracks under the pressure’s weight. After an eternity, tiny feet pad over hesitantly.

Gently gathering your bruised soul with care so as not to cause further harm, I speak to the cracks within us both. “We all say things in anger. But the love between us…that’s forever.”

Your arms tighten around my neck in response. In that forgiveness, however small, glimmered hope – that through understanding each other’s fragility, in time even the deepest wounds might heal into strength.

“I love you, mama,” you whisper against my neck.

“I love you more, Wame.”

You’re five years old and bouncing on your heels in the living room.

“Mommy, hurry!” you shout at me while I pack your lunch. It’s your first day of school.

“Bye mama! Bye baba!” You giggle, sandaled feet pattering down the hall. Abioye smiles reassuringly before clicking the door shut, leaving achingly familiar silence in his wake.

Collapsing on the couch, I stare blankly at the television, anticipating relief. But only emptiness echoes in my chest. Silence settles in my bones, feasting on the chasm where laughter once rang clear. I seek your energy but find only remnants, all lightness excavated until walls show the bones of what remains without your magnetism.

Time stretches endlessly. Finally collapsing in your bed, I breathe your lingering strawberry scent. A sob lodges as realization strikes – you have always been my light and purpose. Now what remains?

I try to convince myself this emptiness will pass but it lingers as part of my routine: send you to school, clean, have an existential crisis. The feelings overwhelm.

I find myself on the phone. “Evan, I need help.”

You think I’ve gone mad with my paint and flour-covered experiments. Evan suggested a hobby. But I was always a student or wife, with no identity of my own. You sometimes help me pick, or join in, amused by my scrambling to find purpose again.

While crafting one day, you stare at my wall, “Mommy, what are those?”

You are staring at my degree. “It’s mommy’s degree.”

“Then why don’t you work?”

I stay quiet for a while. Try and fail to explain it to you. To myself. “That’s a good question.”

I sign the divorce papers when you are seven. Your father and I have been arguing for a while. I surprise myself. I never knew I could raise my voice at Abioye. He gave me an ultimatum, this family or my stubbornness.

I leave with one bag. You stand behind your father in the driveway, your hand in his. I don’t have a car. Almost everything is Abioye’s.

I have no family or friends. For the millionth time, I want to call Evan. I remind myself that he is a man. I refuse any man’s sympathies and charity, determined to sculpt fate with bare hands.

The apartment is small and has a smell I never identify. Roommates come and go. I study at a table the size of a cutting board, under a light that flickers when the wind is strong. I surrender nights to flea-ridden cots and cracking books under pale globes, memorizing equations through bleary eyes rimmed in shadows. Days find menial labour to pay rent for the cramped studio, bare save memories flickering across walls like ghosts.

University proves a blessing – hours spent memorizing distracts from your absence searing me every moment. Though fatigue weighs me down like ankle chains, I forge on.

I graduate when you’re 9. Abioye won’t bring you. I scan the crowd anyway, out of habit. Then I shake the dean’s hand, take my scroll, and smile for the photographer.

I find a child about your age three rows back. She is sitting on her father’s shoulders so she can see. When they call the next name she claps both hands over her mouth, delighted by something. Her father reaches up and steadies her by the ankles, so she doesn’t fall.

I look away.

The photographer wants me to hold the scroll out toward the camera. I do. He takes three shots. “One more,” he says, “big smile.”

I give him the smile.

On the way out I pass a table where families have gathered. Someone’s mother is crying. Someone’s husband is trying to take a photo but keeps laughing too hard to hold the phone still. I walk past all of it and find a bench on the far side of the car park and sit down and eat the sandwich I packed this morning, alone, in my gown, in the sun.

It’s a good sandwich. I made it myself.

Your mommy did it, Wame.

As the years go by, I’m riddled with thousands of emotions. Joy fills me when I get a lecturing job at the state university and when my candidacy for a PhD is accepted. Grief makes me cry most nights as I think of you. Guilt made me reject Evan’s proposal. His eyes shone with understanding, and I try to reflect that feeling two years later at his wedding.

You and I try to stay close. We call. We visit when your father permits. But you listen to your friends talk about their parents, and you remember that I left. That your father is always somewhere else. You begin to understand that you were not, to either of us, the thing that came first. You want to tell me all of this, but you can’t. That would make you a bother.

“You left me,” You say. Your voice is flat and wet at once. You haven’t called since.

The choice was made, though it nearly broke my heart – to leave you was to let my love play its part. I pray each dawn you feel my love, still burning strong though years apart.

You’re going to university abroad. I pack the last of my things into the Civic; it is ageing, second-hand, bought with my lecturer’s salary, and I am driving to your father’s house to see you.

I know it isn’t too late to remedy past mistakes and make amends. The night is clear. I am rehearsing what I will say, how I will say it, whether you will let me in the door.

I have tried formal and I have tried casual. I have tried starting with you and I have tried starting with myself. Nothing sounds right when I say it to the windscreen.

What I keep coming back to is this: I know what it looks like. I know it looked like I chose the degree over you. I need you to know it was the opposite. Staying would have made me someone you couldn’t have been proud of. I was trying to become someone worth coming back to.

I have never said this to you. I have been afraid you would ask why it took so long. I don’t have an answer to that. I only have tonight, and the door, and whatever expression you meet me with.

Twelve minutes from your father’s house. I enter an intersection.

A horn. Headlights in the wrong lane. Frantic hands wrench the wheel… Metal crunches with sickening force as surrounding night spins into shattered glass.

Pain sears through my body. Something warm spreads across my chest. Voices call from afar, help coming. But darkness draws me down into silence.

“Mma, can you hear me?” asks someone, lightly tapping my face. It hurts but I nod weakly. “We’re taking you to A&E now. Try not to move.” Darkness pulls me under once more.

My last clear thought isn’t a thought, exactly. It’s your face at seven, watching the gate close. It’s me, not looking back.

I don’t know if you attend my funeral. Do you even cry?

No, you don’t cry. You shatter.

You hold onto your aunt as a police officer delivers the news.

All these years, you and I wondered whether he loved me. Perhaps that answers it. Or perhaps it was only guilt. You will never know. The not knowing is the thing that wrecks you.

I didn’t leave much for you. My house and a few possessions. You don’t want any of it. You want me.

During my funeral, your cousins cling to you. Your aunts fear you will throw yourself into the grave with me. The thought had crossed your mind but seeing the concern on everyone’s face, you stay on your feet while your heart lies below. Even now, you don’t like to be a bother.

They let you into my old office at the university. Through your tears, you stare at the packed boxes trying to invoke life from them. Invoke Personality. History. You try to invoke me. Your failure crushes you. You walk the garden paths where we laughed and played but living flowers can’t replace one now decaying.

A stranger finds you crying by the swings. You apologise because you are being a bother. He tells you that you are not. His voice is like rain, and you are a desert. You talk through the grief then the guilt and you finally talk yourself into love. That’s wrong, the grief can’t be talked away. Yet whenever it bubbles and chokes you, he lets you slit your throat and bleed over him.

Years later, your baby stirs in your arms as you once did in mine long ago.

She’s 10 minutes old and you wonder if you can love her as I loved you.

You can. You will.

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Amantle Gabolekwe is a nursing student, research fellow, and both a nonfiction and fiction writer although stories of magical princess fighting villains will forever be her first love. She began writing as a child, writing stories during class, where stories became both refuge and rebellion, and today she balances research with creative exploration. Guided by the quote from the musical Hamilton that says, “legacy is planting seeds in a garden you never get to see,” Amantle seeks to write stories that outlive her and inspire others.