Pata cake pata cake, bake me a bread

Pastor, pastor make me a baby…

Having babies, for some women can be mission impossible.

These set of women, no matter how many hours they spend on their backs being pounded over and over again, that miracle seems to elude them.

They would visit prophets and alfas who vow in hallucinatory tones to give them babies. Many times, the dirty pastors and alfa have sex with these women over and over again but when a womb is blocked, it is blocked. No pastoral semen or alfaristic pounding can create a fetus. How some women can imagine that these charlatans, who parade themselves as men of God can give them children is still baffling. I have often wondered who the children from such liaisons would belong to, the husband or the pastor’s.

This isn’t the piece that will explain chromosomes, the Billings method, the ovulation period of women, or sleeping positions guaranteed to yield the expected babies, no. All that is tiresome.

I am writing about women and pastors who promise babies because of an encounter with one of such women.

Sometime ago, I was informed a friend of mine had just given birth to a baby boy. My friend? Gave birth? At what age? Very annoying news, enraging in fact considering this said friend already had five very active boys and she’s well over 40! Many women, like my friend are churning out babies like they have become a factory. All they need do is lie on their backs and wham!

I remember one pregnant school girl who told me once, “I didn’t know I could get pregnant after one round.”

Now you know, girl!

Anyway, I concluded my friend was on a suicide mission, as in what is she looking for? Six boys, the oldest isn’t even 13 yet? So I marched with all the righteous indignation I could muster to the Maternity wing of LASUTH, where I was told I would find her. I wasn’t going there to congratulate her, but to give her serious ‘wording’ and wash my hands off her foolishness. But thanks to a sharp tongued nurse who wiped off my righteous indignation with her vehement refusal to let me in until visiting time, I had no choice but to cool off with some women who had showed up for ante natal that day.

That’s how I met Maria, fierce looking Maria who spoke very good English, too. I looked like a friend of hers from school, she said, then after she realised her mistake, she simply decided to take me as a friend. One gist soon led to another but I didn’t mind because I could see that Maria was in the mood to talk and I had time to burn. Maria looked to be in her mid-30s and her six-month pregnancy was her first.

“I’m with my second husband.” She announced. She had to pack up the first marriage because she made a grave mistake. Her husband caught her where he didn’t expect to find her.

Like many women who just can’t get pregnant in a blink, she had gone to several ‘wolis’ a.k.a. prophets and confessed to eating raw intestines of chicken mashed into a paste with several things she had no name for, all for this elusive child. She had laid naked for more than one pastor to run his hands all over her body in the name of prayer, all to no avail. I didn’t ask if she ever slept with a pastor and she didn’t tell. She wanted a listening ear, mine were available.

Of course, friends and concerned family members kept pointing her from one pastor or alfa to another after each failed attempt and she never stopped to think for herself. She was consumed by this fervent desire to suckle a child.

Her husband?

He was quite content with them not having a child, yet. He believed they would at the right time. Maria however wanted a child like kilode.

“My biological clock was ticking too fast. A man can have children in his old age,” she told me, “but us women, we have a short shelf life.”

True.

So one day, Maria bade her husband goodbye and set off to work, only she wasn’t going to work, she was going to see some baba at Ilesha. She didn’t qualify the baba and I didn’t ask. Was he a herbalist or another pastor?

Maria went and while she was about to eat some concoction prepared for her, behold, her husband walked in. Shock couldn’t begin to describe the expression on the faces of both husband and wife as they beheld each other.

To wrap up a sordid story, both came back to Lagos separately and a family meeting was immediately summoned. Maria was accused of doing juju to keep her husband from making progress.

So what was your husband doing there?

“That’s not important. I was the one eating the concoction and even though I said it was for having a child, nobody believed me. They said after all, your husband is not worrying you for a child”.

Now there’s a pregnancy, how did this come about?

She met a second husband years after and told him from the get go that she was barren. But six months after their marriage, she got pregnant! Pastor visitation or baba?

“No, all these fake pastors can’t give children, it’s God!”

Maria is finally older and wiser.