The first home I remember is my grandmother’s house in Ikot Ekpene.
My teenage mother had given birth to me and gone back to school, which is the kind of sentence that sounds simple until you sit inside it. She did not leave because she did not love me. She left because loving me meant she had to become something. My father, too, was hustling in Aba. He was a young man who had a kid early on and had to make ends meet. Leaving me with his mother was their way of showing me the love they couldn’t show me at that time. I did not know this then. I was too small to know anything except the smell of my grandmother’s afang and the particular weight of being held by someone whose arms already knew how to hold children.
Then my grandmother died. I went to my father. He died a few months later. It’s the kind of loss that should break a child visibly, but instead, it just became normal. You learn early that the people you live with didn’t choose you, that your presence is arranged, and that love is measured in keeping you fed, sheltered, and in school. My uncle and his wife did this. I say this not as a complaint, but as a fact.
When my mother finally brought me to Warri, I understood something had been missing, though I lacked the words for it. What I had were American sitcoms. I studied them as if preparing for an exam: the parent who, without reason or occasion, says I love you; the child who responds; the ease of it. I waited to learn how words like that became ordinary.
With my mother, I knew the thing. I felt it clearly. She worked hard in ways I could measure. She showed up. She was strict in the way that people are strict when they are frightened for you, which is its own form of love, though it does not always feel that way at the time, but saying it? That was a door I would stand in front of and then walk away from, not because I did not want to go through it, but because my hand would not move to open it.
The first time I said it was on a phone call, during my first degree. I remember it came out slightly sideways, as I had aimed for something else, and the words landed a little to the left. She paused. Then she said it back. It was awkward, in the way true things sometimes are, when you have held something so long that releasing it feels strange in your hands.
I have since come to understand that this is not my story alone.
In many Nigerian homes, love is an infrastructure project. The father wakes before sunrise and comes home after dark, and the money that appears on the table at the end of the month is how he expresses his love. The mother carries the household in her body, the logistics of it, the food, the school fees, the uniforms, and the worry, and all of it means: I am here, I have not left, this is what love looks like in practice. The children receive this. They also sit with something unnamed, a want they cannot fully justify, because the evidence of love is everywhere, materially and structurally, except in the one form they keep seeing on television and never quite seeing at home.
The fathers who were strict retire one day and try to become soft, and the children who spent twenty years reading their silence as distance do not know what to do with the sudden warmth. Some of them meet it. Some of them cannot, because you cannot always go back and rebuild a language you never learned in the first place. The fathers who try late are not wrong to try. It is just that timing in these matters is not kind to good intentions.
What I carry from my own particular path, from grandmother to father to uncle to mother, is this: the love was always there. In every house, in every arrangement, in every person who kept me without being required to. It was present the whole time. What was missing was not the feeling. What was missing was the word that makes the feeling legible, that allows the child to stop inferring and simply know.
I think about the children I want to have. I think about how I will not wait for them to figure it out from context. I will say it plainly, on ordinary days, without it being a moment. I want them to grow up in a house where the word is so common it loses its weight, where telling someone you love them is as unremarkable as asking if they have eaten.
My mother and I say it easily now. It took me two decades, a phone call, and an awkward pause to get there.
I intend to save my children from that commute.