Faith Adiele - The Nigerian-Nordic Girls Guide to Lady Problems

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Copyright 2013 by Faith Adiele

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

Cover design by Laura Morris

Cover illustration by Alicia Buelow

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The Igbo always remembered that the dead ancestors lay
reverently buried in the earth That which was a source and
cradle of life that which produced and nourished and laid to rest,
could be none other than a woman. Hence the earth was conceived
of as feminine and gentle, benign and serene.

Chieka Ifemesia, Traditional Humane Living Among the Igbo

Though the four or five tumors inside my womb (one the size of a grapefruit) are supposedly benign, their behavior is not as friendly as the word suggests. Its difficult not to interpret their actions as downright hateful. One shoves angrily at my back, forcing me to sleep upright against a bank of pillows, like a princess. Another hunkers against my bladder, malicious, sending me constantly loping for the bathroom to strain and strain. Two clutch high, one churning whenever I eat, the other morose as a prisoner, twisting on its stalk and cutting off its own blood supply. The unconfirmed fifth one waits on the bench, ready to go in if any of the first string tires.

Theyre not only angry but slightly mad, the result of a single cell gone awry that keeps reproducing itself. Enamored of its smooth musculature, its beauty reflected in white on the glistening pink walls of my uterus, it creates an entire veined community to keep itself company, a family of narcissists. Me, me, me! I wonder if I am to blame somehow. The Selfish Artist, Independent Woman. Worse still, Im my mothers only child. The irony of their presence, the fact that their actions mimic those of a fetus, is not lost on me, the Single Girl Writer. Modern Career Woman gives birth to something less than useful.

I didnt come to graduate school, almost ten years after finding my unknown father and siblings in Nigeria, to get tumors (one the size of a grapefruit). I came to write about finding my unknown father and siblings in Nigeria, and about being raised by my Nordic immigrant mother and grandparents, and about what a bad sister I am, unable to make myself return to Nigeria. So the changeheavy, painful periods that last two weeks at a time and that a parade of blond doctors at Student Health ascribe to the stress of moving to Iowa, where nothing ever happens, stressful or otherwiseirritates me. Do something, my friends goad, and reluctantly, I go online. It is my responsibility to myself, as a Good Modern Woman. I need to be informed, proactive, wary of Western pharmaceuticals, eager to know the worst.

The preliminary symptoms suggest fibroids, which the Surgeon Generals online medical dictionary (so thats what a Surgeon General does!) defines as benign tumors that grow in or on the uterus. Tumors! The threat of the word slyly undercut by the soft promise of benign. How is that possible? How can something be both frightening and friendly? Explain!

The General continues: They are often embedded in the wall of the uterus but may also be attached to the outside, or to the inner lining. I cant picture this, though its intriguing: An army of uninvited children clinging to all sides of the womb like passengers on a Mammy Lorry, babies tied to their backs, toting live chickens and those red-and-blue striped Ghana-must-go bags, careening down a Nigerian road, headed for disaster. They can be any size. The largest recorded fibroid weighed 140 pounds. Take that to the Iowa State Fair! Forget about Countys Biggest Boar and Life-size Butter Sculpture of the Last Supper. Weve got a tumor the size of its host.

Raised to rack up bonus points, I memorize the other names for fibroids: uterine myomas, fibromyomas, leiomyomas, leiomyomata uteri. I settle on uterine myomas as the most foreign of the pronounceable options. Im not yet ready for the casual familiarity of fibroids (Hello, Im Fibroids; Ill be your cross to bear this evening). Fibroids sounds too ordinary, too acceptable, and I havent accepted any of this.

There are pictures for the Modern Aware Woman, a road map to our bodies. In the drawings, my womb is an inverted triangular racetrack of rutted, pink roads, bulging with cottage-cheesy pendulums like the egg sac of some monster insect. The photographs are worseshiny, pink globs of tissue with obscene purple veins and outbursts of frothy pus. I close my eyes and scroll down, repulsed by the inner workings of my body.

Im thinking about birth and after-birth, about how my fathers people the Igbo used to bury a newborn childs umbilical cord and placenta beneath the taproot of a newly-germinated fruit tree, confirmation of how we come from and return to the earth. In Igbo the word for land is the same as for the goddess of the land, Ala. Ala, the one responsible for fertility of both the land and her children on earth, whom she curses when an abomination, such as the birth of twins, is committed.

Im thinking about having children.

Predisposition

According the Surgeon General, the first risk factor for having uterine myomas is someone in the immediate family with them. I call my mother, the only woman in my immediate family who lives in America, and she reminds me of what I had forgotten, that her annual checkup a decade ago turned up uterine myomas. Fibroids, she calls them, resigned to the relationship. Perhaps I forgot because she is menopausal, the tumors small and shrinking in the absence of estrogen, she suggests generously. Because theyre nothing, really.

Or perhaps I forgot because I block out anything having to do with illness and hospitals. When I was eight and needed a tonsillectomy, our small-town hospital in southeast Washington state said the childrens ward was full, perhaps knowing that as an only child I didnt need other children or perhaps because I was the only black girl in town and they feared I would scare the really sick children. They put me in an adult room with six beds, the other five empty. When I awoke in the middle of the night, it was darkno pastel night-lights shaped like cartoon characters in the adult wardand an ancient woman, the old mother of the town librarian, had been brought in. She was standing on her bed, nightdress clinging to her skeletal limbs, babbling. Her hair stuck out in all directions like Hel, Queen of the Dead, daughter of the Trickster Loki who starred in my Finnish grandmothers tales.

Id held my breath, making myself as flat as possible beneath the thin hospital blanket. She hopped down off the bed and wandered into the blue light of the hallway until a nurse and an orderly brought her back and told her to hush. She spent the rest of the night waving a wrinkled claw in my direction, jeering You, you over there, you should be quiet, hush, all five of you, lie down!

The next morning I delivered my news to my mother: I would never bear a child nor enter another hospital under any circumstances. And she delivered hers: the small-town doctor had said that ice cream was not really necessary for recovery after all, that Jell-O and soup would do just fine.

Or perhaps I forgot about my mothers tumors because Im busy blocking out that day, the two of us on the living room floor, my grandmother rubbing my back while we waited for our dough sculptures to bake. I leaned back into Mummis warm softness and felt her flinch, then turned to find her grimacing in pain. I can feel them spreading, she muttered. She shook her head, speaking more to herself than to me. All the things I never said, balled up inside me.