The Years Between
"At the age of twenty-five, I wanted to have a baby," Mariama Kamara begins, her voice carrying the weight of years spent waiting, hoping, trying. The first doctor's verdict landed like a stone: "Your cervix was too small." What followed was a maze of fertility drugs, procedures, and endless waiting – three years of her body refusing to follow the expected path.
Her period, once reliable as seasons, became a stranger. "Sometimes it would take like six, seven months before it would come," she recalls. "It would come just for a day and stop." In those uncertain months, she carried not just her own disappointment but the weight of others' expectations.
"Sometimes it's embarrassing because some people don't even know where to approach you," she says. "Maybe you will sit with another friend. One person will just come – 'Try to get the kid now. You don't reach the age to get the kid.'" The comments cut deeper during disagreements, when people would "use it to insult you. It will make you feel depressed."
At thirty, exhausted from trying, she let go. A relationship ended, and with it, her active pursuit of pregnancy. But life had its own timing. At thirty-four, without trying, without expecting – she became pregnant. Yet even this joy came with complications. Doctors discovered fibroids. "My baby was lying on the fibroid," she remembers. "He said I'm even lucky to get pregnant with that fibroid."
They scheduled a cesarean section, unable to risk vaginal delivery. But even after her child's birth, her body held more challenges. Severe pain led to the discovery of ovarian cysts, requiring another surgery. The pain persists even now. "Especially when it's time for my menstruation," she explains. "The three days to my menstruation, I started having pain from that ovarian cyst side. Throughout my menstruation period, I would go through that pain."
Her dream of having three children has dimmed in the face of these ongoing health challenges. "I wanted to have like three," she says quietly, "but because I have my child late, after that this cyst comes. Sometimes when I think about it, I feel depressed but I just have to accept it like that."
The civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone shaped her story too, disrupting her education just as she was finding her path. "That experience is not good at all because imagine you are displaced all the time," she says. "You will go somewhere, start an established home, you won't move to that point, you have to move back to another point." Her childhood dream of becoming a nurse slipped away in the chaos of displacement.
Now at forty-five, she's built a life around what is rather than what might have been. She's a businesswoman, dealing in shoes and household goods. When depression threatens, she finds solace in movies, in the internet, in moving forward. She understands how Sierra Leone's struggles mirror her own – both working simply to survive. "For now, we only have what we can eat," she says. "We only work for what we can eat."
She speaks with particular clarity about the weight women carry in African society: "In Africa it's not easy for you to be happy without having a child because think of the insults, think of the way people will talk to you, the way they will look at you, the way they approach you." Some would blame past abortions, spinning stories to explain childlessness. "They categorize so many things," she says. "Some will not even come to you and ask you why. They will just assume."
Yet through it all, she's found ways to ease her pain – both physical and emotional. She discovered that garlic helps with the cyst pain through YouTube videos. "I slice it, bit by bit, but I swallow it," she explains. "Since then, it has alleviated the symptoms." It's a small victory, but one that reminds her of her power to heal, to adapt, to find her way forward despite the odds.