"When are you having babies?!?"
The women at the hair salon tell me how a woman should be
Another Saturday at the hair salon. The reason I wanted the longest, shiniest jet black box braids money could afford (mine cost $300 plus tip) was not for myself this time around, but for my boyfriend. The feminists are going to kill me. Yes. I sometimes like to get pretty for my boyfriend. He never asks me to get dolled up for him because he knows better than to ask me to do anything I don’t feel like doing. And secondly, makeup and beauty elude him completely. Sometimes when I’m wearing makeup he barely takes stock of my face. And the times that my face is bare, he’s convinced that I’m perfectly primed in silky smooth foundation and curled lashes. Which of course is a compliment.
I plucked my eyebrows and got my hair braided because I thought my boyfriend would like to see me in my ideal state, as I like to see myself – not shy in my silk cocoon as usual, but as a freshly winged butterfly. Gross. It had been a while since I de-tangled my hair or waxed my bushy brows or spent any more time than it takes to get ready for work in the morning on my appearance. Thirty minutes is the approximate time.
My boyfriend also seemed to be the center of the salon’s attention that day as well. Not his actual personhood, but what my boyfriend means to the larger scheme of sexual politics. I spent the day (eight hours is about as long as these braids take to finish) with three women: my braider, a former neighbor and immigrant from Nigeria, Yemi (she owns a salon on the Far North Side of Chicago), her trainee and a night class student — a few years younger than me and an immigrant from Cameroon – Dominique, and Dom’s older sister, Marie, heavily pregnant, and braiding a young man’s hair in the chair next to me.
For these women (and Nigerian culture as a whole – these women project), marriage and children are central to the social value of women. They seem puzzled that I’m thirty years old (very old to be childless), with a live-in boyfriend (who has not talked frankly about marriage), and I express very little interest in family life. When I’m in Yemi’s salon, we catch up — how are the parents and who you know has COVID and how’s work and how are her little boys handling new interactions in their daycare post-lockdown — and then I get to the business of expressing anxieties about money and career, not love or marriage or children. Yemi laughs at me; she doesn’t think I should aspire to work. She says, “Why? Who wants to do work?” Her smile is warm but bold. “Don’t you want to lay down and eat and not be bothered with bills?” We all have our fantasies and our hoped-for paradises. And yes, work is not a paradise. The discussion of work led into a discussion of what my boyfriend was doing to solve the issue that I, in fact, like having a job.
I let slip that my boyfriend hasn’t met my folks in person yet (we started dating a month before all hell broke loose), and Yemi’s and Dom’s eyes light up like Christmas trees.
“Ah my! Ah my goodness! This means it is coming!”
“What’s coming?” I laugh.
“I can feel it. I can feel it. It will happen soon. Your boyfriend is just nervous because he wants to be perfect before he meets your parents.”
Yemi tells me that many traditional Nigerian families have strict social traditions around courtship, one of them being that the family of the woman must — absolutely must — meet the woman’s courter. There is no question that whatever man this woman brings before her elders, this man will be her approved husband, if he survives the elders’ interrogation.
What’s coming? A proposal. Yemi feels it. She says that it will happen “this year I know it!” And there’s a little squirm and panic in my stomach.
I say, “Yemi! Don’t put that kind of juju into the air!” Not because I don’t ever want to get married (I’ve entertained the thought before), but because I’m a jinx and openly desiring an outcome makes me feel like that potential outcome is in peril.
There are “constitutions” guiding each Nigerian family’s home, and your man should meet their expectations in age, work, and heritage, to name a few criteria. Yemi is surprised, almost offended, that I moved in with my boyfriend after a year of dating, and he has not shaken my father’s hand or ate at my mother’s table.
“My sister,” Yemi begins, “brought to my parents a man who had land and cars. My parents said ‘Yah! He is a good one.’ And my little sister was married before me, but she had known her husband for only three months. My elders say ‘marry this man!’ So she did a week after he met them.”
She also knows my boyfriend is white and he comes from a good family with secure finances. And Dom laughs, sharing the story of the time her family tried to force her to pursue a white French teacher in her village in Cameroon. “They kept saying ‘you know white men are good!’ ‘White men are good!’” I interject that no, not all of them, but they seem to tune me out.
To my friends at the salon — charming and bold and hopelessly romantic — I am an odd woman. I’m charming when I feel like it, not that bold in my generalizations, and certainly not a romantic. I’m also odd because I don’t find any value in having “secured” a white male partner. “Modern woman” Yemi scoffs and laughs. Here in the States, it has been decades since the prevailing Protestant culture of the country looked like the culture of traditional courtship in the countryside and urban districts of Nigeria or Cameroon. Marriage, mistakenly interchanged for the words “romance” or “love,” was about securing the financial and social survival of daughters and their families. And for men as well — having a fertile wife meant that hardship would be lessened. A man could grow his wealth with a larger family, or transfer his wealth (no matter how meager) to his children after his death. Not that courtship and marriage before the full force of the twentieth century’s women’s liberation movement was devoid of love, but as the sociopolitical history of the U.S. suggest, marriage was an institute established legally not to define or defend love, but to honor Christian tradition, sustain male power, and preserve caste or wealth.
As a “modern woman” I believe my social value is tied up in what I can do for myself — shape a career, imagine future travel plans, save money for the down payment on a car or house — not what my boyfriend (although I love him deeply) can do for me. Consider how precarious one’s financial security must be, or how threatened a woman’s status in her community is, if your poor African parents push incessantly for you to seduce a white teacher you don’t know at a poor mission in your village. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a situation that is a constant across the social landscapes of Nigeria, Cameroon, and other African nations. But to hear these women’s stories in the salon, for them marriage and children are antidotes to poverty and other social ills of post-colonial economic inequality and the brutal “christianization” of colonized peoples, as well as an institute on which to shape an identity they value. Yemi, a wife with several children, two of them in private school in Nigeria, the youngest bunch with her and her husband in Chicago. Dominique has no suitor and no children that I know of, but her sister Marie is expecting her third child in less than two years (the first pregnancy were twins). These women expressed deep adoration for motherhood and the role of wife, something that had been divorced from my concept of young womanhood.
My ideal vision of womanhood relies heavily on my desire to learn more about what it means to be financially and socially independent, as well as having bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy, a spiritual and intellectual connection with my body and the control I have over what can and cannot be done with my body, is an idea I had trouble expressing to my skeptical hairdressers. For them, financial and social independence, ironically, is fated in marriage and motherhood — two conditions I find to be the antithesis of independence. “But don’t you want him [my boyfriend] to take care of you?” Dom asks accusingly. “He doesn’t need to because I can and want to take care of myself.” I didn’t say this, but I wish I had, although I doubt I could explain what I mean further.
And bodily autonomy is something we all understood, and yet felt differently about, I suspect. I learned that I take it very seriously, maybe too seriously. My body, and ultimately my sexuality, is first and foremost an instrument for my pleasure and self worth. And I am in the process of unlearning the dangerous belief that my sexualily is for anyone else to own.
While Yemi braided my hair, a Nigerian soap opera played on the television, in which a poor maid servant named Omah spends two hours of a six part series fending off the insatiable and aggressive suitors in the house of the King she serves. While her fiancé, a poor young man who leaves her and her family plot to man a market stall in the city (in hopes of one day freeing Omah from work), the murderous King, the adulterous Prince, Omah’s shy instructor, and even the Prince’s foolish bodyguard lust after her — cornering her in bedrooms and behind buildings to beg for her to sleep with them. Yemi understands the absurdity of these characters’ lust, not necessarily in terms of their power and privilege as wealthy men in the community, but in terms of the bewitching nature of Omah, the sole woman aware of their male designs.
“She is so beautiful! All he [the Prince] wants is the booty!” And the whole salon erupts into full-throated laughter. It is Omah’s magnetic beauty that is absurd, not the mens’ sexuality. Omah essentially “frees” herself of her suitors when she stands up for the Prince’s neglected fiancée, slapping the Prince across the face when he strikes his wife-to-be in front of his parents. Oddly, the Prince becomes a changed man by this violence – no longer lusting after Omah but actually “falling in love” with her. She rejects him still, and runs into the arms of her boyfriend, who has become a rich man in the city, proposes marriage, and has bought her a house, seemingly all in the same day. Although she is free of the household of the King, and her fiancé is benevolent, Omah is still property – still the wife of a wealthy man. She has no independent wealth of her own, and the series is not concerned that her English instruction is not used as a tool for Omah to find her passion or a career. Omah is a fan favorite; she survives physical and verbal abuse, unlike her female counterparts in the soap, by being the perfect potential partner.
Quite possibly marriage and motherhood are not antithetical to emotional and intellectual fulfillment. Maybe I have it all wrong. This past Mother’s Day weekend, my mom, not an immigrant, but a Black American woman, a working class production laborer, and married with four adult children, got to meet my boyfriend for the first time in person. My mother, who once aspired to become a lawyer before young pregnancy, forfeited her youthful aspirations for plans of a life still beautiful and full, but a dream deferred. She sounded a lot like Yemi and my salon friends. Slyly shoe-horning the question of marriage and babies into every conversation. My boyfriend and I managed to coolly bypass my mother’s small prods in the directions of her concerns for my future. And I say “my future” because although my mother was framing her questions as when are “we” (Bf and me) getting married and giving her squishy-faced, sweet-as-pie grandbabies, my gut tells me that my mother expects those decisions to rest solely with the one seemingly with the most at stake and who owns the vagina: yours truly, moi.
I suspect that the difference between my mother and I (and by extension, Yemi) is that my mom does believe that I can have it all. My “English instruction” won’t go to waste. I can have a passion (writing) and a career (in book publishing) while also being domesticated like a feel-good feline transformation clip on The Dodo, wifed up and “having babies.” Yemi and I have long operated from our own experiences of culture as female-identifying people that neither paths can be traveled simultaneously. For Yemi, why work when you can have your husband care for you and your children adore you (although partnership and motherhood are also kinds of labor)? Seemingly, the denial of career and individual fulfillment through hobby or passion or non-reproductive labor is no sacrifice at all. One lifestyle replaces the other lifestyle, one that Yemi finds less attractive: the life of work and career. For many people, of all genders, like Yemi, the perceived philosophical and cultural “sacredness” of domesticity is eternal fulfillment. This is born from the remnants of religious institutionalization in colonized countries, but also from something much more philosophical and individualized. For my mom, although I have two very shiny and expensive degrees and my highfalutin publishing job, she still fears that my life is not quite 100% fulfilled emotionally. Wifedom, motherhood still make life most valuable for women, partially because without romantic partnerships and/or children, our culture views alone-ness (mind you I didn’t say loneliness) as a personal failure. It is not a surprise that the people of my mother’s generation and her mother’s generation still find themselves drawn to mass media’s tired questions and tropes. “Love or career?” asks the online gossipers to single, unattached actresses over thirty-five years old. And in Tyler Perry movies the lead is never satisfied making six figures all on the strengths of her character and intelligence; she needs a man to share this wealth with. The projection that satisfying one’s individual needs and desires for personal betterment as a lonely affair grip all of our creative imaginations on every screen. We internalize this concept, especially for women. To be a singular woman, unconcerned with legally binding romantic partnership or child-rearing, is to be at odds with what we have considered the philosophical drama of our age: how to end our loneliness. I simply have not bought into the idea that being a wife and mother ends loneliness, nor do I believe that it can stunt individual growth and personal fulfillment. We are all our person, cultivating our own gardens, our own personhoods. What stems from the tide of human loneliness for one person might not for another. And because we are human, operating in a grossly unfair and often absurd culture, we fall prey to believing that one way is most sacred and how to be a person in the world is nailed in stone and ordained.
But also, maybe my mother is right. Am I capable of having it all? Could I continue to pursue the career of my dreams, and also be a good wife and mother? What sacrifices might I make? Do I have to make any sacrifices at all? Thinking about the future excites and terrifies me all at once, a lot like sex does. There are so many — too many possibilities! And just because I can consume all of the menu doesn’t mean I want to or should order every entree. The questions of when am I getting marriage (or should I get married) and when am I having babies — those questions will continue to evolve as I get older, as my parents age, as loved ones die and transition into the next life, as my friends pay off debts and buy houses going into more debt, as my boyfriend’s mind changes. This is the natural order of growing up and becoming wiser. So many possible futures.
-Jameka 😈
"When are you having babies?!?"
This piece was pure brilliance. You gave me so much clarity about my own understanding of bodily autonomy; a topic I’ve always felt strongly about but at the same time, something I couldn’t truly put in words when prying, questioning, advice-giving strangers put me in the limelight. Thank you!