Open Your Mouth And Speak...

The Key To Solving Your Problems...

Hi Friend,

It’s been a minute. Packing up your life at 30 and moving countries has been such a journey, and I have been taking it one step at a time, doing only the things I can and letting the things I can’t do sort themselves out.

I had my baby in the year 2020 at the peak of the pandemic. Imagine being a first-time mum and having to deal with all that. Wearing masks to the hospital for antenatal, even though the pregnancy was already taking my breath away. Being paranoid whenever someone sneezed beside me and watching on TV as people said bye to their loved ones via an iPad, for fear of contracting whatever it was that was killing them. It was also the year George Floyd was killed. I watched again and again on CNN as he kept on saying “I can’t breathe,” and how that didn’t stop the officer from pressing his knee down his neck.

It also didn’t help that I was in America at the time, and my husband was in Nigeria. I couldn’t fly out, and he couldn’t come in because the airports were closed. Like something that happens in scary movies.

People kept asking me how I coped. My response was always the same. I opened my mouth and I talked! To whomever was willing to listen. Whenever I got a phone call asking how I was, instead of the regular “I am fine,” I would talk about how scared I was of the night time. Because my baby didn’t use to sleep through the night. We were exclusively breastfeeding and she hardly ever got satisfied, so she would breastfeed through the night. And I had to put her on my chest to burp right after. If I ever attempted to put her down, she would wake up and start crying, not stop until I breastfed her again, and it went on and on until 7 a.m. in the morning, and we had to be at the hospital the following morning for some sort of check-up or the passport office so we could get her travel documents as soon as possible and go back home.

I told whomever was willing to listen that every time I pumped, I would do a 45-minute session only to produce 4 oz of milk! With all these breasts?????? (even though I found the hack with my second child. I was producing two big bottles in 20 minutes. Water. I would drink at 2.5 litres of water a day and that was the magic.)

I told whomever was willing to listen that I was missing home and that I missed my husband. I was not afraid to be vulnerable, to speak as tears rolled down my eyes. I didn’t try to hold in any emotions. I remember one time this nice lady volunteered to bathe my baby and she cried all through the bath. I cried as she cried. I didn’t care who was looking! I didn’t care who would say what behind my back. If you would gossip about a new mum in the situation I was in, that says more about you than it does about me.

Photo by Sophia Richards on Unsplash

I realised that every time I opened my mouth and shared the problem, what seemed so scary stopped being scary, and sometimes we would even make jokes out of the situation. People would offer solutions and I would take the ones that worked for me and discard the rest. Like giving my baby formula in the middle of the night for the first two weeks, which allowed her to sleep well at night and allowed me store the milk I pumped at midnight so she could take it in the morning. After two weeks, my milk was flowing enough to fill her, but I still was not producing much from pumping.

A problem shared is a problem truly half solved. I know some badly behaved people have made it difficult for certain people to share their troubles. But if you have trusted people around you, share with them. If not, say it out loud.

For example: I am scared of the night. My baby cries a lot and it scares me.

Then say something positive to follow.

For example: It won’t always be like this. It is only for a couple of weeks and everything will return to normalcy.

Speaking is so healing and powerful, and that is why you will never catch me saying negative things about myself, not even as a joke.

So today, I leave you with this message: There’s no problem too big for your tongue to solve! Open your mouth and speak.

I’ll leave you here for now. I hope to write to you soon.

But until then,

It’s Mory Pounds Sterling signing out! I love you.