Don’t tell him anything yet. Just start. Let’s see how it goes.” Olivia almost argued. She thought about the baby, about timing, about whether she was even still marketable after all this time at home. She said all of that to Amelia. Amelia said, “The baby is older now. The nanny situation will work itself out.
And if it still doesn’t work out, we will find a way around it. And Olivia, you ran campaigns for that company for three years. You are not a woman who has lost her skills. You are a woman who paused. There is a difference.” That night, after Frank fell asleep, Olivia opened her laptop on the bathroom floor and began updating her CV.
It took her four nights to finish it, 20 minutes at a time. So Olivia did. The email came on a Tuesday morning. Olivia was feeding the baby when her phone buzzed. She almost ignored it. It was probably a bank notification or a promotion, but she glanced at the screen and froze. It was a job offer, a marketing role in a firm in Lekki Phase 1.
She had applied three weeks ago, not expecting much, but they wanted her. The pay was good, better than her last salary. They wanted her to start the following month. She put the phone face down on the table. She finished feeding the baby. She bathed her, put her down for a nap, and then sat in the kitchen and read the email again slowly, three times.
She called Amelia. “They offered me the job.” Amelia screamed. Then she laughed. Then she said, “Olivia, this is God. This is the exact moment you need.” “But who will watch the baby?” Olivia said. “What about Frank?” Amelia said. “When is his leave?” Olivia paused. Frank had mentioned it just that weekend, one month of annual leave, starting the following week.
He had been relaxed about it, talking about resting, watching football, sleeping in. Amelia said it plainly, “Let him do your job for the one month of his leave. Every single thing, no help from you, and you will be the one that leaves the house in the morning.” Olivia was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “Are you sure this will work?” “Yes, it will, Olivia. You can face this.” Olivia nodded. She told Frank that evening after dinner. She did not beg. She did not argue. She simply said, “You are on leave next month. I got a job offer. I want to take it. You will be home with the baby.” Frank looked at her. Then he laughed. Not a mean laugh, just a confident one. “How hard can it be? It is just staying at home. That is nothing.
All this lazy up and down you’ve been doing.” “Good,” Olivia said. “Then it will be easy for you.” She accepted the offer that night. Olivia was out of the flat by 7:15. She dressed quietly, kissed the baby’s forehead, and left Frank a note on the kitchen counter. Baby eats at 8, 12, and 4. She needs a bath before her nap.
There is rice in the pot from last night. She closed the door behind her and took a deep breath of outside air. She had forgotten what this felt like. The road, the buses, the noise of Lagos in the morning, all of it moving around her. She stood at the bus stop and something loosened in her chest. Back at the flat, things began falling apart almost immediately.
The baby woke up crying at 7:30 and did not stop. Frank carried her, bounced her, and sang to her. Nothing worked. He tried to heat the rice with one hand while holding her with the other. The gas flame caught the edge of a kitchen towel. He grabbed it, knocked over a bowl, and stood in the middle of the kitchen with a crying baby and a smoky towel, breathing hard.
He picked up the older child from the house gate where the bus had dropped him that afternoon and arrived home to find the sitting room he had just cleaned already scattered with toys. Both children needed dinner. The baby needed a bath. His head was spinning.
By 9:00 that night, when Olivia walked through the door, she found Frank sitting on the sofa with both children finally asleep on him. The kitchen was a disaster. He had not eaten. She heated food for herself, ate quietly, and went to bed. He did not say anything. The next day, he could not keep up with the baby’s schedule. She cried at 2:00 in the morning. He got up, changed her, fed her, and by the time she slept again, it was 4:00. His alarm went off at 6:00 to start preparing the older child for school.
He called his friend Seun that afternoon. “Guy, this thing is not easy at all,” he said, his voice low so Olivia would not hear when she came home. Seun laughed. “Which thing?” “This baby thing, the house thing, all of it.” Seun said, “Welcome to what your wife has been doing.” Frank did not respond. He just stayed quiet on the line. He stopped judging. Not out loud. Not as a decision he announced. He just stopped.
The comments that used to form in his mind, “Why is the place not clean? Why is dinner not ready?” He no longer had them. Because now he knew. He knew exactly why. He had managed to cook a pot of soup that took him three hours. Three hours because the baby needed to be put down twice. The older child needed help with homework. And he burnt the first batch of onions and had to start again.
He thought about Olivia doing this every single day. Every single day. Without once burning the onions or leaving the homework unattended. He stopped complaining. Not because there was nothing to complain about, but because he no longer felt he had the right. He understood now that exhaustion was not weakness. It was just what happened when a person gave everything they had to something that asks for everything.
The week that followed, he was rushing from the kitchen to the sitting room, carrying the baby in one arm and a plate in the other. He did not see the small puddle of water the baby had knocked from her cup onto the floor. He slipped. The baby landed on the cushion of the sofa as he twisted to protect her.
Frank hit the floor hard, his left arm taking the full weight of the fall. The pain was immediate and sharp. He lay on the floor for a moment, checking that the baby was okay. She was. She had even stopped crying, looking at him with wide, curious eyes. And then he tried to move his arm. It was fractured. He went to the hospital. They put his arm in a cast.
He came home that evening looking pale and quiet. Olivia looked at the cast. She looked at him. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. She nodded and went to check on the children. She did not say what she was thinking. She did not have to. One evening, he was exhausted. He collapsed on the bed without bathing.
He had been awake since 5. The baby had a mild fever and had been restless all day. He had barely eaten. His cast made everything harder, cooking, bathing the children, carrying things. He just fell onto the mattress and closed his eyes. Olivia stood at the bedroom door softly.
She said, “If it was me who did this, came to bed without bathing, what would you have said?” He kept his eyes closed. He said nothing because they both knew the answer. The days that followed, everything continued that way. Olivia came home, ate, and went straight to sleep. She checked on the baby once. She did not ask how his day went. She just lay down and slept.
Frank stood in the sitting room with the baby on his good arm, staring at the bedroom door. Then he snapped. “You won’t even come and help me. I am exhausted. I have one good arm. The baby has been crying since 5:00 and the older one has not done his homework.” Olivia opened one eye. She said very calmly.
“You are just at home doing nothing, right?” The words landed like a slap. Frank went very still. He sat down slowly on the sofa, the baby against his chest, and did not say another word. That night, Olivia turned to him in the dark. She moved close to him, her hand finding his arm, a quiet, private moment, asking for nothing except closeness. He sat up immediately. “I am too tired.
I cannot even think right now. I don’t have any urge. Please.” He heard himself say it, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing he had ever heard because he remembered every time he had said something like that to her, or worse, had not even said it, had just rolled over and let her feel rejected, unseen, alone. He lay back down. He stared at the ceiling for a long time. Something inside him cracked open.
By the fourth week, the man who had said, “How hard can it be?” no longer existed. Frank moved differently, slower. He did not reach for his phone the moment he woke up anymore. He would lie still for a minute, listening. Had the baby stirred? Was the older child already awake? What needed to happen in the next two hours? He thought about the months he had spent watching Olivia from the corner of his eye, thinking she was idle.
He thought about the morning he had transferred little money and told her to manage. He thought about every time he had said, “You contribute nothing.” And he felt something in his stomach drop. He was not a bad man. He had never thought of himself as unkind, but he had been blind. And blindness, when it hurts someone you love, is not much different from cruelty. He called Amelia one afternoon. He had never called Amelia before.
He got her number from Olivia’s phone while she was at work. Amelia picked up on the second ring. “I know you probably think I’m a terrible person. Please help me beg Olivia,” he said. There was a pause. “I think you’re a person who needed to learn something. The question is what you do with what you have learned.” He thanked her and hung up. On the last day of his leave, a Saturday evening, Frank bathed both children, put them to sleep early, and sat in the sitting room, waiting for Olivia to come home.
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