By Ezeikolomuo
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!At 35, Dr. Adaku should be dreaming of wedding bells or the laughter of children. Instead, she spends her nights awake, staring into the darkness, weighed down by the kind of rejection many would struggle to imagine.
It is not that she lacks suitors. On the contrary, three men had once asked for her hand in marriage. But each time, the moment their families learned she grew up in an orphanage, the relationships collapsed.
Born without parents, raised under the care of a Reverend Father and Catholic Sisters, Adaku has known from childhood that the absence of Umunna (paternal lineage) and Ikwu nne (maternal kin) would one day cast a shadow over her adult life. The fear has since become reality.
For Igbo families who hold tightly to the sanctity of bloodlines, this was an unbridgeable gap. One family, the family of the man she loved the most, dismissed her bitterly, calling her “nwa abụrọ anụ enu, ọbụrọ anụ ana”, a child without roots, neither from above nor below. They branded her Osu uka, a derogatory term for those considered outcasts within traditional society.
A Reverend Sister who mentored her had long warned her to prepare for such prejudice. “Only a true Christian family,” she told her, “will not be bound by archaic man-made laws from which Christ has set us free. A true Christian family knows that old things have passed away.”
But the reality has left Adaku disillusioned. “There is no true Christian Igbo family,” she now believes. “They profess Christianity, but when it comes to standing firm for the faith, they melt away.”
The three men she had loved, a Catholic, an Anglican, and a Pentecostal, were all practicing Christians. Yet when tradition confronted their families, faith gave way to fear.
Humiliated and heartbroken, Adaku resolved to end any search for love with an Igbo man. She held on to that decision until she met Obinna, a software developer.
Their paths crossed when Obinna’s mother was admitted to Adaku’s hospital ward for two months. In that period, doctor and patient’s son developed a bond that slowly grew into affection. What began casually has blossomed into a serious relationship.
Now Obinna wants to formalize the affair. He has told Adaku he is ready to meet her family. And that is why she lies awake at night, heart pounding with dread.
She fears the familiar path of rejection. She dreads the moment Obinna, like others before him, may discover she has no family to present beyond the priests and nuns of the orphanage. She cannot bear another reminder of the fate she never chose.
In her restless hours, Adaku weighs impossible choices. Should she take the risk of telling Obinna the truth, hoping his family will prove different? Or should she persuade him to put her in the family way, so she can have a child of her own and abandon the idea of marriage altogether?
Yet even that thought troubles her deeply. “Why should I bring a child into this world to suffer the same fate as me?” she wonders.
And so the night stretches on. Between the tug of love and the weight of tradition, Dr. Adaku remains caught in a battle she never asked for, her heart yearning for acceptance, her reality shaped by rejection.