When Ogechi Laura Amajuoyi met the man who would become her husband in February 2016, she thought she was stepping into a love story. Within three months, she was pregnant. She did not know his real age. She did not know he had been married and divorced. She married him anyway, already carrying his child and still a student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Her first pregnancy unfolded between lectures and exams, her belly growing under her clothes as she tried to keep pace with her peers. Dropping out was a constant threat, she recalls, and it was her mother’s support that kept her in school. At home, she says, there was no such support. No husband rubbing swollen feet. No partner at antenatal visits. No one to share the fear and exhaustion.

The second pregnancy came as she was finishing her degree and preparing for Nigeria’s compulsory NYSC program. Again, she says, she carried the weight alone. Her husband’s presence, when it appeared, was fleeting. At the government hospital in Enugu where she delivered, he would show up briefly, then hurry off to meet friends, leaving her to navigate labor and recovery by herself.

By the third pregnancy, the cracks in the marriage had become canyons. She discovered she was pregnant the morning after sleeping outside, locked out of what was supposed to be her home following a fight with her husband. That discovery, she says, crystallized a truth she had been avoiding: she was valued for her womb, not her wellbeing.

Even the naming of her children became a symbol of erasure. Her ex-mother-in-law, she says, treated it as a right, not a privilege, insisting on choosing every name. The last baby was named Ifunanya, meaning “love” in Igbo, a name Ogechi associated with another woman her husband had allegedly been involved with. When she complained about the affair, her mother-in-law did not confront her son. Instead, she told a story of enduring similar infidelity in her own marriage, as if betrayal were a tradition to be passed down.

For Ogechi, that was the lesson: women who normalize irresponsible men raise sons who repeat the pattern, and daughters-in-law expected to endure it. She rejects the idea that a toxic two-parent home is better than a peaceful single-parent one. “A child doesn’t need two parents under one roof,” she insists. “They need at least one parent who isn’t teaching them, by example, what to accept.”

“My name is Ogechi Amajuoyi,” she concludes, “and this is one of the sacrifices I carry that I no longer call noble.”