A friend once told me she knew her marriage was ending after an attempt to spice up the bedroom went south. She had dressed up in lingerie, done her hair, and made her way to the bedroom hoping to be met with enthusiasm. Instead, her husband laughed. None of that was necessary, he told her. After all, she was the mother of his children.

The laughter confirmed a longstanding insecurity she had carried from the beginning of the relationship. All of his ex-girlfriends shared an uncanny resemblance: Amazonian, curvaceous women with thirty-inch lace front wigs in every colour except black. My friend on the other hand was a glaringly stark contrast; petite, athletic frame with locs.

Something wasn’t adding up. Naturally, she wondered what was “so special” about her that had inspired him to take such a dramatic detour. Whenever she raised it, he reassured her. “People are allowed to change their type!”

Months later, she found an email receipt for La Perla lingerie purchased for the woman with whom she would eventually discover he was having an affair. The woman looked exactly how she imagined she would. The pattern or, rather, his type, had unsurprisingly returned.

I’ve since encountered this same story in different fonts. The more women I spoke to, the more familiar the story became. The feeling that they had been selected for reasons that had very little to do with desire and the hyperfixation on their role as a relatable girlfriend, a suitable wife, and practical choice.

A woman can spend months, years, even decades, trying to understand why a relationship feels slightly off before she arrives at an inevitability she had been too afraid to internalize.

What if being chosen and being wanted aren’t always the same thing?

Sex and the City explored a version of this cognitive dissonance through Charlotte York. Her husband, Trey, insisted he had no interest in sex until she caught him alone with a Playboy magazine. When Charlotte responded by dressing up in lingerie and presented herself to him, he recoiled.

“It’s not you,“ he told her. For Trey, there was no version of Charlotte that could be both respectable and desirable at the same time.

Freud called this the Madonna-Whore Complex: the tendency for some men to separate love from desire, viewing women as either virtuous, respectable partners they love, commit to and build a life with, or as sexually desirable women they lust after but struggle to fully respect. The idea is more than a century old, yet versions of it continue to surface in surprisingly modern places.

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When I thought about sharing what becoming a mom has meant to me, I had a few false starts. I wasn’t sure which part to begin with. What I did know was that I didn’t want to write something generic, which is surprisingly easy to do. Much of what women discuss about motherhood is a shared experience. It’s transformative, it’s life changing, it’s an identity shift and reset that can only be expressed in so many ways before the language starts to feel repetitive.

That’s because motherhood is the most ordinary extraordinary experience. There are over eight billion people in the world, and every single one of us came through a woman. And yet, somehow, every woman’s story of becoming a mom is entirely and uniquely her own.

I gave myself as much time as I needed. I jotted notes down when inspiration struck, but I knew I couldn’t write about the experience immediately. This required time. Time for my body, my emotions, and my mind to catch up with one another, which wasn’t exactly a priority during the newborn haze. It also isn’t really my way. Some things simply can’t be articulated in real time. They need to be lived in, metabolized, and only then translated into language.

One of the things I pride myself on is giving language to experiences that are hard to express. Being a “baddie with big feelings” has its benefits.

I have always processed life this way when things are serious. The more intense the experience, the slower I tend to go. I usually integrate heavy moments through careful observation and distance while I try to intellectualize my feelings instead of fully processing them. Externally, this can make me appear somewhat detached, when in reality I’m deeply impacted.

Becoming a mom completely crashed that operating system I had developed. The sheer force of the feelings behind the experience left me unable to intellectualize or analyze the way I was used to. Instead of understanding the transformation first and then becoming it, I had to become first, and only then try to understand. I’m still doing that now. So seven months later, I’m not quite there yet, but I have found enough clarity to begin.

When it came to motherhood, I watched my life actually rearrange itself in real time, almost like an out-of-body experience. Part sleep deprivation, part disbelief at the magnitude of what was happening. The feelings were too fast and layered for me to catch up; awe, gratitude, anxiety, shock, fear, tenderness, surrender, disbelief, excitement—the list goes on.

I have always had a tendency to live more in my head than in my actual body, but the sensation and responsibility of becoming a mother pulled me fully into the present . There was no time to think, it was just reality unfolding moment by moment, nonstop.

Every time I tried to write something that could contain the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual weight of the experience, I paused. What might have looked like procrastination was actually just stillness. I trusted that the words hadn’t downloaded yet and that when they did, I would know.

What I know now, even as the language is still forming, is that motherhood taught me something I have been trying to learn my entire life. The most important thing it taught me isn’t about sacrifice or love. It’s about trust.

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Trust in divine timing. Trust that things are being worked out behind the scenes. Trust that I am on the right path regardless of what is happening around me. Trust that whatever I lose when I choose myself will be replaced by something better. Trust that I should always stand up for what feels right. Trust that I am being guided.

And perhaps most importantly, trust in myself.

Learning to trust isn’t as simple as having faith or believing in yourself. There are experiences and environments that systematically teach you not to trust your inner voice so that you rely on external validation and authority instead of your own intuition. When you get into that loop, it trains you to second-guess your own truth for the comfort of others, even when it means betraying yourself.

Living without trust teaches hard lessons. Before you know it, you start making decisions from fear instead of belief, operating from scarcity instead of abundance, and relying on lower instincts instead of higher ones. I had lived through years of disappointment and rejection that felt personal, having my hopes rise only to be cut be down, and making choices that hurt instead of helped. Trust became a battle I knew was worth fighting for, so I fought.

I fell into a cycle of repairing my relationship with trust after betrayal, shame, and periods of transition in work, in family, in love, and in friendship. And still, when things truly fell apart, fear would take over. I would backslide and start overriding my intuition again. Afterwards, I would always wonder whether I had permanently damaged my ability to trust myself.

There were moments I struggled to forgive myself for ignoring what I knew. I worried that intuition was something you could lose through misuse, like an innate gift you could squander. Pregnancy and motherhood released me from that fear. This initiation wasn’t a reward, it was a confirmation.

So much of what we are taught about trust centers on believing before seeing. The law of resonance, which sits beneath practices like manifestation and prayer, asks us to inhabit the life we are moving toward before it exists. This idea is often reduced to the phrase “fake it till you make it.”

The hard truth is that believing without evidence is difficult, sometimes almost impossible, especially if you have been a late bloomer in the areas that matter most. You’re constantly reminded that you’re behind. That your mistakes make you unworthy. That settling for less is more realistic than hoping for more.

Accessing that level of trust feels different for me now. The kind of self-trust required to start over, jump timelines and design a life with more intention is easier for me hold. My son became my evidence and cheat code. He showed me what happens when something is aligned instead of forced or negotiated. He recalibrated my nervous system and restored my faith in many things, but especially in the version of myself who listens to her inner guidance.

During periods in my life when my trust was the lowest and my life was reflecting that, I kept holding one to my entitlement to a better life. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. I have always understood that verse as a promise rather than a mandate to suffer. That endurance isn’t permanent and life is meant to be enjoyed. That belief gave me permission to want more for myself when I was told it wasn’t my portion. It helped me trust that what I hoped for wasn’t delusion, it was my destiny.

Motherhood became the evidence I had been waiting for, and my son’s name ended up reflecting that truth.

Yoruba culture believes that a child’s name is a prophecy; their name is what you believe they came into this earth to be or represent. Two weeks before my son was born, we still didn’t have a name. We had a thoughtful shortlist, but nothing felt right. His father kept saying he would know it when he saw it. Even though part of me was nervous about cutting it close, something in me trusted that timing too.

One Sunday, the name arrived. Olúwákáré - God, well done. It didn’t feel chosen, it felt revealed.

His name means praise. Every time it’s spoken, it’s thanksgiving without effort. In saying it, I am reminded that I have a reason for praise even when I can’t see what’s coming next. Praise while the things I am manifesting are still gestating.

Becoming a mom taught me that trust isn’t something you force. It’s something that arrives when you are finally ready to receive it.

My Káré. God, well done. And well done to me for believing while I waited.

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During one of the last conversations I had with my mom before she passed away, she told me that there were three important things to look for when it came time to choose a husband: “Marry someone who will be kind to you, take care of you, protect and love you.” 

The guidance was clear—and the instructions sounded simple enough to follow—yet there I was: 32, in divorce court battling my ex-husband over my finances after just one year of marriage. So how did I get here you ask? 

The issue with my mom’s advice was that like many other young women—particularly African women—I lacked the necessary context to comprehend what genuine compatibility entails. I didn’t quite grasp the significance of knowing (and valuing) yourself enough to prevent others from dictating your identity or what you’re worthy of experiencing in this life. Moreover, I hadn’t been exposed to healthy relationships that prioritized genuine happiness over appearances, a cultural staple in the Nigerian relationships. Our benchmark for a successful marriage is heavily influenced by conservative belief systems that are rooted in upholding “family, church & the status quo” instead of happiness and places a premium on endurance over enjoyment. 

As women, we're often taught to carry a heavy burden of shame for our mistakes, especially in matters of love. And when the very thing you get wrong is what your dying mother warned you about in your final moments together, that weight is multiplied to infinity and beyond. That kind of shame is something most people would prefer to bury as deeply as possible for as long as possible. But as Oprah famously said, “life will tap you on your shoulder until it knocks you on your butt” and I was flat on my ass. In order to get up I had to face my shame head-on, suppressing it only breeds resentment which is the equivalent of taking poison and expecting the other person to suffer. Leaving my marriage was a bold act of self-love and I wasn’t going to reward that courageousness with bitterness. 

While it feels easy to blame this on the fact that I was raised by a single mother, there are plenty of women with present fathers and positive male figures in their lives who, like me, have fallen for love-bombing and manipulation masked as emotional intimacy. Without an understanding of self and healthy relationship dynamics, women end up in unsatisfying relationships that chip away at their self-esteem and overall well-being. 

In the early stages of the relationship (which started shortly after my mom’s death) that resulted in my short-lived marriage, I sensed deep down that I was doomed. Despite my mother’s wise words lingering in my mind, I found myself concocting creative narratives to justify staying in a toxic situation and drowning in shame because of it. I was so desperate to escape my grief that I ignored the red flags from my partner, and isolated myself from family and friends who voiced their concerns. As my sense of self slowly diminished, I found myself walking on eggshells in the name of maintaining peace. I realized the fairy tale romance we once shared was nothing but an illusion. The orchestrated displays of romance lacking substance, exaggerated attention to detail and emotional enmeshment served as deceptive smokescreens that would ultimately be used as tools to diminish my worth. 

Despite the glaring red flags — such as the calculated and degrading stories about his “crazy” ex, gleefully disseminated by his team of chief enablers with surgical precision (trust me, been there), or the emotionally charged outbursts — it was easier to stick it out than face my own anxiety-fueled life choices and insecurity. But as my self-worth dwindled, I realized I was stuck in a cycle of seeking approval and validation, and it was making things even worse. At the time, my partner's constant nitpicking veiled as support made me feel confused and ashamed; but now, I know that he masterfully used my vulnerabilities as weaponry in the hopes that I’d be too insecure to leave. In the end, I walked away from that warped reality, but the damage to my identity had already been done. It was a painful lesson, but one that taught me the importance of listening to my intuition and valuing my own worth above all else.

When genuine self-love is absent, toxic people seize the opportunity to prey on your vulnerability, whether they be partners, friends, bosses, or even family. They relentlessly feed off your light to obscure their own darkness and feelings of inferiority because (to their benefit) they know you can’t see your own power. Consequently, you may find yourself trapped in a life that feels fundamentally flawed. Only by daring to embrace the unknown can you begin to confront the bitterness that threatens to consume and alter your identity.

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