Barrenness: societal, family support vital

in some families, there are no children and they are deemed incomplete.
When a couple fails to conceive, it is then deemed a taboo.
In most cases the woman is blamed for failing to have children.
This might leave the woman with no choice but applying desperate measures to try and bring peace in the marriage yet the husband might be the one with the problem.
women who have been blamed for failing to bring an heir to the family have ended up faking pregnancy and “stealing” other people’s babies.
We have read and heard about such stories.
There is a woman who after having a number of miscarriages was called a witch and taken for cleansing, only to find out that she had a weak uterus which needed attention whenever she was pregnant.
when that problem was attended to she was able to conceive and now she is a mother of three.
It is therefore advisable for couples to seek medical advice before they start the blame game because many people have been helped before.
In the 70s, another woman who was said not to be able to conceive did the unthinkable as she was tired of the talk from her in-laws.
They could sometimes force her to take some horrible medicines and herbs.
She was at one time forced to take raw eggs, which she vomited and her body was very weak after that.
The experience left her devastated and she had to come up with a plan to save herself from this abuse.
She lied to the husband that she was pregnant and yet she had been injected with a family planning injection – Depo Provera.
Some of the effects of Depo Provera injection are that a woman can miss her periods for three or six months depending on the injection.
After three months she had her period and she complained to her husband that she might be having a miscarriage.
When the husband asked her to go to hospital, she gave excuses.
The husband left for work and while at work he got a message that his wife had miscarried, but had refused to go to hospital for a thorough check up.
But how did this woman have a miscarriage and yet she was not pregnant?
When the husband left for work that day, she bought some liver and cut it into pieces and put it in a bowl and mixed it with raspberry drink.
She went into the bathroom as if she wanted to have a bath, and spread the liver on the floor of the bathroom, she then screamed for help.
The sisters and the mother of the husband rushed to see what was happening, and thinking that she had had a miscarriage, they quickly took care of the stuff by flushing it down the toilet and helped her walk to the house as she was in pain and was in shock.
When they were about to call an ambulance to take her to hospital, she refused and insisted they call her grandmother (apparently as the story unfolded, the grandmother was part of the scheme).
The grandmother warned them that they should not take her to hospital as that would limit her chances of getting pregnant again. The grandmother was going to administer some herbs, which would make it easy for her to conceive again.
The husband who had been notified of what had happened was present and he agreed to the plan.
While she was hatching another plan of becoming pregnant, the husband got a scholarship to study abroad and in a month’s time she sent him a letter that she was pregnant.
she even went up to five months and when she visited an aunt in the rural areas she announced that she had a miscarriage.
The husband’s family was notified and the mother-in-law travelled all the way to the rural areas to bring her back to town accompanied by her aunt.
These are some of the desperate measures that women take to stop families from talking and applying pressure on them.
after a year the husband invited her to join him abroad and when she came back to visit in the 80s, she had three children.
Friends took her to task and asked whether they were her real children and she said they were hers, and when she wanted to show them photos while she was pregnant, they refused and reminded her of what she had done.
She did everything to convince her friends that they were her children; showed them photos while she was breastfeeding; the third one was also still breastfeeding and, they believed her.
She made everyone laugh when she said: “I think system yangu yakanga isingade zvekutaura-taura.” (I think I was not able to conceive because of talking and pressure from my in-laws).
She justified why she had pretended to be pregnant: “Dai ndisina kutongwara maizonzwa kuti ndadyiswa gonzo chairo.” (If I had not come with a plan you could have heard that I had been given more deadly stuff to eat in order to conceive).
A colleague told me a story of true love; of how he stood by his wife when she could not conceive.
They had gone to doctors and both had some tests. The tests had shown that the woman could not conceive. But the two never gave up.
They loved each other and they had support from the husband’s parents who always comforted them by saying, “Nguva kana yakwana muchapihwa mwana naMwari. Mwana anobva kuna Mwari.” (When the time is right you will have a child. A child comes from the Almighty and when the time is right, you will get your child).
It was actually members of his wife’s family who would complain to the wife’s parents to try and do something as they had taken lobola from the (son-in-law).
After eight years of waiting, the wife got pregnant but had two miscarriages. Now they have two children.
He said that when they went to the doctor who had told them that the wife was not able to conceive, the doctor was actually shocked.
My colleague encourages couples to know that what is important is to love each other in sickness and in health and remember that children come from the Almighty.
Some years ago Betty Chishava who could not have children, an issue that caused problems in her marriage started an organi-sation called Chipo Chedu, to help and give support to people who were facing the same problem.
However, the organisation seems to have gone quite.
Couples should try to find workable solutions to this problem and stop the blame game.
Families should also assist the two in order for them to be able to open up about their problems.
Joyce Jenje-Makwenda is a researcher, archivist, author, producer and freelance journalist. She can be contacted on: joyce.jenje@ gmail.com