The Void Between Hearts ~~ongoing~~

Ⓐ ⒽⒾⓈⓉⓄⓇⓎ

     22|ℐℕ 𝒯ℋℰ ℬℰᎶℐℕℕℐℕᎶ.

   BOMA'S MOM WAS BORN, Mina Francine Lawson, in the United States. An only child to Nigerian Parents who immigrated a few years prior.

   When she was 10, her parents died in a car crash and the city of New York's Social Department For Displaced Children put her into a foster home with other 'stray kids' as their foster parents, Mr and Mrs. Jones tagged them. In that home, with the Jones's, all the foster kids were laboured, malnourished and mistreated.

   Tee was one of the older stray kids and the closest person to love that Mina found in those years. He was five years older than she was and always looked out for her, whether doing her chores so she could get extra sleep or sharing his meagre rations with her so she didn't have to fall ill all the time, he was her saviour. 

   But after Mina turned 13, her foster father, Mr. Gregory Jones, and his friends started to sexually abuse the female kids. So, she took off and became homeless instead. 

   While away from home, Mina found food by doing odd jobs in coffee shops and slept at a shelter for the homeless.

   She had just turned 16 when she got a job as a cleaner in a nice restaurant and there she met one of the customers, Fritzl Hermann. He was 28, a German and a Post-Graduate student at New York University.

   He treated her well, bought her food, expensive clothes, her first cell phone, walked her to the shelter every night after work, then they started sharing kisses every now and then. 

   Soon, he asked her to move in with him and she didn't hesitate because at the time, he wasn't as scary as the rest of the world and she believed he loved her. 

   After one year together, when she was seventeen, Fritzl was returning to Germany and asked her to come along. Without a second thought, she rode the wild wind of adventure with him.

  In Germany, Fritzl kept Mina indoors always and asked her to hide whenever he had visitors. Even though she didn't like how it made her feel, his electric blue eyes always made her feel loved, plus he was so good at apologising afterwards that she became better off being hidden. 

   She had stopped her contraceptives before they got to Germany and everything changed when she found out she was pregnant. 

   Fritzl insisted she have an abortion, telling her that if his father discovered of her pregnancy, he would strip him of all his inheritance. Mina didn't want an abortion but Fritzl didn't let up, so she conceded, and he took her to the clinic.

   While waiting for her turn, she picked up a pamphlet and in a split second that would later determine the course of all their lives, Mina realised she wasn't loved, and for the first time, she began to consider herself as being psychologically trafficked. 

   She decided not to go ahead with the abortion and ran away from the clinic, not contacting Fritzl until three days later when she called to ask if she could get her belongings. Fritzl told her that he had filed a restraint against her and he knew very powerful people in Germany who would lock her up for life if she dared call or come near him again. 

   So Mina had nowhere to go and nobody would employ a pregnant foreign black girl who couldn't speak German. Even the Nigerians she met weren't ready to take her in.

  Around eight months later, she had raised enough money to buy a one-way ticket to the US, from asking for alms on the streets and churches, thankfully her passport was in her purse the day she ran. 

   Though heavily pregnant, she was skinny and malnourished from months of sparse feeding and lack of proper ante-natal care, so much so that her bump was as small as a baby watermelon, still for fear of obstruction at the airport, she wrapped herself in layers of all the baggiest clothes she could find at the shelters, and so, passed through customs unnoticed. 

   Having had only one wish the day she ran from the abortion clinic, which was that her baby wouldn't be born in Germany, the euphoria that filled Mina's heart on the plane was insurmountable.

   Until the contractions started. 

   She spent most of the time shuttling between the toilet and her seat. But following the leak of her amniotic fluid, the contractions only intensified, leaving her with no option but to tell an air hostess.

  The tall blonde air hostess with a soothing smile was German, Anastasia by name. She helped Mina through the contractions and planned for an ambulance as soon as they landed in the US.

    A few minutes after landing, Mina delivered Boma in the ambulance. 

  The first couple of minutes, the tiny baby girl with a head full of blonde curls was blue and couldn't cry. While Mina held her, she could feel her little heart beating, but very weakly.

  The paramedic took the baby and tried to resuscitate her, but he needed advanced equipment that the ambulance didn't have. With the hospital still a few minutes away, it was up to fate and time to determine the outcome of the baby.

   When they finally got to the hospital, the baby was taken away immediately and as Mina tried to go after them, she collapsed from exhaustion. 

   She woke up to a nurse holding Boma in a blanket. "She's a miracle, a little fighter." The nurse smiled. Mina will always remember those first baby screams she heard. 

   The nurse handed her baby over, a tiny baby girl, with big eyes that seemed brown but were indeed the brightest shade of baby blue and small red lips that resonated loud cries whenever her thumb skipped her mouth. She was moving around, agile, warm and red from all her crying. 

   Mina named her Bomate after her own mother. Anastasia after the air hostess and Hermann after her father. They put that name on Boma's birth certificate, it remains there till date. 

    Then Mina sent Fritzl an email with a picture of Boma and her name and when he didn't reply for two years, she replaced Hermann with Lawson (her grandfather's name).

   Thereafter, she went to college, became a full time blogger and moved to Nigeria when Boma was 3 years old to start her business.