Stay With Me is a tough book to read. It carries many triggers: the loss of a child, infertility, broken families, and the lies people tell to keep up appearances. It breaks your heart, one truth at a time. The story reminds us that no matter how long a secret or lie is kept, the truth always catches up with us. And when it does, nothing can save us but God’s grace.
Hope, in the Bible, is the belief and expectation that God will make things better. It is the confidence that tomorrow will be a better day. Hope keeps us rising each morning, believing that when tomorrow comes, we will still be here.
But when one loses this hope, the will to keep pushing fades. The reason to keep living begins to slip away.
Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me captures that slow unravelling, the aching space between faith and despair, between what we believe should be and what life throws at us.
We follow Yejide and Akin in 1980s Nigeria. They meet at the university and soon get married, even as Yejide completes her final year. They are young, in love, and dream of a family. Yet dreaming is one thing; seeing those dreams come to life is another.
Infertility becomes the obstacle to that dream and the beginning of their heartbreak. Four years into the marriage, Yejide has tried everything to give her husband, her in-laws, and herself what they all long for: a baby. Even her education and reason cannot stop her from chasing every cure she hears of, every promise of healing for her “barrenness”.
Then one morning, everything changes. Her husband’s family, accompanied by her stepmother, arrives unannounced, and they say it is time for Akin to marry a second wife. Yejide expects to hear of a new pastor or herbalist she could visit. Instead, an uncle says, “Well, our wife, this is your new wife. It is one child that calls another into this world. Who knows, the king in heaven may answer your prayers because of this wife.”
Yejide’s life shatters. She cannot understand how love and betrayal can coexist, or how a man who promised to love only her could sit beside another woman and call her his wife. She believed their love would keep their families out of the marriage. She decides the only way to keep her husband is to become pregnant as soon as possible, before Funmi does.
Society’s obsession with blaming women for infertility needs to be questioned. This burden, placed solely on women, is harmful to their health and their sense of belonging. Many women take dangerous steps to show they can be mothers, which is what society expects.
Adebayo also offers readers Akin’s side of the story. We see what is happening in his life while Yejide fights to save her marriage. The struggles he faces are known to us but hidden from her. I consider this a clever way to tell such an emotionally charged story. It allows the reader to understand, even reconcile with, some of Akin’s choices, even though they are painful for Yejide.
Love is not enough. Yes, it is a beautiful beginning, but it must be strengthened by empathy, understanding, consideration, and accountability. As Adebayo writes, “Before I got married, I believed that love could do anything. I learnt soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, and comes close to breaking, and occasionally it breaks.”
Motherhood in Stay With Me is portrayed with tenderness and sorrow. Adebayo shows the price women pay to experience it. Yejide’s longing to be a mother begins as a dream to build a family with Akin. Later, it becomes a way to keep him close, and finally a desire to have someone who would be entirely hers. “Anyway, what was a husband compared to a child that would be all mine? A man can have many wives or concubines, but a child can have only one mother.”
She later learns that motherhood is much more than giving life. It is also about surviving loss. Through her eyes, we see how grief reshapes love, silences laughter, and asks a woman to begin again, even when everything inside her is broken.
Stay With Me is a tough book to read. It carries many triggers: the loss of a child, infertility, broken families, and the lies people tell to keep up appearances. It breaks your heart, one truth at a time. The book reminds us that no matter how long a secret or lie is kept, the truth always catches up with us. And when it does, nothing can save us but God’s grace.
Maybe honesty really is the best policy, because it spares so much pain. Pain that could be avoided if we were honest from the beginning and allowed others to choose what to do with that truth. But that kind of honesty only exists in an ideal world.
Jane Shussa is a digital communication specialist with a love for books, coffee, nature, and travel. She can be reached at [email protected].
