How the Balcony Began
The story behind Shadows of the Cradle — and why Lucy Edogha had to exist.
I did not set out to write a novel about postpartum depression. I set out to write about my mother.
And my mother's mother. And the women whose names I will never know but whose silence I have always felt — the silence of women who carried children while carrying grief, who nursed babies while nursing broken hearts, who smiled at family gatherings because the alternative was explaining something no one had language for.
I set out to write about the balcony.
The Real Balcony
There was a balcony in my childhood. My grandmother sat there with a wrapper tied loosely around her waist, sometimes peeling oranges, sometimes shelling groundnuts, always watching. Children played in the dust below. Women passed with firewood balanced on their heads. Men argued about politics near the mango tree. And my grandmother saw all of it without seeming to look at any of it.
But what she saw most were the young women who found their way to that ledge. Who simply appeared — a new wife from two compounds away, a daughter-in-law carrying a baby who would not stop crying, a girl who had returned from the city with eyes that had seen too much. They sat. They said little. My grandmother said less. And somehow, by the time the evening insects began their chorus, the visitor would stand lighter than she had arrived.
I did not understand what was happening there. I was too busy chasing lizards and demanding Grandmother tell me stories about the tortoise. But I understood that the balcony was sacred. That something passed between women on that ledge that did not pass in living rooms or kitchens or church pews. Something older than advice. Something quieter than therapy.
Something like witness.
The Silence I Grew Up In
My mother had me young. Not scandalously young — just young enough that she was still becoming herself while becoming my mother. I do not remember her depression. I was too small. What I remember is the care she took with her sadness. The way she arranged it so I would not trip over it.
She never cried where I could see. She never spoke ill of my father, though he was gone before I could form memories of him. She never said, "I am tired," though I now understand she must have been exhausted beyond language. She simply functioned. And in functioning, she taught me that motherhood was a performance of wholeness.
I believed this for a long time. I believed that good mothers did not break. That strength meant silence. That the women on my grandmother's balcony were simply chatting, not surviving together.
Then I became an adult. And I began to hear the stories that had been whispered around me my entire life.
The cousin who stopped eating after her second child. The neighbor who woke up one morning and could not remember why she had wanted children. The aunt who told my mother, in a voice so flat it sounded like someone else speaking, "I look at my baby and I feel nothing. Is that normal?"
My mother's answer — I never heard it. But I imagine it sounded like my grandmother's: not a solution, but a presence. Not a diagnosis, but a permission to be exactly where she was.
These were not women who lacked love for their children. They were women who lacked language for what was happening to them. In a culture where motherhood is synonymous with sacrifice, and sacrifice is synonymous with silence, there was no room to say: I am drowning in the very love I am expected to celebrate.
The Research That Broke Me
When I began writing Shadows of the Cradle, I told myself it was fiction. I told myself Lucy Edogha was a character, not a ghost. I told myself the balcony was a metaphor, not a memory.
Then I started reading.
The World Health Organization reports that maternal mental health disorders affect up to 20% of women in low-resource settings. In Nigeria, a 2020 study in the Nigerian Postgraduate Medical Journal found postpartum depression prevalence at 23.5% among new mothers — and fewer than 10% received any form of professional care. Not because the women were invisible. Because the condition was.
I read about women who were told their sadness was "normal." Who were advised to "pray more." Whose families interpreted their withdrawal as laziness, their irritability as disrespect, their tears as ingratitude. I read about women who suffered in the exact silence my mother had perfected — not because they chose it, but because it was the only language available to them.
And I understood something that made me put the research down and weep:
My mother had been one of these women. She had simply never named it. And in never naming it, she had protected me from a vocabulary I might have used to understand her and to understand myself.
Why Lucy Edogha Had to Exist
Lucy Edogha is my grandmother. My grandmother was quieter, funnier, inclined to offer wisdom directly. She is the grandmother my mother needed. She is the grandmother I am trying to become — for myself, for the readers who write to me, for the women who still sit on balconies without knowing why they feel lighter when they leave.
Lucy does not diagnose. She does not prescribe. She does not even always listen in the way therapists are trained to. She witnesses. She remains. She offers the one thing that postpartum depression steals from women: the certainty that they are not alone in their breaking.
The balcony in the book is not a setting. It is a method. It is the architecture of survival that women have built for millennia — spaces where the performance stops, where the mask can slip, where a woman can say "I am not okay" without the sentence becoming her identity.
When I wrote the scene where Lucy tells a young mother, "The child does not need a perfect mother. The child needs a present one," I was not writing fiction. I was writing correction. I was correcting every message my mother had internalized about needing to be whole before she could be loved. I was correcting every message I had internalized about her silence being strength.
Lucy's balcony says: You can be broken and still be enough. You can be present and still be falling apart. Your motherhood is not measured by your wholeness. It is measured by your willingness to keep showing up — even when showing up looks like sitting on a ledge, peeling oranges, saying nothing at all.
The Conversations That Shaped It
I interviewed twelve women for this book. Not formally — I am not a researcher, I am a listener. I sat with them in living rooms, in church halls, in WhatsApp voice notes sent. I heard versions of the same story:
"I thought I was the only one."
"I smiled because what else could I do?"
"My mother never spoke of it. How could I?"
"I loved my baby. That was the confusing part. I loved her and I wanted to disappear."
One woman, a software engineer like me, told me she had coded an entire application while holding her newborn because "if I stopped moving, I would have to feel what I was feeling." Another, a teacher, described postpartum depression as "the color blue, but a blue that had weight." A third, a grandmother now, said she had never told her daughter about her own depression because "I did not want her to fear motherhood the way I had."
These conversations did not become characters directly. They became atmosphere. They became the reason Lucy Edogha does not offer solutions. Because the women I spoke to did not need solutions. They needed presence. They needed someone to say: This is hard. This is real. This is not your failure. And you do not have to survive it alone.
Why Fiction, Not Memoir
I could have written this as memoir. I have the material — my mother's silence, my grandmother's balcony, my own adult reckoning with what I did not understand as a child. But I chose fiction because fiction is permission. It allows readers to enter without bringing their own defenses. A woman who would never attend a postpartum support group will sit with Lucy Edogha for three hundred pages. A man who would never ask his wife if she is okay will read the balcony scenes and finally understand what she has been trying to say.
Fiction is the balcony we build for strangers. It says: Come. Sit. You do not have to explain yourself here.
What I Hope For
I do not hope that Shadows of the Cradle will "raise awareness" about postpartum depression. Awareness is cheap. I hope it will name what has been unnamed. I hope a woman will read it and finally have language for the blue she has been carrying. I hope a husband will read it and stop asking his wife "What's wrong?" and start asking "What do you need?" I hope a mother will read it and forgive herself for the days she could not smile.
I hope the balcony will keep growing. That readers will write to me not with praise, but with their own balcony stories. That the book will become not a product, but a permission — the same permission my grandmother gave without knowing she was giving it, the same permission I am trying to give with every sentence I write.
Lucy Edogha represents what is older than literature. It is the survival technology of women who understood that some wounds cannot be healed alone, and that the first medicine is simply being seen.
This is why I wrote Shadows of the Cradle.
Not to tell a story.
To build a balcony.
[Buy on Shopify] | [Buy on Amazon] | [Buy on Selar] | [Buy on Nuriakenya]