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Gaya

At a family Christmas dinner a few years ago, an auntie looked at Oby across the table and told her that a woman without children has no value when she is old. Oby looked back at her, said she disagreed, and asked if there was more meat.

That is Oby in one moment. Forty-two years old, three boutiques, zero children, and completely done performing distress about it for an audience. Oby has heard every opinion. She has heard them from her mother, her sisters, her aunties, her customers, strangers at owambés who felt entitled to ask. She has been prayed for, pitied, advised, and occasionally argued with by people who are absolutely certain they know what she wants better than she does.

She is done explaining, but she agreed to do it one more time, for Aura, so that maybe somebody reading this would feel less alone in a decision that Nigeria has not yet learned to respect.

Before we get into everything, introduce yourself. Who is Oby?

(smiles)
I am a 42-year-old Igbo woman from Enugu who has lived in Lagos for the past fifteen years. I own three boutiques, two in Lagos and one in Abuja, that stock contemporary African fashion and luxury ready-to-wear. I started with one small shop in Surulere with very little money and a very clear vision, and I have built from there over the past twelve years. I love travel, I love food, I love my family even when they drive me completely mad. I am unbothered by most things that used to bother me, and I am very clear about who I am and what I want from my life. Which is probably why we are here.

Let's start there. Did you always know you didn't want children?

Honestly? No. And I think that's important to say because people assume it's always been this clear thing for me and it wasn't. When I was younger I just assumed I would have children because that's what you do. You grow up, you marry, you have children. I didn't question it. It was just the next thing on the list, like secondary school and then university. I never sat down and asked myself if I actually wanted it. I just assumed I would want it when the time came.

My late twenties. I started paying attention to things I had been ignoring, and one of the things I started paying attention to was what motherhood actually looked like for the women around me. The real version, and I started seeing things that disturbed me deeply. Women who were clearly not okay. Women who had completely disappeared into motherhood and had nothing left of themselves, and then the stories, you know the stories. The ones that make the news. Mothers who harmed their children. Mothers who broke down completely, and people would react with shock and judgment, but I kept thinking, what happened to that woman before it got to that point? What was she carrying? Who was checking on her?

It was, because I wasn't thinking about it abstractly. I was thinking about myself specifically. I was thinking: I know myself. I know my limits. I know what I need to function well and what I cannot give without losing myself, and I looked at what motherhood requires, not the beautiful parts, the full picture, and I thought, I cannot do this. Not won't. Cannot. There is a difference, and I knew which one it was for me. By the time I was 30 I had made up my mind, and I have not wavered since.

You've built something impressive — three boutiques across two cities. Do you think your decision gave you the freedom to build the way you did?

Completely, and I say that not to suggest that mothers cannot build businesses because they absolutely can and do, but for me specifically, the way I work, the hours I keep, the risks I have taken, the times I have put everything back into the business instead of taking a salary, I could not have done that with children. Not the way I did it. I was in that shop at 6 am and leaving at 10 pm for years. I was travelling for buying trips with two weeks' notice. I was making decisions that only affected me, and I could make them freely.

My business is not my baby, I hate that phrase honestly, but it is my life's work, and I gave it everything I had because I could. That freedom was a choice, and I made it deliberately.

How did your family react when they found out?

(laughs)
React is a generous word. My mother did not react. She refused to accept it as information. She heard what I said and filed it under "Oby is going through something" and waited for me to come back with better news. That was twelve years ago. She is still waiting.

My sisters were a mix. One of them genuinely tried to understand, asked questions, we had real conversations about it. The other two treated it like a phase. Like I had said I was on a diet and they were just waiting for me to start eating rice again. I have three sisters. All of them are married. All of them have children. I love my nieces and nephews completely, but at every family gathering there is a specific dynamic that I have learned to navigate. I am the one without a husband, without children, the one everyone is still trying to figure out.

(long pause)
The aunties are their own category. In Igbo culture especially, your business is everyone's business, and your womb is apparently a community matter. I have had aunties pray over me at family gatherings without my permission. I have had aunties tell me my boutiques are beautiful but who will inherit them. I have had an auntie, a grown, educated woman, tell me that a woman without children has no value when she is old. To my face. At a Christmas dinner. I looked at her, and I said, very calmly, that I disagreed, and then I asked if there was more meat.

What else do you do? You cannot educate everyone. Some conversations are not worth having, and I have learned to identify them quickly.

Has religion played a role in the pressure you face?

Always. I am from an Igbo Christian family, and the Bible has been used against this decision more times than I can count. Be fruitful and multiply. Children are a blessing from the Lord. A woman's purpose. I have heard all of it. I have had people tell me God will change my heart. I have had people tell me I am blocking my own blessings. I have had a pastor, at a friend's event, not even my own church, pull me aside to ask if I had considered that my business success might be God compensating me for what I was missing.

I am a person of faith. I have my own relationship with God, and I have made peace with the fact that my understanding of what God wants for my life and other people's understanding of what God wants for my life are not always going to agree. I stopped arguing about it. Faith is personal. So is this decision.

Most of your friends are mothers at this point. What has that done to those friendships?

It has changed them. I won't pretend otherwise. There is a natural shift that happens when your friends enter motherhood and you don't follow. Their lives reorganise completely around their children and there is a whole shared experience; the school runs, the children's parties, the parenting conversations, that I am simply not part of. I don't resent it, but I would be lying if I said I never feel the distance.

What I have found is that the friendships that survived are the ones where the woman remained herself inside the motherhood. Where she still had interests and opinions and a life beyond her children. Those friendships stayed rich. The ones where the woman disappeared completely into the role, I drifted from those. Not by choice exactly. Just by the natural logic of having less and less in common.

I have also made new friendships. With women who are child-free by choice, women who are single and building, women who exist outside the conventional script. Those friendships have been some of the most nourishing of my adult life.

Let's talk about dating. You're open to marriage. How do you navigate that conversation with men?

It is exhausting. I will say that first. I tell men early. I don't believe in wasting anybody's time including my own, and the reactions are very telling. Some men say they don't want children either and then three months later they are talking about "our kids someday" like the conversation never happened. Some men say they respect my decision and then quietly spend the relationship trying to change my mind. Very few men hear it and actually mean it when they say it's okay.

Even the men who personally don't mind know that their family will mind, and in Nigeria, you are not just marrying a man. You are marrying his mother. His aunties. His family's expectations. A man can tell me he doesn't need children but what happens when his mother starts asking? What happens when his father calls a family meeting? What happens at Christmas when every other couple has children running around, and we are just sitting there? I have seen men who meant what they said when they said it completely fold under family pressure. It is not even always weakness. It is just the weight of what they are up against.

Has anyone ever made it past that conversation and into something serious?

Yes. Once. He was lovely. We were together for almost two years. His family found out about my position on children and that was the beginning of the end. His mother called him. Then his sisters called him. Then there was a family meeting, about whether he should continue the relationship. He came back from that meeting a different person. We ended things three months later.

Like losing two things at once. The person and the reminder that this decision has a cost. I knew the cost going in. I still know it. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it are very different things.

Have you ever encountered the biological clock pressure people talk about? Did it ever show up for you?

People kept telling me it would. That at 35 something would switch on and I would feel it. That my body would override my mind. That I would look at a baby and suddenly understand what I had been missing. I waited. I turned 35. I turned 37. I turned 40. Nothing switched on. No override happened. I held my sister's baby, and I felt love for him and also complete certainty that I did not want one of my own.

I think the biological clock is real for some women, and I would never dismiss that experience, but it is not universal. And the assumption that every woman will eventually feel it has caused a lot of damage, to women like me who are told our clarity is just a phase, and to women who do feel it and are made to feel like that desire is somehow shameful. Both things can be true. Not every woman wants children. Not every woman who wants children should be made to feel like a cliché for wanting them. Can we just let women be?

People always say "you'll change your mind." At 42, are they still saying it?

(laughs)
Less now. At some point, the biology makes the conversation moot and people quietly stop bringing it up. But for years, for so many years, that was the sentence I heard most often. You'll change your mind. You're still young. Wait until you hold your sister's baby. Wait until your friends start having children and you see what you're missing. I would nod and smile and think, I have held babies. I have watched my sisters become mothers. I have been present for all of it. And I came home every single time and felt the same way I felt before. Certain.

There's been a growing conversation online about mothers who regret having children. As someone who chose not to have them, do you have thoughts on that?

I think it is one of the most important conversations we are not having honestly enough. Because the pressure on women to want children is so enormous that some women have them without ever truly asking themselves if they want them. Then they are trapped, in the love, in the responsibility, in the guilt of having feelings that are not allowed to exist, and they suffer in silence because saying "I regret this" about a child is considered monstrous.

I am not surprised by those conversations. I am relieved they are happening. Not because I think motherhood is bad, but because I think women deserve to make genuinely free choices, and a choice is only free if all the options are equally acceptable. Right now they are not. Wanting children is celebrated. Not wanting children is questioned. Regretting children is unspeakable. Until all three are treated with equal dignity, we are not actually giving women freedom. We are just giving them different flavours of pressure.

What do you say to women who are in the same position but haven't said it out loud yet?

That the pressure does not get easier by staying quiet. It just gets heavier. I spent years softening this decision for other people's comfort, framing it as "not yet" instead of "not ever" because "not ever" makes people uncomfortable and I was still young enough to care about that. I wasted a lot of energy managing other people's feelings about my life.

Say it clearly. Say it early. Say it without apology. Not because everyone will accept it, because they won't, but because clarity protects you. It protects your time. It protects you from relationships built on the hope that you will eventually come around.

(doesn't hesitate)
Yes. I have my boutiques. I have built something real. I have a life that is mine in every sense. I travel when I want. I show up for my nieces and nephews and I love them in a way that is real and present and completely sustainable because I am not depleted. I am whole. And I can love them from a place of wholeness instead of exhaustion.

Is it the life Nigeria expected me to have? No. Is it the life I chose deliberately and would choose again? Absolutely. I am not waiting for my real life to begin. This is it, and it is enough.

Oby's story is not for everyone. It is not a manifesto or a recruitment. She is not trying to convince anyone that children are wrong or that the women who want them are making a mistake. She is simply telling the truth about her own life, clearly, without apology, without the softening she spent years performing for other people's comfort.

What her story is, is permission. For the woman in her late twenties who has never wanted children but has been telling herself she will eventually come around. For the woman in her thirties who is dating someone she loves but cannot imagine having children with. For the woman at 42 who is still nodding along at family dinners and saying "not yet" when she means "not ever."

You are allowed to know what you want. You are allowed to say it out loud, and you are allowed to build a life around that truth without spending the rest of it explaining yourself to people who didn't ask.

Oby, 42, has built two businesses, three boutiques, and a life that is entirely her own. The one thing she has never wanted is children. She sat down with Aura to talk about the decision nobody in her life has fully accepted.

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