Sunmibare was in the Sainsbury’s Local on Acton High Road when she got an inclination that all was not well with her husband, Ibayomi. Call it a spiritual connection, or ancestral whispers from the Black History Month aisle where she was deciding whether to add Supermalt to her trolley. It was a knowing she could hardly explain if anyone asked her in the moment. Something terrible had happened.
Despite this oneness she had with him, she had unfortunately grown used to seeing Ibayomi only once a year now, twice if she was lucky and he decided to visit during Christmas in addition to his visits in the spring. She did not know when she became used to that arrangement, when it became their family modus operandi to live separately like that. But in the beginning it was not so.
In the beginning, when they were newly married and living in Lagos, Ibayomi was the husband of fairy tales, the obsessed Mr Darcy to her Elizabeth Bennet. It was Ibayomi whom Nollywood videos portrayed as having been poisoned into submission by their over-experienced wives, whose mother believed wholeheartedly that Sunmibare had indeed put a love potion in her son’s vegetable soup.
Sunmibare always found it ironic that his mother imagined that she, who didn’t know how to cook a simple, decent stew, could somehow manage to cook vegetable soup and even know at which point to add the love potion.
It was Ibayomi who cooked, as easily as he breathed. Had his mother not been a pain in the neck right from the beginning of their relationship, Sunmibare would kneel every day to thank her for a fine job of teaching her son how to cook.
Ibayomi had the patience to bleach palm oil and cut shaki and ponmo for ayamase sauce. He was happy to cure salmon for six hours before grilling it, grinding his special herbs and spices in his small black mortar that Sunmibare bought him from a place called Oistins in Barbados on their first-anniversary holiday.
She liked buying him cute personalised kitchen stuff because he spent a lot of time there. A cheesy apron that said ‘The Host With The Roast’, a charcuterie board that said ‘I’m Grate At This’. She liked that he actually used them and churned out plate upon plate of food for her.
After their first child, Ire, arrived, Ibayomi spent extra hours coming up with original purée recipes, all of which she wolfed down from when she turned six months, as if she had been starved all of her brief, wondrous life.
“You’d better write a children’s recipe book,” she would tell him, licking leftovers from their daughter’s silicone bowl.
Sunmibare noticed, though, that whenever Ibayomi’s family visited, especially his mother, he preferred to assume a dissimulated position of authority, sitting askew in the living room and flicking through channels on the television, pretending he did not do household chores.
He explained that he did this because he did not want any of his family members to look at her with judgement in their eyes, or call her an idle woman who sat lazily doing nothing while her husband inhaled steam and smoke in the kitchen. So whenever they were around, Sunmibare pretended to be busy while he sat in his position as head of the home.
She served his moin-moin with grilled cod, which he had meticulously oiled on both sides and wrapped in aluminium foil as a buffer, so the high heat from the grill didn’t break it apart. When they finished wiping their plates clean and she cleared their dishes, she smiled coyly as they praised her for the most delicious moin-moin ever made.
They quickly thanked Ibayomi too, for providing her with the money to cook such a delicious meal.
She hated those superficial greetings, fake and shallow as a frying pan, because she knew they would still go home and gossip about her. The thought of them doing so grated on her nerves, made her feel small.
But Ibayomi would tell her to ignore them and crack jokes to make her laugh once they had gone.
“SunmiBamBam,” he used to tease her, tickling her armpits like a toddler.
She had initially hated the nickname, considering it a stupid, childish name. But she would come to think about the peculiarity of it, how he managed to say a casual, silly word with unbridled lustfulness for her. She soon came to accept it and even hated it whenever he dared to call her by her actual name.
It was stupid nonsense, but it was their stupid nonsense.
And because stupid-nonsense jokes were never quite far away from Ibayomi, she had thought he was joking on the day he said, “Let’s move to the UK and start a new life. What do you think?”
“Oh!” was all Sunmibare could say when she realised he was serious.
“Yeah, we can use the school route. You can work while I do an MBA and when I finish the MBA, I’ll get a job too, you’ll start your own master’s, and we’ll settle down. You know, it’s a better quality of life there. Maybe we can have one more kid once we find our bearings.”
His voice sounded a little too urgent. What was this need to leave everything in Lagos and go away? It was as if he was running from something.
And perhaps she had before then harboured a silent desire to leave the everyday trauma of Lagos but never thought it was a choice available to her, or perhaps it was because only the week before, during her mother-in-law’s visit to see her newly crawling grandchild, she had overheard portions of what she was saying on the phone, telling someone about her.
“Where is that done?” her mother-in-law was whispering. “That foolish boy needs to wake up from the trance that woman has him in. I didn’t name him Otaibayomi Olorunoje for him to come and sit down and let her be the one dictating how things are done in the home. May God never let my enemies win.”
She had been mad as usual. She was ‘that woman’. No matter what she did, she would always remain that woman to Ibayomi’s mother.
In one brief, selfish thought, she wished that her mother-in-law had been elderly and had died before she ever met Ibayomi. She chastised herself for that horrible thought. Still, she hated how his mother made her feel. Ibayomi’s mother’s words were always critical, so she had to walk on eggshells around her, never wanting to offend.
She hated the way she cowered, wearing a mask to perform for his mother, pretending to be interested when she wasn’t.
She hated that she had succumbed and put her daughter’s marvellous, defiant afro in cornrows as soon as she turned six months old, because every time Ibayomi’s mother called or visited, she blamed Sunmibare for making her granddaughter look rough, like a tomboy.
She had caved in because she wanted to please the woman, wanted to live up to the respect that was supposed to ooze from a wife to her mother-in-law. But what she mostly felt was resentment, directed at Ibayomi as she waited for wretched scraps of reassurance that she was not the problem and that he would always defend her.
And while his mother made her feel small, her own mother treated Ibayomi delicately, like an egg, deferring to the wisdom of his position as a man and husband.
And so, when moving away from her mother-in-law’s vicinity became an option, Sunmibare did not mind taking it. Being far away would keep her mother-in-law from constantly meddling and limit her control.
They would start all over again in the UK, learn new skills if they had to, and, in her case, go two, maybe even three steps down the ladder she had only just begun to climb in telecommunications.
***
They spent their first year in the United Kingdom cramped in a small flat that Sunmibare joked she could spread the entire width of her arms in, navigating the jagged pavements of Hanger Lane with a buggy, their first Amazon purchase as soon as they arrived.
“Look at you complaining that the pavements are uneven. Do you even have pavements in Lagos?” Ibayomi would tease her.
He was starting his MBA at the London Business School, and they attended many of the school’s welcome events together, learning by the second one to eat real food before leaving home because, even though there would be glass after glass of prosecco available, potato crisps and withered sandwiches were what they called food here.
Sunmibare spent most of her mornings job hunting, remembering advice she had read online to use a racially ambiguous name if she wanted to get a ring back for an interview.
She tried Sunmi first, but Ibayomi said it sounded Indian and wouldn’t help. So she went with Su instead. There was still no ring back.
Because it was Ibayomi who was busier now, with coursework and projects during the week, Sunmibare picked up cooking, watching Sisi Yemmie on YouTube with her EarPods as soon as she put Ire, now almost two years old, down for a nap.
And on the weekends, she and Ibayomi did grocery shopping together, taking turns to push Ire in the buggy while they stuffed their weekly supplies into the base.
Between them, Ibayomi was quicker at understanding the bus and train routes, knowing where to fill in the forms for a GP, and all the other nuances of British life. He was impressed by the infinite choices available for just one item in the supermarkets. The array of apples: Royal Gala apples and Pink Lady apples, Bramley apples and Granny Smith apples.
In the end, they settled on Granny Smith because it looked similar to the green ones they ate in Lagos, except that when Sunmibare tasted them, they were sour and tart. She wondered just how grumpy this Granny Smith had to have been for such a sour apple to be named after her.
On Monday mornings, she took their daughter to the one-hour rhyme-time session held in the upstairs corner of the Waterstones in Ealing. There, she searched for jobs with one eye on her phone and the other watching their daughter listen to stories about witches on a broom and green eggs and ham.
On Sundays they went to a non-denominational church near Ealing Common. Ibayomi had said he didn’t want them going to an African church.
“We did not come all the way to the UK to come and attend another Redeemed Church. We could have stayed in Lagos for that. So, we are going to integrate properly and find an oyinbo church that teaches the simple Word of God.”
They were both aligned on this. They were not interested in that pompous way that Nigerians did church, behaving as if it was only in their church that God moved and performed miracles. How they took ownership of church as if it was not Jesus’ own.
“Come to my church, my pastor is anointed.”
She wondered now, though, standing in that aisle, if Ibayomi remembered those days. The second child they had was turning seven in a week. A child who barely knew Ibayomi.
He had found a job in a Big Four consulting firm as soon as he finished his MBA, and shortly after, they moved into a bigger house in Acton, a three-bedroom that didn’t have built-in storage in the rooms but was decently sized and had a small back garden.
They went to the new IKEA in Hammersmith and found lovely shelving units to fit in the rooms, and their neighbour, Debra, who had twin girls of her own, gave them a plant and invited Ire to a playdate.
They changed plans about Sunmibare getting a master’s as agreed, so they didn’t put too much of a strain on their common purse, but she eventually found a part-time job as an estate agent in a Foxtons near them, doing client home viewings.
She moved on to full hours as soon as Ire started in Reception at a school only five minutes from them. Debra’s twin girls started at the same school too, and on several days they walked together to do pick-up and drop-off, talking about the school and how small the catchment was, how impressive it was that the school’s Ofsted rating had been outstanding for twelve years, how lucky they had been to find a house close enough.
Sometimes, when she was running late from a home viewing, Debra picked up Ire along with her twins and took them home. Other times, Sunmibare picked up the twins, who were shocked to find that Ire showered both in the mornings and the evenings.
One year later, she became pregnant and, when the baby was born, another girl, it was as though they had been waiting all their lives for her to complete their family.
Ibayomi joked that Sunmibare was smart enough to have had her second child in the year she turned 30, saving herself from the onslaught of Nigerian aunties who checked on biological clocks at family events.
She joked that now that she had turned 30, her back was in no position to carry his heavy child because her 30-year-old bones were weak. So it was Ibayomi who always put Ife in a kangaroo pouch and took walks around Ealing Common.
They lived the same simulated life of the average Londoner: stringent but moderate. They took weekend walks through giant parks that were surprisingly free to the public and supported their local football team during home matches. They became used to long, winding NHS queues that ended in less than ten-minute GP consultations.
They liked the pastries at Pret better but always went to Costa because of the free babyccino the baristas gave Ife. They bought fresh produce from M&S for quality, and everything else from Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
When they prayed every night, they thanked God for giving them the bountiful good of a foreign land, for making them the lucky ones, not the kind of immigrants that Priti Patel intended to ship to Rwanda.
And as they settled, it delighted Sunmibare how London made her feel more in control, more at ease, and less tortured by the opinions of in-laws she did not need, like what her children’s hair looked like or if she was feeding her family like a proper wife should. She slept in on Saturday mornings without feeling guilty, like she would have in Lagos, because Ibayomi took the girls out.
Being away from Nigeria gave her a freedom she had not known she desperately needed: the freedom to not care, the freedom to look in a bag of fucks and have nothing to give.
Once, when her mother-in-law called to say hello one morning, she did not pretend to be bright, cheery and awake as she normally would have done on the video call.
She was done with that shrivelled version of herself that being with her in-laws produced.
Before, she would have pretended to look busy so that she didn’t look or sound like a mere kept wife. She would have answered the call from the kitchen or the bathroom, making sure her yellow gloves were visible in the video, making sounds with pots and pans and turning the tap on and off to sound like she was washing.
Now, she did not care. She would not struggle in the chokehold of other people’s opinions. So what if she was a kept wife?
It was a position she realised she came to perhaps with age and maturity, one she wished her younger self had known was imminent. She now knew it came to women only with time because girls were often conditioned to bend and cater for everybody else but themselves.
She wanted to reach for the young wife she was in Nigeria, and hug her tight.
***
Everything changed after Ibayomi’s brief visit to Nigeria.
Excerpt from There Is Goodness Waiting at Home published by Mason Books. Copyright © 2026 Tope Owolabi
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