I know the exact day of my cycle the way some people know their PIN numbers. Automatically. Without thinking. It lives in my body and in my phone and in a notes app that has become the most private document I own. I have been trying for four years. I want to write that sentence without softening it because I spent a long time softening it, saying things like we are not not trying or it will happen when it happens, and what that softening really was, was protection. Protection

I did not know, when I packed for Canada, that I was also packing for a version of motherhood I had not been told about. My son was two when we arrived. He was a quiet child, which I told myself was just his personality. He did not like loud sounds. He did not always respond when I called his name. He arranged his toys in straight lines and cried in a specific way when anything was moved. I thought: he is adjusting. We all are. Give him time. By the time he was three and a ha

My mother called on a Tuesday. She does not call on Tuesdays. She calls on Sundays, after church, when she has the full energy of the Holy Spirit and approximately forty-five minutes of things to say. A Tuesday call means something specific. It means she has been thinking. It means someone's child just got married. It means the conversation is going to end with her saying "I'm not getting any younger" even though it is me who is not getting any younger. I have been in Canada

I have a good life here. I wanted to get that out of the way before i say anything else. The house is beautiful. The children are in a good school. The neighbourhood is the kind where people wave to each other and the streets get ploughed quickly after snow. The car is nice. The groceries are not a source of anxiety. When something needs to be fixed, it gets fixed. When my children need something, they have it. I do not take any of this for granted because I grew up in a home

Something happened to me in my first year in Canada that I was not prepared for. I have a child. I know I have a child because I brought the child with me. What I did not know was that Canada also knew I had a child, had feelings about this, and intended to do something about it every single month. The first time the Canada Child Benefit landed in my account I sat with my phone for a full five minutes. I called my mother back home. I said: they sent money. She said: who sent

For seven years, Miriam did not know what country she belonged to. She left Asmara in 2013. She was twenty-four. She did not tell many people she was going because in Eritrea, telling people where you are going means those people can be asked about it later. She loved the people she was leaving. She did not want to put that on them. She packed one bag. The kind you carry without looking like you are carrying everything you own. The route took months. Ethiopia first. Then Suda

There are days I sit very quietly and ask myself a simple question. Did I actually do this to myself? Not in a dramatic way. Just casually. Usually while scrolling, or when the day is moving slower than expected, or when someone sends a voice note in the family group and I realise I have been in Canada for three years and I still cannot explain what a T4 is to my mother. It starts small. Then the thoughts begin to stretch. It does not help that everyone back home is eating. Y

I had already made peace with starting again. Taking a role below what I had done before was something I understood, at least on a practical level. I told myself it was part of the process, that I just needed time to adjust, learn the system, and find my way back to where I had been. What I didn’t expect was what came next. The conversations about performance. They weren’t harsh or confrontational. In fact, they were framed carefully, almost gently. Feedback about growth area

We talked about everything before we moved. Work, housing, money, the schools, even the weather. We tried to think ahead, to prepare ourselves for what life might look like in a new country. It felt like we were being responsible, like we were doing it the right way. What we didn’t really talk about was us. Not because we didn’t care, but because we assumed we would be fine. We had already built something together. We had gone through challenges before and come out stronger.

I didn’t expect dating in Toronto to feel this complicated. Not because there aren’t people. There are plenty, and the apps make that obvious. You can match with someone new every day if you want to. That part is easy. What isn’t easy is what happens after. Conversations start well enough. Sometimes they even feel promising. You talk, you laugh, you think maybe this one might be different. But then something shifts. Replies slow down, plans don’t materialise, or things just f

I didn’t think the cold would affect me like this. I expected the weather to be different, but I thought it was something I would get used to quickly. I had the right clothes, I had prepared in the way people told me to. But knowing about winter and actually living through it turned out to be very different things. The first thing I noticed wasn’t even the temperature. It was the quiet. Back home, mornings had movement and noise, people talking, cars passing, something always

A Story about what immigration does to families over time Nobody tells you about the last time. There is always a last time that the whole family is in the same place, everyone under one roof, the noise of it, the smell of food from the kitchen, the arguments about nothing that only happen when people are comfortable enough to argue. There is always a last time, but it does not announce itself. You do not know it is the last time until years later, when you are trying to reme

My mother did not cry when I left. I know because I watched her the whole time, the way you watch someone when you are trying to store them. Every detail. The exact shade of her wrapper. The particular way she holds her handbag with both hands when she is trying to stay composed, tight at the handles, knuckles slightly raised. A habit I have known since childhood. She did not cry. So I did not cry. That was the agreement we never made out loud. I thought about that airport th

The morning Chidi shovelled snow for the first time, he laughed. Not because it was funny. But because he kept thinking of his over a decade of work experience. Fourteen years of managing drainage systems, supervising site crews, presenting to government ministers, signing off on infrastructure budgets worth hundreds of millions of naira. And here he was, in a parking lot in Mississauga at six in the morning, in a coat that was not warm enough, clearing a path for cars that

Stella Igweamaka on losing her father in Nigeria while building a life in Edmonton Stella is a Nigerian-Canadian writer and researcher based in Edmonton, Alberta. She holds an MBA from the University of Lagos and has been featured on CBC News for her work on the experiences of Black Canadian women. In December 2024, just after marking a personal milestone, she received a WhatsApp call from Nigeria telling her that her father was gone. She could not travel. She could not sit b

Every December my mother makes pepper soup. Not for Christmas. Not for any occasion that a calendar would recognise. She makes it because December is cold here and pepper soup is what her own mother made when the harmattan came and the air turned dry and the body needed something that reached all the way down. She makes it the same way, with the same ratio of crayfish to pepper that she learned by watching rather than by measuring, because some knowledge does not live in reci

There is a Yoruba word my grandmother used that I have never been able to translate. She used it when something was both painful and necessary at the same time. When my uncle left for London in 1998. When my father came home from a long trip. When she held my face in her hands the morning I left for Canada and looked at me for a long time without speaking. She said the word quietly, almost to herself, and I stored it without understanding it and carried it with me across the

I have been asked where I am from more times than I can count. In Lagos, nobody asked. The question did not exist because the answer was obvious. I was from here, from this noise, from this traffic, from the particular chaos of a city that raised me without asking my permission. I belonged to it the way you belong to something you never chose. Completely, without paperwork. In Toronto, the question follows me like a second shadow. It is not always unkind. Sometimes it is genu

As told by Fuad. Before I tell you what happened, let me tell you what kind of people we are. We are not big people. I don't mean that in a bad way, I just mean we are ordinary. I had a phone accessories stall in a market in Lagos. Aisha did bookkeeping for small businesses around our area. We managed. We were not suffering but we were also not people that money was waiting for. When we decided to do this Canada thing, we scraped for everything. The consultant we hired, we pa

People assume that moving within Africa is easier. That because you are still on the continent, still Black, still breathing the same general air, the distance is somehow smaller. Théodore had believed this too, briefly, the way you believe things that sound logical before experience corrects them. He left Kinshasa in 2015 not because of a single catastrophic moment but because of what happens when a thousand small catastrophes accumulate until the weight of them becomes indi