She Said, “I Want to Kill My Baby.” Years Later, I Wrote the Story I Couldn’t Forget.

Memory is supposed to preserve the important things. Yet sometimes it keeps the one thing you wish it would let disappear.

I was in my second year at university, working part-time as a gym instructor in the evenings. There was a woman in one of my classes.

She was troubled. I could see that much, although I didn't understand what I was seeing.

She asked to speak with me. Then she said six words

“I want to kill my baby.”

I had no idea what to say.

I did not know what had happened before she said it. I did not know what was happening inside her. I did not know whether she was asking for help, confessing something, testing whether someone could hear her without judging her, or trying to put into words something she herself could not understand.

I only knew that I had heard it. And then I went home. Life continued.

University continued. Years passed.

But her words stuck to me.

Years later, a television scene opened a portal I thought I had closed.

In early 2021, I was watching a television series. There was a woman on the screen who should have been one of the happiest moments of her life.

Everything about the moment suggested fulfilment. Yet something about her made the happiness feel wrong.

Not false.  Wrong.

That distinction mattered.

I suddenly remembered the woman from the gym. Her words came back with her. And for the first time, I began wondering about the space between what a woman is supposed to feel and what she actually feels.

I started asking questions that involved a lot of "what if" and "what happens" I never found replies to my questions but I found a story instead.

I went looking for an explanation and found something more shocking

I went to clinics and hospitals.

I spoke with gynaecologists.

I read anonymous accounts from women who had found enough courage to type what they could not say aloud.

I listened to pregnant women.

I listened to new mothers.

I listened to women who had already moved beyond that season of their lives.

I listened to my mother.

And I thought about my late grandmother, Lucy, and the things she understood about life that could never be reduced to a textbook. The more I listened, the less comfortable the subject became. I discovered how many different explanations could exist.

There were women who could speak.

Women who could not.

That was when I understood something I had not understood when I first heard those words years earlier:

Sometimes the most frightening thing a person can say is not the thing that needs judging first. It is the thing that needs understanding first. That realization changed the story.

I wasn't trying to write about motherhood At least, not in the way you might expect.

I was trying to understand a contradiction. How can something be deeply wanted and still become unbearable?

How can someone love and resent the same life?

How much of ourselves can we surrender to expectation before we no longer recognize what remains?

And if we do lose pieces of ourselves, are they actually gone? Or are they waiting somewhere beneath the identities we have learned to perform?

I kept asking. The questions became notes. The notes became scenes. The scenes began to form a person.And eventually, that person had a name.

Emma.

That was when I stopped researching a subject and started writing a novel.

But Emma is not the woman I met at the gym.

That distinction matters.

The woman gave me a question.

Emma became my attempt to explore it.

What happens to Emma is hers.

I won't take that away from her by explaining it here.

The dangerous thing about telling you what the book is about

Authors are often expected to explain their books.

What is it about?

Who is the main character?

What happens?

Why should I read it?

Give me the summary.

Tell me the ending.

Sometimes I understand the need.

But there are stories that become smaller when reduced to their answers.

Shadows Of The Cradle is one of them.

I could tell you what Emma faces.

I could tell you what begins to unravel.

I could tell you what she discovers.

I could tell you what the people around her see and what they don't.

I could tell you where the story eventually takes her.

But if I did, I would be asking you to read a story whose portal I had already opened for you.

I don't want that.

I want you to enter without knowing which room will change the way you see the house.

So I am going to tell you what the book is not.

It is not a simple story about motherhood.

It is not an instruction manual for becoming a mother.

It is not an argument about what women should feel.

And it is not an attempt to provide a neat answer to a complicated human experience.

It is a story about what can happen when the life you have been taught to call a blessing collides with the parts of yourself you have never learned how to identify.

What happens after that?

That belongs to Emma.

And to you.

The title is a warning disguised as a cradle

A cradle is an image of safety.

Something small enough to hold.

Something precious enough to protect.

Something associated with beginnings.

But a cradle can also conceal what nobody wants to look at.

That is where the title came from.

Shadows Of The Cradle.

The shadows are not necessarily where you expect them to be.

Some belong to motherhood.

Some belong to memory.

Some belong to expectation.

Some belong to the versions of ourselves we bury because becoming who we are expected to become requires us to leave something behind.

And some shadows are created by things that were never spoken.

That is why the second part of the title matters just as much:

The Art Of Becoming Whole.

Because becoming whole is not always a return journey.

Sometimes you have to meet the person you became.

That meeting can be beautiful.

It can also be terrifying.

Three years and eight months is a long time to live with an unfinished question

The book took me three years and eight months.

That sounds like a duration.

It wasn't.

It was thousands of small decisions.

Pages that survived.

Pages that didn't.

Questions I thought I had answered.

Questions that returned wearing different clothes.

Days when the writing came easily.

Days when every sentence felt like evidence that I should stop.

There were times I wondered whether anyone would read the book.

Not whether anyone could read it.

Whether anyone would want to.

That is a different fear.

A writer can survive criticism more easily than indifference.

At least criticism means someone entered the room.

Indifference means the door was never opened.

I came close to quitting more than once.

But eventually I understood why I was still there.

I wasn't trying to prove that I could finish a manuscript anymore.

I was trying to give the questions somewhere to live.

So I stayed.

Then the story stopped being mine alone

There is a strange moment in the life of a book when the author has to surrender control.

For years, the story exists in your head.

Then it exists in your notebook.

Then in a document.

Then in a manuscript.

Then, suddenly, someone else is holding it.

That is when writing becomes publishing.

And publishing introduces a responsibility I did not fully appreciate at the beginning:

A story cannot find a reader if the reader doesn't know it exists.

Bookivo understood that.

Their Author Spotlight did something I found unexpectedly moving.

It took the private journey behind Shadows Of The Cradle and placed it somewhere public.

The woman who heard that sentence years ago.

The questions that followed.

The research.

The doubts.

The years.

The book.

The people who helped me survive the process.

And now, the reader.

Bookivo described me as a software engineer, an artisan and a writer.

That combination doesn't feel strange to me.

I've always been drawn to making things — systems, ideas, physical things, stories.

Perhaps writing is simply another form of building.

You start with pieces that don't seem to belong together.

You keep asking why.

You discover the connections.

You remove what doesn't belong.

You stay with what does.

And eventually, something begins to stand.

The part of the story I am deliberately leaving out

There is a reason I have not given you the plot.

It isn't because there is nothing to say.

There is too much.

I want the book to retain the ability to surprise you.

I want you to meet Emma without my voice hovering over every page telling you what you should think about her.

I want certain moments to arrive before you understand why they matter.

I want questions to become uncomfortable before they become clear.

I want you to wonder whether you understand what is happening.

And then I want the story to make you reconsider what you thought you understood.

That is part of the contract between a writer and a reader.

I give you the door.

You decide whether to open it.

So I will give you one question.

Only one.

What happens when the life you have always imagined becoming your greatest joy begins to feel like something you no longer recognize?

I wrote a book because I couldn't stop asking.

You can find out where the question leads.

But not here.

Bookivo called it an Author Spotlight. I see it as something else.

Recognition is nice.

I won't pretend it isn't.

There is something deeply satisfying about seeing a piece of work that occupied so much of your life reflected back by someone who encountered it from the outside.

But I don't think this moment is really about being featured.

It is about movement.

For years, this story moved from my mind to paper.

Then from paper into a manuscript.

Then from a manuscript into a book.

Now it is moving toward readers.

That is the part that matters.

Because I don't want Shadows Of The Cradle to remain a book I wrote.

I want it to become a book someone found.

Someone who needed the question.

Someone who recognized the silence.

Someone who has wondered whether becoming someone else meant losing themselves.

Someone who understands that becoming whole is not always about going backwards.

Maybe it is about finally looking at what remains.

I heard six words. I spent three years and eight months answering them.

I never set out to write Shadows Of The Cradle.

A sentence found me first.

Years later, a question followed.

The question became research.

The research became a story.

The story became Emma.

Emma became a book.

And the book has finally begun leaving the place where it started.

I still think about that woman sometimes.

I don't know what happened to her.

I don't know whether she ever got the help she needed.

I don't know whether she remembers that conversation.

She may not remember me at all.

But I remember her.

Perhaps that is the strange thing about stories.

We don't always know what they will become when they enter us.

Sometimes they sit quietly for years.

Sometimes they wait for another moment to wake them.

And sometimes, when they finally emerge, they are no longer the story you thought you were going to tell.

They are the question you were never able to escape.

Mine became Shadows Of The Cradle: The Art Of Becoming Whole.

I have told you where it began.

I have not told you where it ends.

That part is waiting inside the book.

"Read the Bookivo Author Spotlight →" https://www.bookivoapp.com/blog/maxyn-edogha-author-spotlight-shadows-of-the-cradle

"Discover Shadows Of The Cradle: The Art Of Becoming Whole on Bookivo →" https://www.bookivoapp.com