Body Whispers With Bisi

You are lying beside your husband right now. Or maybe you are sitting alone in the bathroom after. And the same thought is circling your mind — quiet, heavy, impossible to shake.

"Why can I feel nothing? What is wrong with me?"

He touched you and you were completely dry. Again. You tried — you really did. You closed your eyes. You told yourself to relax. You waited for your body to respond the way it used to.

Nothing came.

So you did what you have been doing for months. You performed. You made the sounds. You moved the way he expected. You waited for it to be over. And afterwards, while he slept, you lay there staring at the ceiling — wondering how you became this person. A woman going through the motions in her own bedroom. A stranger inside her own body.

You cannot ask your mother. She would not know what to say. You cannot tell your friends — even your closest ones. Because how do you say it out loud? That you feel nothing? That intimacy has become something you endure?

You have Googled it. Late at night, in incognito mode, phone dimmed. Everything pointed to gynaecologists and sex therapists — expensive, clinical, not built for women like you. So you closed the browser. And you carried it alone. Again.

Stop. Read every word of what I am about to say.

Our grandmothers knew things about a woman's body that we have forgotten completely. Not because the knowledge disappeared — but because we stopped asking. The quiet woman-to-woman conversations that happened in kitchens and across compound walls simply stopped. And we were left without the answers we needed most.

I am a 36-year-old woman from Ibadan. Mother of two. Wife of five years. I am not a doctor or gynaecologist. I am someone who went through nearly two years of private agony — dry, feeling nothing, faking everything — before I found the answer that changed my body and my marriage permanently.

After my second child, something changed. About four months postpartum, my husband would reach for me at night and I felt... nothing. No response. Completely dry.

It will pass, I told myself. Give it time.

It did not pass. Months went by. Then a year. My body stayed the same — dry, unresponsive, like a switch had been permanently turned off somewhere inside me. And it was not just the dryness. There was no sensation at all. Just emptiness where feeling used to be.

I tried the KY Jelly from the pharmacy. It helped for a few minutes but killed all spontaneity — and my husband noticed. I tried a herbal mixture from a market woman — no instructions, no quantities, scared of what I was putting in my body. I tried an expensive Instagram oil that did absolutely nothing. I tried steaming, and developed irritation that lasted a week and made everything worse.

I tried accepting it. Telling myself this was simply what marriage became after children. That lasted three weeks before it shattered — because I was 34 years old and I refused to believe my intimate life was finished.

Then came a naming ceremony in Ibadan. My cousin's baby. A Saturday afternoon. The compound was full, food everywhere, women gathered in corners talking the way Nigerian women talk — quietly, intimately, with lowered voices and knowing eyes.

I was sitting at the far end of the compound, not truly present. An elderly woman came and sat beside me. She moved with the quiet confidence of someone who had seen everything and feared nothing. Her name was Mama Risi — 74 years old, a retired midwife from Ogbomosho who had delivered over 800 babies in her career.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said: "You are not here. Your eyes are here but you are somewhere else. What is troubling you, my daughter?"

I do not know why I told her. Maybe because she was old enough to be my grandmother. Maybe because I was exhausted from carrying it alone. I told her. Not everything — but enough.

She nodded slowly. She looked like a woman hearing something she had heard a thousand times before.

"This is not a new thing," she said quietly. "This happened to women before you and will happen to women after you. The problem is not your body. The problem is that nobody teaches you anymore what your body needs."

She pulled me into the kitchen — away from the other women — and talked for forty minutes. She told me about ingredients. Nigerian market ingredients. Things I had seen my whole life and never connected to this problem. Tiger nuts and what they do for a woman's hormones. Moringa and how it feeds the parts of the female body that restore natural moisture. Uziza leaf, black seed, shea preparation — and the specific way things needed to be combined and timed.

"Forget those pharmacy things," she said firmly. "Your grandmothers did not need any of that. And neither do you. The market has everything. You just need to know what to ask for and what to do with it."

I was skeptical on the drive home. Tiger nuts? Moringa? Things I have been around my whole life? But I was also desperate. And I had nothing left to try.

I bought what she told me. That same evening. I made the first tonic — a specific combination prepared a particular way — and I drank it before I slept.

Day one. Nothing. Day two — maybe. Day three, I almost stopped.

And then came Day four.

I was in the kitchen making dinner. My husband came up behind me and put his hand on my waist — a casual touch, something he had done a thousand times. And I felt it. Actually felt it. Not a dramatic wave. Not a movie moment. Just warmth. Response. My body acknowledging his touch the way it used to before everything went quiet.

I stood very still. Afraid to move in case it disappeared. It did not disappear.

By Day seven I was not faking anything. By Day nine, my husband pulled back and looked at me — properly looked at me — and said: "Bisi. What is happening to you? You are different. You are glowing. Whatever you are doing, please do not stop."

I laughed. In the bedroom. Something I had not done in longer than I could remember.

By Day fourteen, I felt like myself again. Like a woman who inhabited her own body rather than endured it.

I called Mama Risi to thank her. She said something that has stayed with me since.

"You did not find something new, my daughter. You found something back."

Over the following months I quietly shared what I had learned with four women — friends and relatives I knew were suffering the same thing but would never say so. By Week two, one sent me a voice note: "Bisi. I cannot explain this. My husband thought something was wrong with me. Now he cannot keep his hands off me." Another message came on Day eleven: "I cried. Not from sadness. From relief. I had forgotten what this felt like."

The requests kept coming. Women I barely knew. Voice notes at 11pm. Women I could not call back individually.

So I did what Mama Risi would have wanted. I wrote everything down. The full protocol, every ingredient, the exact preparation methods, the timing, what to expect each day, how to source everything from any market near you — and how to adjust for women in the UK, US, and Canada.

Introducing...