Prologue
′The start of a new day always brings new complications yet it is always something of a blessing if you are still breathing.′ Thoughts like this faded in and out of Tasha’s mind as she herself drifted in and out of sleep. All of a sudden she was fully awake. She could not figure out what had woken her. As she lay there trying to separate dreams from thoughts and reality, it hit her again. It was a sharp pain in her belly. She lay still for a while counting seconds (she had to be sure) and there it was again. Her heart began racing as she remembered what had happened the last time. For a moment her brain felt numb and she almost could not breathe. Then she switched on the bedside lamp. She reached over to the right side of the bed where her husband was sleeping and gently patted him. It took him a while to awaken and he turned toward her. She did not need to say anything; he could see her face in the dim light and knew what was going on.
“Are you in labor?” He asked in a hoarse voice still half asleep. Her nod was enough to fully wake him and he jumped out of bed rushing into the next room to wake his mother then remembering she was not there. All his life he had depended on her so it was not easy to adjust to the fact that he had married and moved out of her house. He went back to the bedroom and started pacing the floor.
“Get me to the car, David!” Tasha was getting impatient.
David seemed to be coming to his senses yet he was still so confused. He took the car keys from their drawer and started running around looking for those keys. Rushing to open the garage door he had the car halfway down the driveway before he realized he had left Tasha in the house.
It took David over an hour to drive to his mother’s house with Tasha screaming at him to go straight to the hospital. But David insisted that he could not do this without his mother (as if he was the one giving birth.) When they got to her house in Ballantyne Park, it was as if she already knew for they met her by the door fully dressed, a deep frown on her face. She got into the car without a word to her son and asked her daughter-in-law how far apart the contractions were. She was not sure; she had stopped timing at 20 minutes apart. Now that Mrs. Taga was around, David was panicking less, he felt like everything was going to be just fine.
A little over one hour later the younger Mrs. Taga was in the delivery room with a nurse awaiting the doctor with her husband and mother-in-law on either side. The last thing Mrs. Taga whispered to her daughter-in-law before the Doctor asked them to leave was, “Remember the Hebrew women” (Exodus : ) and sure enough her labor was not long or complicated. It was a girl.
Her grandmother took hold of her from the nurse. She had the same worried eyes as her father as she seemed to be studying her grandmother’s features.
“What shall we name her?” were David’s first words to his wife as he looked at her with his worried eyes.
“Audacious,” she replied and they both understood why.
She had been audacious enough to come into the world when all the odds had been against it. Tashamiswa Mungayi had been told from a very young age that she would never have children and for seven years it had seemed to be true as she had miscarriages and still births. But now here she was, her very own...Audacious, birthed from faith.
