When Naomi Abena Obeng discovered she was pregnant for the first time, excitement was quickly overshadowed by a body that refused almost everything.

The 2018 winner of Ghana Most Beautiful, popularly known as Abena, recalls a season marked not by glowing skin and cravings, but by relentless nausea and an inability to eat or drink.

Speaking in a motherhood series with MzGee ahead of her annual Convergence of Mothers conference, Abena revealed that she initially mistook the symptoms for malaria.

“I didn’t know I was pregnant at first. I thought I had malaria or something. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t even drink water. Anytime I tried, I would just throw up. It was that bad,” she recounted.

The experience, she said, left her looking visibly malnourished as her body rejected even the most basic nourishment. At just 21, the transition into motherhood came with physical demands she had never anticipated.

But while her first pregnancy proved overwhelming, her second told a completely different story.

“I could eat. I didn’t even feel like I was pregnant,” she said, explaining that the symptoms were far milder the second time around. Yet her third pregnancy swung back to mirror the first reinforcing what she has now come to understand.

“Every child brings different symptoms. It doesn’t matter the gender,” she noted, dismissing common beliefs that pregnancy experiences are determined by whether one is carrying a boy or a girl.

Now a mother of three, Abena continues to channel her experiences into advocacy, creating spaces for women to share their stories and realities through her annual gathering.