For forty years, women have come to my house quietly to ask about vaginal dryness. Here is what I have always told them.

My name is Adunni. My mother gave me that name, and it means sweet to have, which she thought was very funny for a child who cried as much as I did.

I did not learn what I know from a school. I learned it in my mother's kitchen, and she learned it in her own mother's, and by the time it reached me nobody could tell you who had thought of it first. That is how these things travel. Quietly, from woman to woman, in the hours when the men are not in the room.

What they taught me was for the vaginal dryness that comes when a woman's body begins to change. It can arrive at menopause, or after childbirth, or sometimes for reasons nobody explains to her at all.

Nobody announces it. There is no ceremony for it. It simply arrives, and the woman it arrives to usually decides, on her own, that she will not be mentioning it to anybody.

My mother's generation did not have that shame. They had a name for it and they had something they did about it. They called what they were restoring honey flow, because of what they wanted back, not because of what they used.

I am seventy-three. I have seen every remedy that has passed through this country, and I have seen most of them fail.

I have watched women go to the chemist and describe something else entirely, because they could not bring themselves to say vaginal dryness to a young man behind a counter.

I have watched them use what a friend's sister swore by, without asking what was in it.

I have watched them sit in a hospital, wait four hours, and leave with nothing, because the doctor was busy and the question felt too small to hold him up.

And I have watched a great many of them simply decide to live with the dryness.

That last one is the one that troubles me. Not because the dryness will harm her. Because she made that decision alone, in silence, believing she was the only woman walking around like this.

She was not the only one. She has never been the only one.

I did not know the reason when I was young. I only knew what my mother did, and that the women she gave it to stopped coming back to complain. The reason was explained to me much later by a nurse who married into our family, and it is not complicated.

When the body's own moisture starts to fall, and it falls in every woman eventually, the tissue down there changes. It becomes thinner. Drier. Slower to recover after anything touches it. That is not a disease. It is ordinary. It happens to more women than you have been told, and it is not your fault.

The things most women try only work on the surface. A cream sits on top of skin that has already changed underneath. That is why it does not hold.

What my mother's generation understood, without ever reading a medical book, is that there are three things a woman can still reach: what she feeds the tissue from the inside with her food, what she applies from the outside with the right preparation, and the small daily habits she does not even know are making the dryness worse.

The old method works on all three. That is why it holds when the other things did not.

Nothing in it fights anything a doctor has given you. If you are already on treatment, you keep it. Your doctor remains the person who manages your care. I am not replacing him. I am telling you what women did before he existed, and what you can do alongside him now.

For forty years I have said these words sitting on a chair in my compound, one woman at a time. That was enough for a long time, but it was not enough forever.

So I sat with a younger woman and told her everything, from the beginning, and she wrote it down exactly as I said it. Every herb. Every preparation. Every instruction I would have given you if you had come and sat with me yourself.

This is everything I was taught about managing vaginal dryness naturally, everything I have added from watching it work across hundreds of women, and everything you need in order to do it properly by yourself at home.

When the younger woman finished writing, she read it back to me and I told her two things were missing.

I said: if you give a woman the method but you do not tell her where to find every single item, she will spend three days wandering through the market asking questions she does not want to ask. And if you do not give her a way to track what she is doing each day, she will stop by week two because she will forget whether she did Tuesday or not.

So I made her add both. They come with the guide at no extra cost.

Every woman who has ever sat on that chair in my compound believed she was the only one dealing with vaginal dryness.

Not one of them was.

What they actually needed was for somebody older to treat vaginal dryness as ordinary, and then tell them plainly what women have always done about it.

That is all this guide is. Old knowledge about managing dryness naturally, finally written down, by a woman who was tired of it dying in kitchens.