Growing up, my mom told me I was special and it went into my head. I walked like the special kid that I was. In school, I wanted to be treated special. When I played with my friends, I didn’t waste time reminding them that I was special. To me, at that age, being special smelled like oil of grace upon my head that everybody ought to know about it. Little did I know that being special can also be a curse. Special is not always positive but I got to know so late in life.

I’m the first child of four children. Three girls and a boy. According to my mom, when she was shuffling through life looking for a child, I was the baby who opened up her womb for the rest to follow. She named me Blessing because I was the cry that saved her from disgrace. That woman pampered me like I was the last child. I walked with roses in my beautifully platted hair and cried about every little thing so my mom would pamper and say sweet things to me.

Then we grew up. When my sister Angela brought a man home to introduce to my mom as her boyfriend, I was twenty-eight years old and single. I’m four years older than Angela. Angela was twenty-six when she got married to her boyfriend. I was still single. The girl after Angela, Abena also brought a man home. A year later they got married. I was still single. At their weddings, people looked at me and asked questions, “What’s taking this one so long while her younger siblings are getting married?” Gossips.

I wasn’t jealous of my sisters but I was ashamed of my plight. “Why do the men in my life don’t stay long enough to be husbands? Why do they leave at a point where I need them the most? What’s wrong with me?”

My mom, in a desperate attempt to calm down my raging spirit, would tell me, “Before you walked the surface of the earth, I knew you were a special child. Special things are coming your way. Just be patient.”

I was thirty-three when Benard, a man I’d dated twice in different seasons married me. We dated for close to two years and broke up. I was young, full of life and full of stupidity. We fought a lot and said bad things to each other. One day, we had a fight and that fight ended our relationship. Five years later, we found each other at a wedding. Maybe it was the spirit of the occasion. We put together the dead woods between us and they sparked into a flame. We got married a year later.

You can imagine the happiness of my mom. My own happiness during the wedding, the happiness of those who truly wished me well. When I sang in church during my wedding, the music flowed from a desperate point of my heart where all my brokenness happened. When I danced, it was only my feet that understood the reason behind my dancing moves. They had walked on many dusty love roads that led nowhere. They had gotten stuck in a mud of heartbreak and fell on gravels of deceit so they knew how much the wedding meant to me and the reason for the dance.

Right after marriage, we started trying for a child. It took us two years of trying to conceive. I couldn’t finish celebrating the news when I miscarried the child. “Wow, must I always be the one bad things happen to?” While I lay crying, my husband held me in his warm embrace and said, “We made it. We can do it again. No need to cry, darling.”

He reawakened the special child in me. That girl who walked down the street with roses in her long hair. I felt like that over-pampered child all over again so I coiled in his arms and asked, “Are you sure? We’ve suffered, remember?”

I fell asleep and had a dream of playing with a little girl in a green field full of butterflies. She was running around screaming while I was chasing her and pleading for her to stop. I sounded like a mother but that girl looked like my childhood. She had long hair decorated with roses just like my mom did to my hair.

When I woke up, I told my husband about the dream. He said, “It’s a girl.” I asked, “Who? The one we lost or the one who may be coming?” He went mute for seconds. I kept looking at him for an answer. He said, “That one is gone. Keep your mind in the future.”

A year and a half later I was pregnant again. My husband put a finger on my lips and made the hush sound, “Don’t tell anyone until we are sure.” So I didn’t say a word. I had a dream that I had fallen down and nursing a wound on my leg. I woke up from the dream and found myself bleeding. It was two months old. My second miscarriage.

Doctors blamed it on chromosomes. Some said my age was a factor. Others pointed at my genes and blamed them for the two miscarriages but I looked within myself and asked, “What’s wrong with me? Is it a curse? Was I born not to be happy? Is that a case of special things happening to me because I was named the special child?”

When I cried, I looked to the face of my husband for love and support. These two things never ran dry in our home and it was something I never took for granted. When I went out and felt the world was judging me and laughing at my plight, it was in the arms of my husband that I returned to and found calm and shelter.

When the third miscarriage happened, I didn’t cry. I smiled actually. I was forty-something–I’m saying forty-something because I’d stopped counting my age. It scared me. My husband was worried I was going mad. “Why are you smiling? What’s funny?” He slapped my cheeks softly, the way you bring a dazed human back to life. “Hey talk to me. Why are you smiling?” I said, “What do you expect me to do, cry? I have no tears left.”

I woke my husband up one dawn and told him, “I give up. If you want a child desperately, you can get it from outside and bring it home. You have my permission. I will take care of it like my own, trust me.” He chuckled and threw himself back on the bed. “You can’t sleep so you decided to worry my sleep, right? Go and watch TV if you can’t sleep.”

He didn’t take me seriously but I meant everything I said. I didn’t want to lose him because of my lack. I wanted happiness for him though I couldn’t be the one to give him happiness.

We celebrated Christmas together in my husband’s hometown. On Christmas Eve, I was going through the village when I saw this old woman fetching water from a well. When I got closer, she beckoned me to help her carry her water. I did. When she was leaving, I looked inside the well to check how deep it was. In a moment of faith, I told myself, “If this was the wishing well we read about, what would I have wished for?”

I uttered the wish in my head, “I wish the next one would stay. I’m too old and tired for another drama.” I threw a coin in and ashamedly walked away. When I thought about it during the day, I laughed at myself for being childish, or superstitious. It felt desperate and it was embarrassing to me.

The following year, on New Year’s Eve, I tested positive. I shivered. I looked up and said, “God please, let this be the one that stays. I’m that desperate.” I didn’t tell my husband about it. If it had to fail, it had to fail quietly without him knowing about it.

A month passed by slowly. Another went by without a noise. My husband noticed a difference in me and asked what the issue was. I lied about not being fine. It was four months old. I could no longer hide it. Plus it had been the longest pregnancy among the four. I told my husband about it and he whispered, “Why are you keeping this from me? Are you OK? Is that how you are?”

I whispered back, “I’m sorry but I didn’t want to invite you to another misery party. I wasn’t sure. Forgive me.”

We were alone in the room but we communicated in whispers as if we didn’t want the walls to hear or the windows to see us. He whispered, “This is the one. It’s not going anywhere.”

My antenatal was late but everything was fine. Six months, eight months, and then nine months. One pristine dawn in September, my water broke and we had Adom. I thought I was going to suffer. Labour pain is very unforgiven, everyone said but Adom arrived so easily I don’t even remember going through pain. When he was handed to me I cried. My husband was there. As usual, he tried hugging me and this time he ended up hugging one more person, Adom.

Today, when I look back at the struggle and desperation, when I think about my moment at the well, the woman who beckoned and the childish attempt at faith and the wish itself, I smile to myself and ask, “Is it the well? Or it’s just a coincidence?” My husband doesn’t know about the well story because I’m too ashamed to tell him. I know what he’ll say, “You threw a coin in a well expecting it to grow into a baby? Are you kidding me?”

Yes, I did. The child with roses in her hair would have done the same thing. Even Jesus admonished us to be childlike if we want to enter the kingdom. I did and the kingdom found me.

A year and a half later, Grace arrived. Followed by Aseda. When you give thanks, it ends there. After Aseda, we bowed out of childbirth so we could have time to raise what we’ve been blessed with.

I’m Attracted To Women Who Have Children

It’s the well. It’s a coincidence. It’s a result of faith. It’s a desperate attempt of the child in me for redemption. I’ve called it all these names but each time I find myself in the village, I pass by the well, help people carry their water and see them smile while I smile along.

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—Blessing

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