I used to have a girlfriend I trusted with my entire heart. When we started dating, I’d joke that I trusted her with my life. I treated her like she was fragile, precious. She made me feel like she would cease to exist if I were no longer in her life.

I was going to marry her. Her family knew it. Mine knew it. It was just a matter of time, until she got pregnant, and we pushed the plans back so she could have the baby first.

Before she delivered, she moved in with her mother. Around that time, I had my own shop and was importing items from Nigeria. But when her time came, it wasn’t a normal delivery. It was a C-section. I had to sell everything left in the shop to cover the medical bills, which were enormous. Our baby came, and things got financially difficult fast. I had an empty shop, a family to feed, and no income. So I went to Kantamanto every Thursday to do head-porting on second-hand clothing bales, carrying loads for a few cedis just so we could survive. That became my routine until COVID-19 hit.

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Then I got a job as a security guard. It wasn’t much, but it put food on the table, and that was everything. She even moved in with my mother for a while, which made things a little easier.

Then one day, she came to visit me with our son for a week. I was a happy man. But it was short-lived. All my plans that evening to spend time with her died instantly because she mentioned spotting.

By the next day, she was soaked in her own blood. As I rushed her to the hospital, my mind was in the gutter. “Someone’s daughter is about to die on me. What will I say happened to her?”

She was losing blood. I was donating blood. I was whispering prayers to God.

I walked the corridors of that clinic with my heart in my stomach. Every day for the three days she was admitted without a proper update, I died a million times.

She was transferred by ambulance to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. I was there again, holding her hand. You know how the healthcare system here can turn on you in an emergency. Hospital cards. Endless tests. The “no bed” syndrome. I can’t even begin to describe the indignity I went through just to get her a bed in the emergency ward. But there was no other choice.

She was there for two weeks. I went every day. Some nights I stayed, sleeping on a hard seat or on the floor. Some days I forgot what it felt like to bathe, to brush my teeth. Food became a stranger in my mouth.

It was an ectopic pregnancy rupture. They had to perform a D&C to remove the child, and it broke me, knowing she had gone through all of that silently.

But that pain was nothing compared to what came next, finding out the child wasn’t mine.

The math wasn’t adding up. But I held it together and focused on getting her well first, so she could give me the answers I needed. When the hospital bill was handed to me, my heart nearly stopped. Close to ₵7,000. Our insurance covered some of it, but what was left still felt like a punch to the chest. I was everywhere, calling, begging, reaching out to loved ones, trying to settle bills for a woman who had cheated on me.

After we were discharged, I asked her.

“How did you get pregnant? Who was the father? Were you planning to pin it on me?”

She broke down in tears, begged me to let it go. “What matters is that I’m alive and here.” I asked her if she was serious. She had almost died. I had lost a huge sum of money, money I could have invested in something meaningful, because of her. I needed answers.

“I don’t have the answers you need,” she said.

Her uncle had to come before she started talking. I was there in the living room, my mouth wide open as she told her story. “One evening, we had sat outside and talked for a while. Everyone went to sleep, and it was left with me and him. Before we knew what was happening, we were doing it. I don’t even know if I was drunk.”

“My Uncle slept with girlfriend, my Uncle slept with my girlfriend,” I was whsipering it to myself as if it would erase the abomination they had committed.

My own uncle had impregnated my girlfriend, a woman they all knew was going to be my wife, the mother of my child. Before she came to visit me, she had stayed with my mother for a while. When she found out she was pregnant, she told her mother first. Her mother told her to come back to me. She said she didn’t want me raising another man’s child, which is why she took the concoctions.

I broke down. I was weak. I was tired.

My own uncle, who already had a wife and a girlfriend on the side, both pregnant for him at the same time this was all happening.

It’s Not God’s Law For A Man To Apologize To A Woman

It’s been close to ten years. The family heads sat down and “resolved” the matter. But nothing and no one can get me to speak about him or his family. Ten years since I cried alone in my living room like a broken record. Ten years since someone’s daughter almost died on me. Ten years since the bitterest betrayal of my life, after all I did was love her completely and without holding back.

Our son is 9 this year. He is the best thing I have, the one good thing that came out of all of it.

As for her, I wish her well. I genuinely hope God gives her another chance at motherhood. After all, nothing is too hard for God.

— Kabutey

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