We were long-time friends before he traveled to the US. It was when he was in the US that we started talking. It wasn’t about love or a relationship. I was happy for him that his dream of traveling had come to pass. It got to a point where we were no longer talking, until two years later when we resumed. This time he talked about love. I laughed it off. I told him I didn’t want to be in a long-distance relationship. He told me he was a legal resident and could marry me later so we could stay together.

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Even then, I didn’t give him any clear answer until he came to Ghana and still pursued me for days before I told myself, “Oh, he’s serious about me. Let me give him a chance and see what comes out of it.” When I said yes, he took me home to meet his mom and dad. He happily introduced me as the woman he wanted to marry. His parents also accepted me and preached to me about being a good woman.

He was in Ghana for two months. That was the best time of our lives as two people in love. I was his backpack. He was my handbag. We didn’t go anywhere without the other. It got to a point where he came to stay with me in my small room. We stayed for over two weeks before he finally said goodbye and left for the US.

That very month, I missed my period. I checked and I was pregnant. My heart dropped. I wanted to quietly get rid of it without telling him, but a voice kept ringing in my head, “Let him know. You may not know what he desires.” So I picked up the phone and told him about it. It was the greatest mistake I ever made in our relationship—to call him and give him the pregnancy news.

He screamed, “How can you get pregnant? Are you a small girl that doesn’t know how to protect herself? Or because I said I love you, you want to use pregnancy to take money from me?”

I was deeply hurt. I said, “Afari, you hate me this much to think this of me? You believe there’s no pregnancy and I’m lying to you?” He said worse things to me and told me point blank that I wouldn’t use pregnancy to pin him down. I wanted to prove to him I was no liar, so I kept the pregnancy. I wanted to let him know that I didn’t need his money to keep a baby going. I could do it myself.

I told his parents about it, and they also blamed me for getting pregnant by a man I wasn’t married to. It got worse when they called him on the phone. He screamed, “She’s lying. If it’s true that she’s pregnant, then she’s pregnant by another man and wants to give it to me. I protected myself when I was with her.”

He never protected himself. Even when I called his attention to protection, he told me he didn’t like it in a rubber. He shamed me before everyone, even my own parents. My sister asked me to get rid of it, but I said, “No way. I will have this child and he would know I’m no harlot.”

I gave birth to a beautiful girl who looked like him. I sent him photos. He blocked me that very day. I decided I wouldn’t pursue him again. For the next five years, I went through life with my daughter all alone. It was lonely and harsh, but I bore it with pride. Afari would come to Ghana and I would only know about it after he had left. It happened thrice, so it stopped being my pain. I took it as he was never going to be in our baby’s life.

Then one day his family members contacted me saying they wanted a DNA test. My baby was five years old then. I asked them, “For what?” They said, “Afari wants to know if indeed the child is his.” I told them, “Oh, it’s not his; I lied. I wanted to give him a pregnancy that didn’t belong to him, but he caught me.” Then I laughed. His father looked at my girl and said, “You didn’t lie. He rather lied. Please let’s do this and put everything behind us.”

I said no, but his father is a wise man. He got into my skin through my head. He said the right things through apology and a symphony of words. I was crying when I said, “Ok, let’s do it.” We did the DNA and it was his child. I didn’t even look at the results. The result was already known to me because I knew the man I had intimacy with before the pregnancy.

One afternoon, I saw his call on my phone. I picked up but didn’t say a word. He ranted for about twenty minutes, talking about regrets, calling his actions devilish and saying he didn’t know what came over him. After singing his apology in a song, I asked him, “So what do you want from me?” He answered, “I want to do the right thing, something I should have done long ago.”

His family met my family and officially claimed the child and asked how much they should compensate me with. I told them, “I don’t need any compensation. I didn’t do anyone a favor by taking care of my own child.” After that day, he sent money every month. He shipped baby things and shipped toys we didn’t need. He would talk to the child and ask, “What do you want Daddy to give you?” Anything my child mentioned would be in the shipment the next day. He shipped a car that he said I should use for Uber. He was doing a lot to compensate for his absence over the years.

One day he told me, “I want the girl to come and visit me in the US. I want her to…” I cut in quickly, “No, my child is going nowhere! She stays here with me. You can come and visit if you want.”

He spoke to his dad to come and talk to me. I told his dad, “No words will change my mind. I won’t let my child go where I am not. I trust him. He would bring her back after the visit, but no, I won’t let her go.”

Afari dropped the issue and didn’t talk about it again until the girl’s sixth birthday, when he told me, “So I’ve decided to bring the two of you here to visit. How about that? Even if you want to stay here, I will be very happy so that I can be with my girl and bond with her.”

I agreed to that one, but I told him I wouldn’t want to stay but would rather like to experience the place first before I decide. Then he called his father to help us get passports and also help us through the traveling process. He gave the whole thing to an agency. They would call and tell us what to do and we would do it.

One day, a lady from the agency called, “The way things are going at a slow pace, it would be better if the girl goes first and then you follow later.” I asked why, and the explanation she gave sounded funny and illogical. I hadn’t traveled before, but it didn’t make sense to me that my child has to go first to speed up the process. I told her, “If that’s the case, then you should stop everything. We are no longer interested.”

Afari called begging me that he’d spent a lot of money already and so we shouldn’t make it all go to waste. I told him, “You can’t use technicality to take my child away from me. What do you mean she should come first? Even if you asked me to come first, I wouldn’t have come, let alone my daughter. Just drop it. We are no longer coming.”

Is There A Perfect One Out There For Everyone?

For a while he stopped sending us money. He said I was being difficult. He said I was standing in the way of the growth and development of our child. I told him, “She grew when you were nowhere to be found. She will continue growing without you.”

I know what he’s trying to do. He wants to steal my child, but that will never happen while I’m alive. I carried her alone. I raised her alone. I protected her alone. No man who denied her for five years will ever take her from me now. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

—Vanessa

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