I fell in love with her before she told me she has a daughter. That didn’t change anything. It wasn’t her fault that I didn’t know right from the start that she has a daughter. I was the one falling in love with her without her consent. We didn’t get the opportunity to have that conversation. I’d fallen in love with her and was talking to her about the possibility of us dating but she always said no to me. I wasn’t ready to back down. Instead, I found a way of growing the friendship that existed between us. I would call her every day and we would talk for hours on the phone. She seemed to love it when I called. She loved my conversation too. The only thing she didn’t love was my love for her. She told me, “It might get complicated and I would have a lot of things to explain to you. I don’t want to go into that now so let’s be friends.”
One day she called me. She said, “Do you know that I have a daughter?” I thought it was a joke. I’ve known her for a very long time and I never saw her with a child and she never looked like someone who had a child. I asked, “A child? You mean your own child or someone’s child that you adopted?” She laughed. “Why would I need to adopt a child at this age? For what? No, I have my own child. She’s four years old—the adorable little girl I had with a mistake of a man.” I told her, “Don’t talk too much about it. I will come home tonight and we’ll talk about it.”
When I saw her in the evening I asked her, “Is that the reason why you won’t say yes to me? Because of your child?” She answered, “That’s not the issue. As I said, I wasn’t ready to go into all that conversation. That’s why I didn’t want to do anything to get me there in the first place.”
She got pregnant when she was about to complete university. The guy she was dating was also in school with her and wasn’t ready for a baby. He tried all he could for her to get rid of it but she didn’t. She thought they were going to get married after school so she was going to keep it for her future husband but the guy had other plans. Marriage wasn’t at the top of his plans and even if he had plans for marriage, it wasn’t her he was thinking of getting married to. He got angry. He used all the anger tactics in the books to get her to get rid of it but she didn’t listen. The guy finally said, “If you give birth, you’re on your own. I can’t be responsible for what I haven’t accepted to be responsible for.”
They broke up before they even completed school. Her parents were unaware of her pregnancy until she completed school and went home with it. She went home with a degree and an eight-month-old pregnancy. Her parents couldn’t do much apart from being disappointed for a while but when it got to where it mattered most, they supported her through it all until the baby came. The guy didn’t come to claim the child after she was born. I asked her, “So your parents didn’t do anything to bring him in?” She answered, “My dad wanted to but my mom asked him not to bother. So finally they agreed not to worry him if he himself won’t come forward for the child.”
The child was living with her parents. It was the reason I didn’t know about her. She told me about her because it was time for her to go for the child and bring her to live with her. The first time I saw the girl I fell in love with her. One beautiful girl with the face of her mother. “Why would any man in his right senses won’t claim this girl?” I started getting closer to her to let her mom know that I love who she loves and love whatever comes from her. She didn’t accept my proposal but she told her daughter to call me daddy. She said, “This is your daddy. Call him daddy ok?” She nodded her head and it had been daddy from that day.
So technically, she didn’t say yes to my proposal but her daughter calls me daddy so I automatically became her boyfriend. That’s how it worked. I went there every evening and helped the girl with her homework. On weekends, I would go for her and the mom and we would go out. When she had to travel to visit her parents, she brought the child to me and left. I was with her all day until she came back later in the evening. The bond between me and the child grew wild while the bond between me and her mother took time to grow. We kissed after almost a year’s anniversary of my proposal to her. She spent the first night in my place when my proposal to her had been over a year old. Love takes time but ours took forever to grow but I enjoyed it.
A year later, I proposed marriage to her. She laughed and said, “Where are you going? It looks like you are always in a hurry to somewhere. Why marriage? We just started?” I answered, “I’ve come to love you and OUR daughter. It’s time we make a home for ourselves.” As I was saying this, I had already met her parents twice and she had met mine on several occasions. I felt our feet were on solid ground for marriage but she didn’t think the same way. She said, “I need time to figure out certain things. Just give me time, ok? We are here forever. There’s nowhere to go.”
My phone will ring in the night and I would see her name on my screen. I will pick up the call and it would be her daughter’s voice I would hear; “Daddy, I didn’t see you today. Will you come here tomorrow?” I felt it was the mother who was speaking words into her mouth. The next day I would go and see them and we would look like a family. It wasn’t once and it wasn’t twice. On several occasions, I had a call from the girl wanting to talk to me. I would ask the mom, “What are you telling the girl that she always wants to talk to me?” She would answer, “You have to tell me what you’ve done to her that she always wants to talk to you.”
A year later, she told me, “I’m not going to get married anytime soon so if you’re in a hurry, you can find someone else and get married to her. I’m trying hard to say yes to marriage but it looks like my heart isn’t ready.” It was hard for me but I decided to wait around and see how it goes. At a point, it looked like it was rather her daughter who was in a relationship with me. She didn’t care about my presence. It was her daughter who will call and say she wants to see me. When I was there with them, she could be on her phone all evening while I play with the girl. I got the message that I’m only important in her life because her daughter likes me. I didn’t want it that way so I started withdrawing. She sensed the change in me when I hadn’t visited her after several attempts. Her daughter would speak on the phone and ask me to come around but I wouldn’t.
She called and ask what was the issue and I told her. She said, “So be it. It’s better we go our separate ways than stick around hoping.” What I said didn’t have anything to do with going our separate ways but she brought it in because that had been on her mind but couldn’t say it. I told her, “It’s bad the way you’re ending everything without telling me anything. Do you have someone in mind? Is someone else occupying your mind?” She answered, “I can’t talk about that. We should concentrate on what concerns us.”
From that day on, I knew it was over. I stopped calling and she stopped calling too. Surprisingly, her daughter’s calls stopped coming. Maybe she wanted to talk to me but considering the situation we were in, the mother might not agree to call me for her. We walked into each other one afternoon after several months of not seeing each other. Immediately her daughter saw me, she ran quickly towards me and hugged me. I picked her up and wheel her around for a while. She was missing me and it showed. “Mom said you have travelled. Are you back? Will you visit us tomorrow?” I looked at her mom and said, “I will come very soon.” Her mom and I didn’t have much to say except a few words, “How are you and how have you been?” That was all.
Six months later, I woke up one morning and saw her missed call. I called back. She said, “It was my daughter who wanted to talk to you. She’s gone to school so when she comes.” We talked for about three minutes. I said, “Let her call me when she comes home.” She called in the evening and I spoke to her daughter. Since that day, the calls have never stopped coming. She would say her daughter wanted to talk to me but we will end up talking for several minutes without involving her daughter. She asked me recently, “Can we visit you this weekend since you won’t come to see us?” I would have loved to host them but the intent of the visit wasn’t clear to me so I said, “I would love to but I will be travelling. Can we do it next week?”
Since then, I’ve given her one excuse after the other. It looks like she’s trying to have her way back to me without making things clear. She’s instead using her daughter.
My question is, should I give her a way back to me? The voice of my intuition says she went somewhere and it didn’t work out. It’s the reason she wants to warm her way back to me. The voice in my head also tells me something different. It says she didn’t go anywhere. She’s now ready that’s why she wants to come back. I don’t know which side to choose. Yes, I still love her but I don’t want to get it wrong this time, especially when I’m talking to someone else. Which of these two voices is true?
—Boakye
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