I read the story about a woman who was angry with her mother for going back to the man who abandoned them. It stirred something in me, because I have lived a similar story. So let me share mine.

All four of us depended on her for everything. When we needed textbooks, it was Mama. When our shoes were worn and torn, it was Mama. When there was food on the table, it was Mama. Growing up was tough. We stared poverty in the face, and it stared right back at us, smiling.

I hated the hardship Mama went through for our sake. I hated the early mornings when she left the house before the sun was fully awake. I hated the late nights when she returned with a frown, her back aching, her body exhausted. Some nights she came home empty-handed. Those nights, we slept with growling stomachs. We would look at each other in the dark, eyes heavy with tears, listening to the sound of hunger between us. There were countless nights like that.

I remember so much from my childhood. I remember when we started selling small items to support Mama. You could argue that it is common, so why talk about it. But for us, if we did not make sales, there was no school the next day and no food that evening. It was that simple.

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I remember going to funerals of people we did not know, just so we could survive on food. I remember Saturdays when Mama would dress up and walk out the door. A few hours later, she would return with food for us. I remember Mama watching the four of us fight over the last small portion of food left on the plate. I remember the many times we went to school without money or food and returned home to hunger. I remember praying to God, asking where our next meal would come from. I remember watching Mama pray too, asking God for a way, even if it was a small one. I remember it vividly.

Daddy left us to be with another woman, a woman he called better than my mother. Every time we got access to his number, he changed it, or he simply recognized our voice and blocked it. When I completed junior secondary school, I had no hope of going to senior high school, let alone university, and certainly not of earning two master’s degrees one day. But the resilient woman I call my mother came through.

I was in university when I called home. I was told my father came visiting my mother. The word “father” sounded strange in my ears, seeing that it was only my mother who did all the work. “My mom said he came to apologize to us for leaving us like that. He said it won’t happen again,” my sister told me.

“It won’t happen again? Where was he when we needed him? My father is dead. That is all I know. Do not let him in the house again,” I told my mother, and expected the issue of my father returning back home dead until I heard his grace-to-grass story.

The other woman he left us for had also abandoned him for someone else. She had sold most of the properties they had made together and run away with her new lover abroad. Worst of all, he had lost his job, so he returned home like the prodigal son in the Bible.

All the anger I felt when I heard he visited Mom at the house did not amount to when I later found out my mother was contemplating taking him back into the house as her husband.

“Efua, whatever you do, he is your father and I can’t let him sleep outside, in hunger. He is my husband whether you like it or not,” she said to me.

I appreciated my mother’s benevolence. She is compassionate to a fault, but I would not stand an inch with a man who abandoned his family to be with someone else, only to come back to the same family he abandoned when things turned sour for him.

During those days, together with my siblings, we had a mission. Call Mama every day and frustrate her about receiving Daddy with open arms. Every day we called to recount one of the many nights we slept without food, or had no new clothes for a year while he slept in the comfort of his mistress. But none of it worked. So we decided to remind her that once a cheating man, always a cheating man. But Mama said that love conquers all.

And maybe she was right, because the kind of glow I saw in my mother’s eyes was incomparable to nothing. Her smiles were wider. She looked healthy, alive. Every day I went home, I saw the change. My siblings saw it too. We would have been happier if that glow had nothing to do with my absentee father, but we were at the bridge where we understood that it was only Father who was the reason for that kind of joyfulness in her heart, so we buried the hatchet.

Over time, I have also learned to let it go. He was an absent father. I have daddy issues because of his abandonment. We live, we forgive.

It has been eleven years now since he returned home, eating from our labor, making decisions as a man, the head of the house, calling things to order, laughing and farting in the same house he abandoned. Sometimes I really hope that he sits to imagine what our life was like before he left us. Sometimes the odds may not be too much on our side because the person we are trying to protect and fight for might not see it that way.

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For the sake of your mother’s happiness and wellbeing, please accept her decision and be the good daughter she brought you up to be.

—Nina

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