My dad walked away from the house one day and didn’t return. There had been a series of fights between him and my mom. My dad was cheating. My mom didn’t want to have anything to do with a cheating man, so it turned into a huge fight anytime she caught him. It was about the same woman, so it got to a point where my dad wanted to marry the woman as a second wife, and my mom resisted.

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According to my dad, he wanted more children, especially a male child. My mom, after giving birth to me, wasn’t able to give birth again no matter how hard they tried. This woman my dad was chasing was way younger than my mom. My mom was scared her place in my dad’s life wouldn’t be secure after he married another woman, especially if the woman was able to give him male children.

The fight got to a crescendo when my dad told my mom, “You know I’m not cheating. Kissiwa is not my girlfriend. She’s my wife. It’s you who doesn’t want to agree.”

It was physical. I witnessed that fight with my own eyes eleven years ago. When my dad left, my mom cried all evening. I don’t know which pain made her cry more—the physical or the emotional one. Later, my dad called my mom’s family and told them he had divorced her. It didn’t end there; he followed it up with the traditional divorce. They didn’t marry in court, so they didn’t need a court divorce.

My mom wasn’t at the divorce ceremony, and she never attended any of the meetings she was invited to concerning the divorce process. She only sent her words and left the rest to the family. She became a shadow of herself. I was her only friend, and she became very protective of me. If I went out and was late, she got angry and nearly hit me.

I started feeling both the pressure and the pampering of being the only daughter when my dad left. Sometimes I liked it; sometimes I hated it. My mom had nowhere to invest her attention, so she gave all of it to me.

Less than a year later, my dad married Kissiwa. My mom and dad had started building together, but the building was uncompleted when their marriage failed. My dad quickly completed the building within a year and moved in with Kissiwa after the marriage. That was my mother’s rage. She talked about it bitterly and even cried about it.

My mom didn’t marry again. There was a man who came close to her four years after the divorce. I was in school, but I heard about him anytime I came home. That relationship existed in the dark until I didn’t hear about the man again. Maybe my mom didn’t have the commitment to give to another relationship after what she went through with my dad.

I completed university without the support of my dad. His new wife wouldn’t allow me to visit my own dad because she believed my mom was a witch who had sent me to bewitch them. I would go to my dad for money, and I had to stand outside and wait for him. For some reason, he despised my presence in the house so much that he told me to only visit him at his workplace and not at home.

I stopped going to see him after I started university, and he never cared to look for me. I saw him often. When he was alone, he would try to talk to me. When he was with Kissiwa, he walked past me as if I were a total stranger. I swore one day that he wasn’t my father, because what kind of loving father would treat his own daughter this way?

My dad had a stroke and nearly died. My mom heard about it and told me. She wanted me to go and visit him so I could bring her updates, but I didn’t go. I was working outside of town, and I hadn’t seen him in ages. My mom would call and give me updates. She didn’t visit, but she knew whatever was happening between them. One day she said, “Do you know his wife has sent him to his family because she’s tired of taking care of him?”

I responded, “It serves him right.” My mom said, “How can she send him away from his own house? Why didn’t she leave instead?” I responded, “It’s up to them.”

Guess what—my mom is the one taking care of my dad now. She left her house and moved to my dad’s family house to nurse him back to health. I asked her, “What are you there for? Tell me, you’re there as what?” She responded, “I’m only helping him, else he’ll die.”

“Leave him to die? What do you care if he dies?”

She’s living in a single room with my dad, taking care of him, while Kissiwa lives in a four-bedroom house with two kids. He went to look for a male child but ended up having two girls with Kissiwa. My mom tells me she’s trying to get him well so he can have the strength to fight for his properties. I know that is a lie. What property? That building that was rushed to the extent that it looks crooked?

It shocks me that after eleven years of divorce, she still has the heart to forgive the man after everything he did to her—the embarrassment he caused her and the shame he brought her after the divorce. His family didn’t say anything sensible to him. They followed him to divorce my mom, and now that he’s sick and can’t move, they are watching my mom do all the dirty work.

The last time we talked, she asked for money to buy drugs because my dad’s pension hadn’t arrived. She asked that I send enough money so she could also buy food and pay for electricity. I ignored her. I didn’t have the money to spend on the man who abandoned us in our time of need. She called me ungrateful and accused me of inheriting my dad’s stone heart. “If you take this heart into marriage,” she said, “they’ll bring you home even before the cock crows for the third time.”

What Nobody Tells You About Divorce

I told her, “You see the family quietly watching you do all the dirty work? Let him not die in your hands. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear you killed him.”

She has found love in forgiveness, and I won’t fight her to stop, but I also won’t be forced to cater for a man who abandoned us for a woman he thought was his world. Why is he living in a small corner room at this moment when his world is still alive and living on his sweat?

—Obaa Yaa

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