I was eleven, and my twelfth birthday was just a day away when my mom walked into our room. My little sister was sleeping, and I was braiding the hair of a doll. Mom said, “Wear something. We are leaving.”

“Leaving to where, Mom?”

Before she could answer, she reached for my sister’s arm and yanked her awake. She started gathering our things. She didn’t pick them up properly. She would grab armfuls of them and forcefully push them into a bag. My dad walked in. He was angry and shouting, “You can go. Do you think I’m going to beg you? I’m not asking you to give me a male child. Someone has done it, and you’re angry?”

“Awww, I get it,” I said in my head. “It’s still this old problem?”

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I wasn’t my mom’s first child. She had two children before me. They were both girls. One died at birth and the other two weeks after she was born. Two years later, I came, and my sister also arrived three years after me. My dad wasn’t pleased that my mom was always giving birth to girls. To make matters worse, my mom said she wasn’t going to give birth again because the more she did, the more my dad hated it. She didn’t want to risk another girl.

My dad never called us his children. Whenever we did something wrong, he would beat us mercilessly and then tell my mom, “You better talk to your children. I won’t allow them to lower me into my grave before my time.”

It was always “your children” and never “my daughters.”

That day, when Mom asked us to leave, it was about my dad’s decision to bring in another woman. My dad had two children with another woman. The first, who was four years old, was a girl, and the second, who was barely a year old, was a boy. My mom didn’t know about them until that very day when my dad mentioned it and said he wanted to bring them home to live with us.

My mom didn’t say a word. She rushed into our room and asked us to leave. She didn’t fight even when my dad was shouting at her. Our bags were spilling over because our things were badly arranged. My mom told my dad, “Look at these girls. One day, you’ll wish they were all you ever had. Mark it on the wall.”

When we stepped out, I looked back one last time and saw my dad standing akimbo with a smile on his face, seemingly happy that we were going. That look on his face always haunted me, the fact that he was smiling while we were leaving.

We ended up in my grandparents’ house. Mom told us, “We are going to start all over again here. You’ll be good children and support me to feed you.”

So I carried pepper on my head and sold it at the market. I carried oranges and even watermelons. When my sister came of age too, she carried some and sold them. We hawked whatever was in season. Even when I got to university, I came home and sold in the store. I never saw my dad again and never heard my mom mention him again.

Twenty-three years later, my mom and my sister live with me here in the UK. My journey to the UK was another struggle. My mom sold the piece of land my grandfather gave her so I could come here and study on a scholarship. Once I was done and settled, I brought my sister, and then my mom followed.

We treated my dad as a forbidden word. It was like we’d had a meeting and agreed no one was going to mention him. One day, I brought him up when we were on the plane coming to Ghana. My mom smiled. She said, “I think of him sometimes. I think he’s doing well. Who knows, he has twenty male kids by now.”

When we got to Ghana, I set off with my sister to go and look for him. Several hours later, we found the house we ran from. Nothing had changed, not even the paint. I saw where he stood akimbo and smiled. I teared up.

We were just about to enter the house when he stepped out, holding his trousers up. He was lanky, grey, and wrinkled but looked very strong. He asked us, “Are you looking for somebody?”

We stood still, staring hard at him, hoping something about us would make him remember us. He kept asking who we were looking for and then said, “Or you don’t understand Twi?” We walked away. My sister cried until we got home. When we told our mom the story, she asked, “Why didn’t you talk to him? You went all the way there and couldn’t tell him anything?”

I asked, “He didn’t even remember us. What could we have said?”

Mom answered, “That you’re the kids he abandoned years ago. The kids he never called his own, but you’ve come to look for him because you’ve forgiven him and want him to know you’re still his kids.”

I opened my mouth wide. “Are you serious?”

“What can you do to him apart from offering him forgiveness?” she responded.

Before we left Ghana, I went back again. When I introduced myself, he collapsed into his chair. He looked at me for several seconds before mentioning my full name. He asked if I still bore that name. I said I was married, so I had my husband’s name. He said, “Your mom was right. When she said one day I’d wish you were all I ever had, I felt it, but… Hmmm.”

We talked about everything. The woman he brought in left him. He had two sons who, he said, never called home. I gave him my number and left. He was so happy that he told me it was the best day of his life.

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He’s never called me. It’s been a year already. Sometimes I smile when I think about him. Perhaps that one meeting was all he needed. Perhaps it was enough to know that we no longer hated him. Or perhaps he still doesn’t know how to be a father to daughters he spent his life wishing had been sons.

I may never know.

But whenever I think about the family I came from, I no longer remember only the father who smiled when we left. I remember the mother who took our hands, walked away with nothing and somehow gave us everything. That’s my happy story. A story I will proudly tell my children one day.

—Ama  

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