That second goodbye

Each morning, I see my teenager to the front door to send him on his way to school. Each time, we pray and embrace. Sometimes we resolve the conflicts that arise from the early morning rush, at other times there may be a last minute exchange about the details and timings of the day and at what time we will reconvene, occasionally there's a last minute prank or a little banter but each and every time, I stand by the door and I wait. 

I wait for his head to glance up, I wait for our eyes to lock and for his hand to rise to wave me farewell. I watch as he looks ahead, there's a pause and then it comes again; that second wave. The one that signifies a final goodbye before I close the door and disappear behind it. Each time (of late at least) it feels like the snip of the umbilical cord where one becomes two in a final act. This boy-man of mine, neither man, neither boy but still my little one. I will carry that second goodbye with me always, in a pocket near my heart just like a good luck charm (if I were to believe in such things), I will tuck his cockeyed half smile up my sleeve for safe keeping in case of needing to draw close to it later on, whilst smiling my own half smile thinking of the many times I have watched my own mother tuck a hanky up her left hand wrist. His purposeful stride, that mirrors his fathers and his fathers before, I will note down hurriedly in the notebook of my mind so that I will come upon words that describe it in detail in the days and weeks and months that are to come.  

Like a super eight film, I see flashes of colour and pop up events that inform of his thirteen years alongside me thus far. I glimpse that first morning feed at the newborn phase, the toddler years curled up with his arms ajar because of the chicken pox in his armpits, where only Winnie the Pooh on repeat would bring comfort, I snatch at the little boy with a raspberry on the end of each finger that devours four, five six ... nine and ten one after another and bares the crimson evidence all across his delighted face. I look over the fence at the child who finds the nookiest of nooks and reads and reads and reads only to forget about the love of reading and then to discover it again and again and forget it. And remember it once more. I cross the road and I see the boy that motions for me, eager to tell me his news, what he likes to eat, what he likes to watch, what he likes to listen to, what he believes strongly in, what makes him laugh, what makes him sad. He calls, then shouts, them whispers, then speaks and tells me softly, openly: 'I don't always want you to cross over the road without me. I can cross alone but we're both headed home so let us walk together.' I squeeze his hand in mine (recalling that it was once smaller than mine) and I whisper to him, 'Let us walk together, let us walk together, let us walk together.' Just then, I hear the clunk of the front door closing, I feel the weight of it on the palm of my hand and I realise all at once, that his life and mine, all of it flashed before my eyes in just a few seconds. In that window between the second goodbye and the close of the door, right there, like a dream. Like that moment between dream and reality, where you're undecided to which world you belong. Like a super eight, super sweet, super fly story of him and I, captured without us ever knowing.  

Thirty Years

I can't remember much from this day thirty years ago today. I can only say that it was a day that my black school shoes glistened with my tears. I have no memory of waking up that day, nor of getting dressed, nor of what I ate or even of my journey home from school. The norm would have been for my mother to collect me but I have some vague memory that my eldest sister picked me up from school that day instead. I was ten years old and still fairly new to the country having arrived from Ghana in the July, four months previously. I was the new girl at school, the only brown girl in my class, one of four mixed race children in a very white school and I was asked frequently if I used to live in a mud hut. 

My memory of that day starts when I reached the door to our house. The front door opened and I entered the house and then I can simply see my mother, with her arms open to receive me. Her eyes are red and her face is worn, it is not typical for her to look this way and my heart beats faster. I am hearing her say something like 'Ive got something to tell you, we have had a phone call from your Uncle who has spoken to your Grandmother in Ghana and your father become more ill and he has died'. I think I see my middle sister raise her hands to cover her face and I look up to see my eldest sister with tear marks on her face now although she is silent but I may be constructing this memory as I write. 

I begin to cry and I run into my mother's torso, my face pressed into her waist. I feel the tears come but I am confused and I know I should cry but I don't really imagine that my father is dead, obviously there has been some confusion. Whilst I am heavily distracted by the noise that is coming from my own body, the sound of my own crying, I wonder to myself why I am still crying. I feel annoyed that this mix up has not been sorted out and yet still my tears come. Still I see my mother's stained and red face and I do not like it. I see her biting her lip, trying to hold in her emotions and contain the quiver of her lips. She never does this. She never does this. She never does this. I say it over and over again in my head as I watch the drip drip drip, of the salty tears steering their way down the slope of my nose and onto my first pair of black lace up shoes. 

Some of those tears don't make it onto my shoes, some fall in the space between my shoes. Some fall onto the old wooden floor. I try to see if any have fallen into the floor cracks but one of my eyes is now pressed into my mum as she squeezes me to offer comfort. The other eye is cloudy, swollen from prolonged upset. I don't know if my mother and I are still standing. I don't know how much time has passed. I don't know if I slept alone that night. I just remember for days and days, months and months and years and years thinking back to the day that my black school shoes glistened so prettily with my tears. I remember thinking that my dad had not really died on the sixteenth of November, that it was perhaps just I that needed to investigate the matter. I could still remember all of the places that he would ask me to accompany him to when he was frail and already ill. I could still remember him taking me with him to visit a hospital and hearing a man say to him ' you are so, so, so so thin' in that way that African's repeat a word for emphasis. My father, the doctor was being told by another doctor that he was 'so, so, so so thin'. I just needed to get back to Ghana and I could find my way by myself and find him either at the hospital in a place where no one knew to look or in Oda, perhaps staying with one of our many, many relatives, so many that perhaps Dad had lost his way and no one else knew where to find him. I could find him. Maybe he was in one of the places that he would tell me that he liked to go when he was a boy growing up in Oda. Maybe. Perhaps. It could be.

I saw my father in many places after that day. It was painful and tender on those occasions and I felt a pain, a physical pain each time. With time it grew easier but today I can hardly believe that it has been thirty years. I can hardly believe that I now have a boy that is the same age as I was when my father died. I still see my father in many places but it is different now. I see him in the dimple in my youngest boys cheek, I see him in the forehead of my eldest boy, in my dark lined knuckles and my strange toes. I see him in the stories that I tell of mango trees and master bobbi and rich oral history passed down. I see him in my name and in the names passed down from him onto my children, Allotey and Allotei. I see him all around, I see him everywhere and when I search for him now, it is only to tell him that I see him and will see him again. On that day I will make many more things glisten with my salty tears.

See here and here for previous posts about my father.