I was just on the phone with my dad for over two hours. I love to hear his voice, I love to talk to him, it really calms me and makes me feel a hundred times better. I love to hear him tell me about the time I was born. During the Ghanaian revolution. My mum was in labour for 4 days. She almost died. I almost died with her. My dad was sent to get medicine to be used for the (Cesarian) operation but on the way soldiers forced him to help move bricks. He quietly worked a little before begging to be let go so he could get medicine for his wife in labour. One of my favourite parts is when he tells me that he had to pressure the nurse to get a doctor to see my mom. Everytime he asked her, she would say, 'let's pray to God' and he would lose his temper. I really could've never been born if my dad didn't have a temper. I could've robbed him of a wife too.
I love to talk about languages too, and how he was right: I should've learned Dagaare and Cantonese, especially since I call myself Ghanaian and Hong-Kong-nese (lol). I like to practise my Dagaare and talk about Chinese. I like to recite all the Dagaare nursey rhymes he taught us and hear him talk about being beaten out of his left-handedness (a trait that carries on in me).
I also love to hear him complain about how lonely it is to live in Palo Alto all by himself and how annoying it is to have to do his own laundry and cook his own food. I seriously love my dad, especially when I think of all the pain he had to go through: to be the only child in his family to ever go to school, and to excel and get to go to the best university in Ghana, then excel there enough by following his passions, becoming a professor, writing books available in univeristy libraries, becoming an expert and mini-celeb in his field, feeding not only his kids but the rest of our extended family, defending my mom when she was blamed for only having 3 daughters and no sons ... my parents have been through so, so much. I see it.
I am here to become something, if only to make my parents proud, if only to keep them happy when they retire. I may not be going down the route they wanted (medicine) but they are coming to accept that - I love them (this is so mushy, but everytime I get off the phone with my dad I feel nostalgic, and emotional, and like I'm 3-years-old again).
Every day I thank the cosmos that I have parents I love so much. I mean, we've been through our nine circles of hell - I, being so opinionated and defiant, have really argued with them and questioned their rules. I've told my mother she wasn't my mother and threatened my dad when he hit me (though I now see that was nothing. some kids really got 'beat', whereas I got a 'knock on the head' - a term which makes me laugh when I read it), I've been deprived of dinner and told I couldn't take part in family events. I've been blamed for my sisters' subsequent defiance, for 'affecting' them. But, god, now that I am so far away, I see how much I love them, it is exaggerated and true. I just want to be 3 again (recurring theme), lying between my parents, pretending to read the newspaper as they flipped through their respective sections...
Yet somehow I can't bring myself to say the one thing I want to say to him. I say 'I miss you' and 'it makes me so happy to talk to you' but I can never say the old 1-4-3: 'I love you'.
From the belly of my heart.
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