The third absolutely normal but weird thin about me... I miss my father more than anything even though I was raised in a single parent family headed by my mother

well I guess I should start of with the fact that growing up, I never saw my father dying as a possibility of life. Yes everyone died at some point but obviously when I was very young I never saw it as something I would have to deal with. Getting older then I realised that anything could happen at any time and that maybe I should prepare myself for what would happen if my MOTHER died. I don’t really know if it was because her death would leave me with no caregiver or the fact that I knew my mother had health issues anyway. Whatever it was I just thought that the death I would have to deal with if any would be my mother's. My father dying was as I said before, impossible. He never got ill, he looked weirdly young for his age and he had over a dozen children to be there for. Why would he die? Maybe I also thought that the fact that I hardly saw him would make it easier for me. It didn’t.

Between the years of 2005 and 2007 my father fell ill on several occasions and was sent in and out of hospital. Apparently he asked of me a lot but I refused to call him, firstly because I hardly had anything to say to him, secondly because in my head he probably only had malaria and will be good in no time and thirdly and most stupidly of all things I wasn’t talking to him because he criticised my SATS results. Since 2005 I adamantly refused to talk to my father about anything at all including school stuff until I either was able to get straight As or I died, whichever came first. To be honest I was quite happy with the Bs and occasional Cs I was getting. I knew I was smart but I had my weak points, besides that growing up I never really saw myself as a high and mighty career woman, I just wanted to marry a nice guy have a few kids a nice house, maybe a turtle (I shall specify in later posts) and be happy. As a matter of fact until my father died I actually thought there might be a possibility of me being/ or planning to get married by 20 (obviously that ship has sailed now) but I knew that there was no way my family would be satisfied just with me being 'happy' so I actually considered going to uni and made it an option. To me either I got married and my happy family or I had a career, there was no middle point and to be honest after the speech I got from my father over my level 6.8 in my maths SATS exam my dreams kinda started to falter a little. I still wanted to live a life where I would be a young mother and be able to spend all day with my kids but then there was what my dad wanted for me, or rather what I thought he wanted.

Anyway that’s just a little background on why I wasn’t talking to him. I finished my GCSE mocks in the summer of 2005 and they were up to no standard my father would accept so I continued to refuse all contact with him though he would beg my sister to make me call him. I never did.

Even when I started getting news that he was getting worse I still didn’t call, too ashamed to face him and still holding on to the fact that my daddy cant die and there will be more than enough time to get my telling offs. Then came February 2007, I was attending an all night service at church, prior to which I had been told that my dad was getting worse by the day. I still didn’t call but by the end of the service I burst into tears when I felt this unreal, not physical pain in my chest. I asked my pastor to pray for him and I could not stop crying through the entire prayer.

I guess that was the beginning of the end. I don’t really know all the details of my dads illness because he was in Ghana the whole time but in the months between February and June I felt like utter shit. I would pick up the phone to call him and drop it again I would wake up at night crying for no apparent reason, I was thinking about my father 24/7 and as a result got very close to flunking my GCSEs but I didn’t, I got my 10 A*-Cs and decided to bury the hatchet and reconcile with my daddy. Somehow I thought 'now he must be proud of me somehow'. True because at that point he had already passed away and I guess dead people don’t keep grudges. I finished my exams at the beginning of June at which point he was already gone for weeks, but no body told me. The only thing that gave it away was this pulling feeling I had towards him everyday to call him, to buy him stuff as a peace offering. Funnily enough everyone else knew, even my little cousins but did a really good job at hiding it from me.

On the 27^th of June (the morning after my prom) my mother gathered my aunt and her family in their living room, in my head it was because they wanted to hear gist about my prom. Silly huh?

Well nothing could have prepared me for what was coming. My mothers long, ridiculous speech that gave everything away from the start (though I was still trying to deny it), the pain of being lied to for over a month, everything I had worked for being for absolutely nothing. I almost attacked my mother, calling her a liar. It wasn’t true, to me it just wasn’t true. I would have screamed and kicked if my boyfriend at that time hadn’t been a 6'4'' heap of a human being and retained my every move.

For me it was over, everything was gone. Everything I wanted was useless now. Why get married if he cant walk me down the isle, shout at people during the preparations, get jolly with his friends at my traditional wedding and be proud but still make heat under my husbands ass, what’s the point of having kids if he wont be there to buy them dresses that look like they belong on a porcelain doll and wont be there to watch them destroy my furniture cz he thinks kids should be left to explore.

What of the memories of him taking us to the beach and restaurants etc. What’s the point of owning nice houses and have money and a career if I wont here him complain about how he cant operate the expensive TV or how the house help didn’t prepare his food appropriately, what’s the point if he’s not there for me to buy him cars, loan him money ill never ask back or go to trips with him I really don’t enjoy but I do anyway because I know he just wants to show me off. I lost all reason to all the things I lived for and to be honest I still haven’t found a substitute motivation.

His funeral came by and I didn’t attend because it was in Ghana and my mother thought it wise not to take me. To be honest I wanted to go but was scared of accepting he was gone, if I had seen him I’d have to believe it and I refused to. I have never set a foot on his grave site in the whole four years of his death and am not sure I want to.

Sometimes I really dislike the way hate and love go together, I want so much to detest him for leaving me and not even saying goodbye, not even letting me know he was going so I could be on the first plane down to be with him in his last moments like some of my siblings got to. I hate him because he made me want to be such a great person to make him proud and then just left, I hate him coz he took away part of my identity. I lived life being ' wofa yaw's daughter' and now am nothing.

But still I love him, I would do anything to be with him, would give anything to have him here because if it wasn’t him, I wouldn’t have grown up being who I am. I wouldn’t have grown up loving where i'm from, speaking the language of my ancestors, I wouldn’t have half of the confidence I once had, I wouldn’t have been so proud to be nothing else but just what I am. He loved me, probably much more than I even recall, he would have given the world to keep me if there was the slightest chance I was to get lost.. he would have been there if I had let him.

So somehow I guess its understandable why I miss my father above anything else

and its weirdly normal to do so.

The second absolutely normal, but weird thing about me... my real name is sweetie

yes I know, as usual I presume my readers are split in opinions. Most of you must still think am crazy and the rest just think its cute...NO! Like really, there is nothing worse than being called sweetie. Not only do I think its very huge sign of lack creativity on my mothers part but I also resent the fact that me being named as such was a complete and utter accident, an accident which I shall gladly narrate to you...

OK, so my mother had been in hospital for a few days before my birth due to the fact that apparently I was giving her complications, according to a certain doctor I had tied the umbilical cord around my neck and was now on the verge of suffocating and that this was why I wouldn’t keep still in my mothers tummy. To be perfectly honest with you I think I just wanted up and out of there as much as I love my mother she was way too skinny for my liking when she had me and as much as I may not recall my days as a foetus I am quite sure without the extra padding and insulation of a chubby woman (which considering how much my mum loves cooking is really what she should have been) it might possibly have gotten quite cold and bumpy in there so I wanted to explore other options.

Anyway at some point my mum was induced into labour and here I was...the product of both my mother and father, obviously!

Funnily my father wasn't actually there when I was born (I will explain in future posts) even though as tradition goes, it was his responsibility to name me and apparently he had readied a name for me but never showed up in time for when my mother was confronted with the task of registering my birth, and to do that, I needed a name. Fortunately for my mother (unfortunately for me!) she had settled on calling me sweetie because the nurses insisted on telling my mother how cute I was and therefore put sweetie asantewaa on my birth certificate as a temporary solution until she came up with something better. And now here I am 20 years later and it still says sweetie asantewaa on my birth certificate, I acknowledge that Africans (and everyone else nowadays to be honest) never keep to their timing but I’m quite sure 20 years cannot be referred to as temporary.

Its kinda odd because to be frank, my name never bothered me too tough when I was younger as I lived in a country that hardly spoke English and so the oddness of my name was not as obvious because no one immediately assumed its meaning but then I moved to the UK and it was a whole different case. People would hear about me at a new school in a matter of hours because rumours would spread concerning whether my name was real or not. Growing up men would find it an opportunity ever so unmissable to make insinuative jokes. 'so do you taste as sweet as your name?' :/ like really dude? You couldn’t come up with nothing better? But guys are are just a whole different post all together so getting back to my name...I guess it has had its bad and some good sides too. I have raked in a few compliments on account of my name I guess I should seize this opportunity to thank my mother for making it impossible for me to get work as a serious politician without previously erasing my entire identity from birth till now and also for giving me a name that is a great ice breaker when meeting new people. I guess there are a lot of friends I wouldn’t have made if it wasn’t for awkward introductions and just me cracking up about my name in the first place so I cannot complain too much.

Also if I think of some other people's names I am quite glad I got what I got. For example, Gaylord, if there is anyone out there reading this with the name Gaylord I utterly empathise with your pain but even they make something out of it. There are a lot of option, such as nicknames etc.

also I recently learnt that if I was Yoruba I would have, according to tradition, been named abidemi which d name given to someone born in their father's absence. I have always known my father wasn’t there at the point of my birth and he wasn’t there most of the rest of my life but I’m not sure I would want to be labelled like that. To be honest I love the name abidemi and I mean no disrespect but looking at all the other weird names my mother could have gone for (i.e. sheniqua, danisha, ladonna, beyonce, Sunday, precious, godsent etc.) I am quite appreciative of what she settled on, even if it was by 'mistake'.

And that's why being called sweetie is absolutely, weirdly normal.

The first absolutely normal but weird thing about me... I use the phrase 'absolutely normal but weird'.

Under usual terms, this phrase makes no sense at all. To be honest it makes no sense if in unusual terms but that isn’t the essence of the phrase.

OK let me try and clear things up, the majority of you would have read this sentence and asked yourself what mental asylum I have escaped from but, a small minority will have understood that I meant that as odd as this quality of mine might be, its what makes me human and unique as a creation of god. I am probably just as normal as any other human in that I have two hands two ears and a nose (as an African I may or may not have extensively large nostrils but that is not the primary concern here lol), I have a brain that use similar psychological processes on a day to day basis as any other tom dick or harry and I have a similar range of emotions as anyone else. The point I am trying to make however is that the most common thing about every human being, the one thing we all have in common, the singular thing that probably makes so 'human' is the fact that we are all different.

OK to extend my point further I would like to point out that we all have very unique fingerprints, everyone knows that, they are like the bar code of human beings. As a matter of fact if too many of your skin layers were to peel off at once, in the unfortunate case of you placing your hand in a fire and scorching yourself raw to the flesh for example, your new skin would have a different print, the shape of the 'swirls' in your print will stay the same but you will essentially have a new finger print.

We also know that we are made up of strings of DNA which by 'chance' (arguable but I wouldn’t want to alienate any atheists reading my blog) happen to have been arranged like that, surprisingly again, none of these strings are EVER identical and this is why we can understand medical conditions by examining DNA, we can apprehend offenders of the law because of the uniqueness of our DNA. I guess what I am trying to say is that our oddness is exactly what has brought humanity to its grade of civilisation. Its because every human has a unique way of trying to fulfil his or her unique dream.

Being weird is perfectly normal to humanity, that is what our race is based on, we thrive on weirdness. Sometimes it might cause a negative reaction but essentially we are all a little weird so maybe we just need to understand and embrace that fact.

And that is why using the phrase 'absolutely normal, but weird' is very weirdly normal. X