December 28th, 1973 Bea’s maternity home, Tema. There sat my twenty-one-yearold unmarried mother, Josephine Ewurama Sackey, on her hospital bed, looking at me, her newborn baby, lovingly. She was awed by my beauty, with my head full of black curly hair, my very beautiful face, and my small lips. How proud she had been when her friends came around that afternoon, oohing and aahing, as they gushed over me, saying to her that I was no ordinary baby. What a loss it would have been if she had aborted me. That is what she had meant to do when she first found out about the pregnancy, after all, at that time my father did not know about it. I would not blame her, as it stood; she already had a son with my father, a taxi driver who was ten years older than her, but he was an unreliable father at the time. However, my father’s friends got wind of the pregnancy and told him. In order to get her to keep the pregnancy, my father caught her off guard with a bizarre story, one Ember of youth in which he claimed to have been warned by a diviner that his girlfriend was pregnant and was contemplating an abortion, which if she did, she would die. That scared my mother, and that was how she carried me full term. Yet as she looked at me, she wondered how she would provide for her small family with this newmouth to feed, wondered whether in her young inexperienced state, she would ever be able to give us even an average life, whether we would be able to attend school, to be well-clothed, to have three square meals each day. And she had cause to worry because, true to his form, our father abandoned us, leaving her to fend for two children all by herself. Although I was a child and ignorant of the happenings around me, my mother would later relay to me the misery, lack, and hardship we endured during the period until she met my stepfather. She named me Juliet Hagan. My earliest memories are of my mother leaving us with our grandmother and going off somewhere. I was only three years old, but in a way, I could sense my mother’s sadness as she pushed us towards our grandmother on the day she was leaving. “Be good children, okay?” she said before hugging my brother and me one more time. Then, she got up hurriedly to put her suitcases together JohnMac Christian 6 The Birthday Journal
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