Photo Credit | © Afia Ofori-Mensa
friday’s child
by Afia Ofori-Mensa
In the town where my mother grew up, it was against the law to cry on Fridays.
The chief in the palace had declared every Friday to be Mother Earth Day. On Fridays it was forbidden to go to the farm, to hold funerals, or to cry. My mother's mother died on a Friday, in July of 1966. The uncle who came to tell the household, including my grandfather's 12 other wives, also said to everyone, "If you're going to cry, you better have your money ready to pay the fine." My mother, 16 years old and now a motherless child, swallowed her own tears.
My mother had slowly watched her mother dying, during visiting hours at Atibie Hospital all that week. My grandmother went in on a Tuesday, incapacitated by stomach pains, and came out that Friday wrapped in a sheet. My mom always hated hospitals after that, because she believed them to be places where people went to die. Twelve years later, she found herself in the very same one, in labor with her first child.
By then my mother had met my father in college. They got married, and my dad got the visa he had been waiting for to go to America. But he had only one visa then, not two. So he left Ghana, his new wife, and her growing belly, to move to the United States on his own. There, he worked to get his new little family over the water and by his side. That is how my mother found herself at Atibie Hospital again, in labor with her first child, all alone. Her husband, the father of the baby yet to be born, was across the ocean in Abrokyere.
My sister was breech. Her instincts told her to move toward the crown of her own head. So up she pushed, until she was compressing my mother's lungs and threatening her heart. My mother's labor lasted three days while her unborn baby, wrapped completely in the umbilical cord that connected them, turned in every direction trying to find her way into the world. With the fourth day dawning, it seemed like maybe neither of them would make it. My mother almost died in the very place where she feared dying the most. My sister nearly lost her life trying to be born out of our mother's mouth.
My mom, who had been born on a Tuesday, went into the hospital thinking she would leave with a baby who bore the same day name as hers. When the baby finally came out via emergency C-section, though, it was Wednesday. Custom dictated that her day name would not be "Abenaa" like my mom's, it would be "Akua" instead. For the baby's second name, my mom wanted to call her new daughter "Dankyira", after the mother lost years before. This little girl would make it out of the hospital alive, wearing the name of that woman who never did.
But my dad said no. The baby would be named "Asiedua", after his mother. That was the custom. My mom was weakened by days of birth-giving on her own and a blood transfusion that had given her hepatitis. Her husband was a man. Even an ocean away, he was more powerful than she was. My mother swallowed her words, and her daughter became Akua Asiedua.
Nearly three years later, they were all in America together, and my mother was pregnant with a second child. It was the early 1980s then, and the limits of technology and racism prevented the doctor from trusting that the incision done in Ghana would hold. This time, instead of risking labor, they would schedule the C-section in advance. The doctor told my parents to pick the day on which their first American son would be born. My mother for the second time hoped for a Tuesday, but my father again prevailed. He picked December 19, a Friday, so that the boy would be named “Kofi” just like him.
I came out in a blizzard, born into a winter my parents could not have imagined only three years before. Their first American son emerged instead as their first American daughter, a Friday’s child with a name of my own, birthed in silence against this new white face of Mother Earth. Among the four babies that my mother would have, I was the one who cried the least.
But when I did, she says, I had the loudest voice of them all.