Life Story: Emotionally Damaged By Absent Parents

I think deep down I knew I was something was deficient, that something wasn’t right but I had no idea how my upbringing, given my parents’ abandonment would leave me emotionally damaged.

My grandmother did her best. She cared for me as best as she could. But she was old and sick a lot of the time. I think the death of my grandfather hit her hard, and I was too energetic for her to handle. My constant, incessant questions irritated her. She was unable to help me read or do my schoolwork, she didn’t care about the cartoon characters I cared about. She couldn’t relate to me nor I to her. But she did the best she knew how for me. She fed me, provided shelter, and that was it.

Essentially she taught me to survive. Everything else, I had to figure out on my own. It was a very lonely life. I think raising myself in that way created the damage I would reckon with later in life, which left me emotionally impaired.

I remember once when I was about eleven years old, I overheard her tell one of our neighbors how tired of me she was. “She’s a good girl,” my grandmother said, “But she is too much. I wish her parents could come get her already. I am tired.”

That night, I cried myself to sleep. Even my grandmother didn’t seem to want me very much. I had no idea what emotional damage of emotional illness was back then, but I remember the sinking feeling I carried with me in the years that followed. The feeling of not belonging, the pain of parental abandonment  and the sting of loneliness; I think my little soul broke.

When I was nineteen, right after completing high school, one of my father’s friends visited. He was no stranger to me, he had visited with money and gifts from my parents many times over the years. He was always so kind and encouraging. It was he who explained to me years prior, why my parents were unable to visit Ghana, he said they needed documents before they could take me with them. He let me speak with my parents on his mobile phone anytime he visited. He was the closest thing to a father I ever had.

This time when he came, he was so impressed with how “grown” I was. He seemed genuinely surprised that I was not the preteen he saw the last time we met. I got many compliments from him, and he seemed genuinely interested in  my academic performance. He was excited that I was preparing to go to the University; he thought I’d done well, given that my parents had been absent all my life.

My father’s friend decided he would stay in town a couple of days more to “take care of personal business.” He gave my grandmother money to make him meals. And it was my duty to take the meals to him. Once while delivering his dinner, we began to talk and he told me my parents were divorced and married to other people. They both had other children with their respective spouses.

This was news to me! My parents actually had it in them to have a family? Children they loved to live with? I had other siblings whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me? Why did I have to always be the one on the outside looking in? Why couldn’t I just have a normal family like my siblings? They abandoned me, just to turn around and love on their other children. That hurt a lot!

My father’s friend might have seen my crestfallen face, he drew closer and pulled me into a hug. “Don’t be sad, you’re a woman now, chart your own course,” he said.

His was the first hug I had received from any father figure in my life. He was warm and cuddly. I clung to him and cried. He wiped my tears and pulled me on his lap. He kissed me. I was confused and tried to pull away.

“Don’t be afraid, it’s me. This is what love looks like.”

By the end of the evening, he had had sex with me and called it our little secret. I had learned about sex in school, but not the social skill of how to remove myself from sexually unhealthy situations or to recognize sexual assault.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said. This is between you and I.

Weeks later I was pregnant and sick.

I remember the phone call from my mother I received on our neighbor’s cellphone, it was the longest she had ever talked with me. And I remember the names she called me and the caliber of whore she thought I was. My father called to disown me; I had greatly embarrassed him among his German social circle.

The nerve of those two people, who made a baby and turned her into an emotionally damaged woman.

My father’s friend brought a couple of drinks and some money to my uncles and married me. He promised he would take care of me and our child, and I would be safe with him. Everyone thought I was such a lucky girl, to marry a ‘wealthy’ man who was flying me to Europe. My grandmother was proud indeed.

If I thought life in my grandmother’s house was lonely and horrible, I knew life in Germany with my father’s friend was horrible! He was mean and domineering. When I got a job, he made sure the money was paid in a ‘joint account’ he solely controlled. There was nothing safe or comforting about my life with him. I lived with trepidation, walked on eggshells around him, everyday. He damaged me emotionally and mentally, more than I already was. My only consolation and motivation to go on was my son.

I found myself wanting to go to sleep, hoping to never wake up. I would wake up from sleep, sad to be alive. My joints always ached, doctors had no idea why. And I developed ulcers. My soul was sick. That is what was wrong with me. I had moved from frying pan into fire.

After years of enduring my marriage to my father’s friend, I finally confided in a kind elderly woman at work about my life. And for the first time ever, somebody gave me perspective about what had happened to me. This was no normal relationship, and what had happened to me in that hotel room years prior was rape, he had taken undue advantage of me. Why had no one ever done anything?

I was introduced to social services, who enrolled me in a social intervention program. My marriage and my life began to unravel. I learned what abuse is; sexual, emotional, psychological, physical and mental abuse. Therapy helped me to begin to understand I was emotionally ill, emotionally damaged from the effects of my absent parents, from having to emotionally raise myself and from having lived with a sexual predator for years. I was given tools and taught how to deal with my abandonment and years of abuse. And I learned not to only live but thrive.

With the help of a state appointed lawyer, my marriage was annulled. I moved out on  my own with my son, and for the first time at age twenty-nine, I was my own person, and I was clear about myself, my mental and emotional health, and I was in charge of me. And I have realized I am actually fine by myself!

Healing from this kind of trauma takes time. It took me a good amount of time and dedicated effort. But I am now able to live a good quality life and enjoy being alive. The years of abandonment and abuse I endured linger in the background, you never forget, it never goes away, but those memories do not run my life anymore.

I now know parental abuse doesn’t have to be physical, or even emotional. A parent’s intentional, prolonged absence in itself is a form of child abuse. And it is just as damaging. It creates a deficiency that creates emotionally impaired, emotionally damaged, and ill equipped adults who struggle to adjust to healthy lives.