Switched At Birth: My Father Fought To Find Me

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I was switched at birth. And I was loved and protected at birth too!

I have known love and nurturing all my life. And so have I known kindness, empathy, and forgiveness. My Momma is a good mother, but my Daddy, I want to shout of the world’s ‘bestest’ and best father of all time. He says I make his heart fill with love and gratitude every time he sits to ponder the fact that he contributed to making me. He calls me his heart. That heart led him to recognize I had been switched at birth, and made him fight to find me, even when everyone including my mother said he was being ridiculous!

I was born in a popular maternity center in the Central region in the late eighties. My father had taken a month long leave from his clerical job at the magistrate court he worked at to be there for my mother in her last days of pregnancy. He took my mother to the birthing center himself and stayed through a grueling ten hour labor.

My father always tells the story of my birth with his favorite line, “You were the tiniest baby I ever saw, but you had a good set of lungs and the loudest wail to announce you had arrived. But when I held you, your tiny self put a lot of weight on my heart.”

My mother says my father hovered at the entrance of the labor room while she pushed, and as soon as he heard my cry, he entered to greet me, much to the chagrin of the midwife and nurses. It was the eighties, men were not allowed in labor rooms in Ghana I guess.

They bundled me and handed me over to him. And he held on to me, and drank in my presence. Mama says he kept his gaze fixed on mine and prayed loudly, while tears streamed down his face. And the midwife had to practically wrestle me out of his arms to go clean me. The nurses and doctors kept asking if I was their first child, I was their third, and yes he was like that with my two older sisters too.

My father went home to arrange meals and other necessities for my mother. When he returned, the medical staff had done all they needed to do and had returned me to my mother who was breastfeeding me.

One look at me and my father instinctively knew I’d been switched at the birth center. The baby my Mama was feeding was just as tiny and feisty but she wasn’t me, and my father knew that in his heart.

He took the baby from my mother and examined her. She had a mole on her right cheek just like me, but hers was closer to her nose where mine had been higher up on my cheek bones.

He looked in my mother’s face and said, “This is not our child. They’ve switched her. Purposefully or not, they’ve switched our child at birth.”

My mother tried to assure him they had the right child, she pointed to the mole to make her point. But my father was adamant I had been switched.

“Kuma, how do you know?” My exasperated mother asked.

“Because I feel nothing in my heart for that child and I felt a lot for the one you birthed,” he said.

And off to the managers of the center he went, to report his missing child as well as the missing child his wife had. They tried to brush him off, saying he didn’t have any basis for his claim. So he used his position at the court to pull some strings that very day, and a detective was assigned to investigate.

The birth center had no choice but to comply. They threatened that if it turned out to be nothing, my father would be made to bear all the cost of the tests and man hours they were putting in. My Daddy agreed.

DNA testing was not prevalent then, so they decided to cover the basis with blood type and Hb genotype tests to see if they could make any meaningful conclusions.

When I was three days old, all the babies born at the center with me were brought to a lab to draw blood. Four boys and three girls, myself included. I guess they included the boys to accommodate my father’s supposed ridiculousness.

They also tested both my parents.

A teenage mother had a baby girl with a mole on her right cheek, a few hours before I was born. And the baby had trouble regulating her body temperature, so the staff took her away to stabilize her. While she was in the nurses’ care, I had been taken away from my Momma to be cleaned. Somebody did not do their due diligence, the babies got mixed up.

The blood work came back a couple of days later.

When my parents and the midwife who delivered me confirmed I was born female, the boys were excluded from consideration. Two of the girls had hemoglobin genotype AA and one had Hb AS.

My father is hemoglobin genotype AS and my mother is AA. I am AS.

The teenage mother had the daughter with Hb AS. That baby had a mole on her right cheek. They tested the teenage mother, she was AA. They arranged to have the teenage mother’s partner tested. He was AA.

Doctors concluded two AA parents cannot produce an AS child, so they did the needful and gave the rightful babies to their rightful parents. My father received apologies for being told he was crazy, for insisting I had been switched at the birth center.

I have grown to be an exact replica of my father and my paternal grandmother. And all my life, I have felt a father’s love, I have never once felt unsafe in the home I was raised in. And for that I will ever be grateful to my father.

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