A Woman Called Patience

A son’s recollection of his amazing mother

Story written by Abram Hagstrom on behalf of Anthony Akator. Posted with permission.

Preface

I want to tell you about a woman unlike anyone you’ve ever known. She is my mother. Along the way, I’ll tell you a bit about myself, but this story is not about me. It’s about the woman whose love made me who I am. I am only one of the many people who have been changed by her love, but as one of them, my life is a testament to the depth and quality of her love. My name is Anthony Kafui Kwame Akator.

Among the many gifts I received from my mother, one of the most important has been the ability to believe: to believe in myself and to believe that good is always coming my way. She believed that I could be great, and as she shared that belief with me, I have come to believe it, too. I believed, and still believe, because my mother believed.

But what is this thing — belief — that has had such a profound effect on my life? It is something unlike wealth, possessions, and status. But neither is it like talent, skill, or intelligence. It’s more like sunglasses for the soul. It’s a way of seeing that is always slanted toward hope — like clairvoyance steeped in optimism. In our age of materialistic skepticism, this kind of belief is as rare as the woman who gave it to me.

If this story has an antagonist, it is my father. Not because he was anyone’s enemy, but because my mother’s light shone all the brighter in the shadows of his shortcomings. His flaws highlighted her virtues. His absence, too, after his sudden death, shed further light on the kind of woman who was raising me and my twelve siblings. Until his death, I hadn’t noticed how unique my mother truly is.

Although I was born in Yendi, in northern Ghana, today I live in Tucson, Arizona. I am a businessman and a single father of three beautiful children. Currently, I am completing my dissertation for my Doctorate of Education in Teaching and Learning. I credit my mother with nearly all of my success. She has been a constant support through every season, even when I couldn’t see her holding me up.

Still today, at forty-five years old and half a world away, I can hear her steady voice in my head, reminding me of who I am, centering me like an anchor in the changing seas of life.

From Girl to Mother

Do you believe a person’s name can be prophetic? Does the name make the person or does the person make the name? Although my mother’s parents couldn’t have known who their baby girl would become, they named her Patience. In the apostle Paul’s famous description of love in 1st Corinthians 13, patience is the first attribute mentioned. From the very beginning, then, my mother had a great calling on her life, and each time she was called, it reaffirmed that calling and an identity equal to it.

My mother was born in Ghana, West Africa, on January 23rd, 1947. In Ghana, we place a special significance on which day of the week a person is born. My mother was born on a Thursday, so her second name is Yawa (which means “Thursday-born”). One could see this as pure coincidence or wishful thinking, but Yawa is very close to the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh — a name too sacred to be spoken — a name that hints at the spiritual breath God shared with man in bringing him to life.

In a roundabout way, then, my mother’s name is something like “The Patience of God”. If this name strikes you as grandiose, or as the overzealousness of an affectionate son, I invite you to read on. If I am able to tell her story adequately, by the end, I think you will see at least a glimmer of the greatness that I see in the woman who brought me into the world and filled my sails with the breath of life. If it seems too much to be “The Patience of God,” no one could doubt that she is at least a child of God. And as a daughter, she takes very much after her Father.

My mother was born to loving Presbyterian parents in Amedzofe, in the Volta region of Ghana. She grew up with four older brothers and five older sisters. As a little girl, she walked to school on red dirt roads through the lush green countryside of the Volta valley. She attended Demonstration Primary School and then Dzokpeli Middle school. When not busily working on her studies, she enjoyed playing games with nets in the middle, such as ping-pong and volleyball.

As the youngest child in her family, she was highly motivated to keep up with her older siblings. In middle school, she took the Common Entrance Exam at age fourteen. This exam is an aptitude test for middle schoolers who believe they are ready for Secondary School. When a student passes the exam, he or she is allowed to skip any remaining years of middle school. That year, 1961, my mom was the only one in the whole school who passed the exam! She began secondary school at Tamela in Northern Ghana and finished at Orielly Secondary School in Accra, the capital city. After that, she attended university at Wesley Girls College.

She met my father in Koforidua, in the eastern region of Ghana, in 1970. They fell in love and had a traditional Christian wedding the following year. Since my mom had always wanted to be a wife and mother, she fell naturally into the role of homemaker. She was honored to be the wife of a D.C. (a District Commissioner, similar to a Senator in the United States). Although they began their married life with three of my half-siblings, whom my father had begotten before he met my mother, she embraced his children as her own.

At the time, neither my big-hearted mother nor my amorous father could have foreseen what lay in their future: his tumultuous political career, the ongoing infidelity, his death at the age of fifty-four, and the subsequent deaths of three of my siblings. Each of these events would shake our family to the core, and there at the core was the woman who would become my hero, my mother, holding it all together with uncanny composure — an almost eerie, supernatural kind of serenity.

Childhood: Shaky But Structured

I was born on December 4, 1976, to Mr. and Mrs. Cosmos Yaw Akator. The Ghana of my youth was a place of political upheaval, and since my father worked for the government, changes in the country’s political structure directly affected our lives. When I was five years old, there was another military coup in a long line of military coups. As a member of the previous government, my father, unsure of his safety in Ghana, fled to Nigeria.

Although we would join him in Nigeria when I was seven, for two years, my mom took care of our family on her own. My father would send money when he could, but he wasn’t there to help with any of our daily needs. In addition to keeping our home up and running — brushing teeth, changing diapers, cleaning the house, paying bills, and making meals so she could change more diapers — my mom also consistently held a job as a school teacher. Not only that, but she also ran a small bakery on the side, recruiting the help of my older sisters and teaching them a work ethic along the way. Don’t ask me how she did it. Privately, I’ve always believed she had some secret way of multiplying the hours in a day.

After living in Nigeria for two years as a family, we all moved back to Ghana in 1985. By that time, the military regime had mellowed into something closer to an authoritarian democracy under the leadership of the former Air Force lieutenant, Jerry Rawlings. When we got back, we had to start from scratch. We had to find a new home, new furniture, new schools, new friends, and a new church. Amazingly, my father landed a new job as the head of the Ghana National Trust Fund, similar to the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States.

For the next four years or so, while my father held this important position, our lives settled into a pattern of education, prayer, and entrepreneurship. As both of our parents were teachers, getting good grades wasn’t optional: in our home, it was a must. When we got our progress reports from school, we would all gather in the living room where our parents doled out praises and critiques according to our performance. This was almost always a positive experience for me, as I was the top student in my class, academically, until secondary school. Like my mom, I took the Common Entrance Exam in my first year of middle school and passed directly to high school.

Prayer, on the other hand, usually wasn’t a great experience for me. At five o’clock in the morning, the whole family would gather in the room our father had designated as the Prayer Room. I couldn’t pray to save my life. And not just because I wanted to go back to sleep. It was often because I was angry at everyone else in the room for one reason or another. We would all have to pray, and I would go through the motions so as not to disappoint my parents. We prayed for God’s will to be done, we prayed for our country, we gave thanks for our blessings. But when I was a boy, the prayers rarely came from my heart.

In my heart, I cherished achievement, success, working hard to be my best. This, I believe, came mostly from my father. He was a man of ideas who, from my youngest years, emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship. When we were growing up, no matter where we lived, he always kept a little farm in the backyard. He assigned each of us kids our own section, and it was our responsibility to see that it produced a crop. If you had visited our home on any Saturday of the year (as people often did) you would see us out in our respective plots working under the sun: weeding, pruning, planting, or harvesting. In this way, our parents taught us a strong work ethic, because, as they often reminded us, “Nothing is given for free.”

And because nothing was free, in addition to their primary jobs, our parents always maintained a small store, selling groceries to the neighbors, or some other side-hustle. This was our life. My sisters would help our mom prepare the meals. We would work our butts off all day long at whatever we set our hands to. And daily showers for everyone; two per day for the girls. Education was the foundation. Prayer was the centerpiece. Entrepreneurship was the flower.

We were raised to be Christian, taught to be ethical, and required to be respectful to everyone around us. This was due largely to the example and the careful instruction of our mother. Through all of the ups and downs, she remained an educator (personally and professionally) with the heart of a priest. When I say she has the heart of a priest, I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean it in the truest sense of the word: my mom is one of those rare people who gently guides others to God as naturally as a tree bears its fruit.

Forks In The Road

As the years passed and I continued to excel academically, two separate areas of strength began to develop in me. One was taekwondo. The other was teaching entrepreneurship. At fourteen years old, I started tutoring kids in my area after school. They would come to our house and I would help them with such things as developing a business plan, assessing profit and loss, or gaining some competitive advantage over their competition. At one point, I had fifty students coming to my house after school to learn about business.

At the same time, I was becoming nearly unstoppable on the sparring mats. Taekwondo, which means “the way of the hand and foot,” is one of the more striking-oriented of the martial arts. As such, it was a fantastic outlet for my anger. But more than that, even as it gave me an outlet for that pent-up energy, it was also a tremendous classroom for character development. I had to push myself my beyond previous limitations over and over again. I couldn’t win by wishing for it. I had to work for every victory — another of life’s prizes that is never given for free.

At sixteen years old, I made the national taekwondo team in Ghana, which led to a fork in the road of my life. Being on the team would require so much time and energy that I wouldn’t be able to continue my after-school business tutoring. I had to choose one or the other. After thinking it over, I chose martial arts. And although we can never really go back and choose the other of two paths, my choice seems to have been the right one. I poured my heart and soul into my training and fought each tournament as if it were my last. At 22 years old, I became the youngest international taekwondo referee in all of Africa, and by the time I was twenty-six, I had dominated the fin-weight division in Ghana for a decade.

Not only did taekwondo take me around the world, competing within Africa as well as overseas, but it also introduced me to two men who would turn out to be very important in my life. The first of these was Rubben Lolly, my teacher or sensei (who is now an internationally recognized Grand Master and 7th-degree black belt). Rubben’s careful training is the reason I was able to win and retain the national fin-weight title. But his significance in my life has not been limited to taekwondo. Of all the men I know, he was the most like a father to me after my father died.

As I trained under Rubben, his younger brother, Aaron, become like a brother to me. To this day, Aaron is still my best friend. He stands out to me as an incarnation of loyalty and steadfast friendship. He has made me believe that it is possible for one person to stay by another’s side through every challenge that life can bring. When my family was abandoned and shunned by nearly every person we knew, Aaron and Rubben (along with my mom’s sister, Mrs. Rose Mortagbe) were as steady and faithful as granite. Today, Aaron, Rubben, and I live in Arizona. Aaron and I, both 5th-degree black belts, still train under Grand Master Rubben.

The mass abandonment mentioned above was the result of my father’s death. (In Ghana at that time, a family’s standing revolved around the father. When our father, Cosmos, died, our standing in the community died with him.) His death changed our lives in so many ways. His absence left a gaping hole in our family, and as my mother’s only son, it was my duty to step into that void and figure out how to provide for my family. I took on a supportive role to my mother and became like a father to my siblings. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The consequences of my father’s death will make more sense once I explain some of the consequences of his life.

My Father’s Children

When we lived in Nigeria, I had four siblings — that is, four that I knew about. My oldest sibling, a half-brother, didn’t live with us at that time. Nor did I know that the two older siblings in our home were from another mother. Since we all lived together — we all called the same man “Daddy” and the same woman “Mama” — I never suspected any difference in our origins. Such questions were all the farther from my mind because our mother loved us all equally. She accepted these other children as if from the hand of God and raised them as her own. I only came to know about the mistresses and the affairs after my father died.

Before he died, he fathered seven more children, for a total of thirteen. Only one of the last seven children was from my mother (meaning I have three full siblings and nine half-siblings). Knowing this, is it hard to believe that my parents remained married until my father’s death? If so, do you imagine a spiteful woman, bitterly going about her motherly duties, regretting her life, and resenting her husband? If I had been in her place, I would have been all that and worse. I might have killed the man and considered incarceration an acceptable price to pay. But my mom drew her life from a wholly different place. Not only did she do him no harm, but she continued to love and serve him until the day he died.

As I said before, until my father’s death, I knew nothing about the other women, and because I knew nothing about them, I was partly oblivious to the true character of the woman who raised me. But as things fell apart in his absence, and I assumed more responsibility in the family, a curtain was slowly thrown back on my mother. With each receding fold of the fabric, the brightness of her heart dazzled me all the more. It’s only human to put on a show of godliness when others are watching. But what is it to do so when no one is there to see your good deeds and praise you in the streets? In God, this is who my mother is.

When I was young, siblings just happened. New kids popped into our family from time to time, and, probably because experience shapes expectations, I didn’t think much of it. My mind was distracted by academics. Kids were my parents’ problem. That was our normal and no one made a fuss about it. That is, until the man who had brought all of us children into the world, left this world and all of his children behind. Then it became my problem.

Not to excuse my father’s infidelity, but to put it in context, he lived at a time when men of his station had multiple wives. In the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s in Ghana, this was the norm. Men of wealth and status, including those of the political class like my father, were more or less expected to indulge their sexual appetite as occasion permitted — perhaps not unlike Solomon with his harem in the Bible. Societal importance has its privileges. And as long as my dad held his lucrative position, providing for his burgeoning tribe wasn’t a problem. But this state of affairs collapsed in 1990 when he lost his job at the National Trust Fund.

In one fell swoop, my dad lost his job, his status, his large income, and we had to move into a smaller home — one we could afford on my mom’s much smaller salary. Once again, our security, which had been firmly planted on one of man’s more stable institutions, suddenly became our peril. The floor opened beneath our feet, and as we dropped downward, the earth, too, seemed to yawn into an open grave. My father’s decision not to lie down in the dirt and die touched off a new season in his life. As I watched him reinvent himself, I saw his true strengths like never before.

Instead of looking for a new job, he decided on a new career path. At forty-eight years old, he enrolled in law school and set his sights on becoming an attorney. While he attended school, my mother was the primary breadwinner, but my father also ran a small shuttle service. Anticipating services like Uber and Lyft, he turned one of the family cars into a little business, transporting people from one point to another. Was he ahead of his time, or was he merely running a homegrown taxi service? More likely the latter. But either way, he was using what he had to turn a small profit, and even as a teenager, I admired his perseverance in the face of humiliation and hardship.

Although my father already held doctorate degrees in philosophy and government, his return to higher education created a new inroad in our relationship. For all of his intelligence in other areas, he was horrible at math. Since math had always been a strong suit for me, I was able to be of real assistance to him in this department. I will always remember the courage of my father coming to his son for help, and the late nights we spent together studying. While the rest of the family slept, my dad and I drilled accounting and mathematics in the dim light of our small home. I was honored to be able to give something back to one who had given me so much. With my help, he soon passed the bar exam and began his law practice as Esquire Cosmos Yaw Akator.

Filling His Shoes

When my father began working as an attorney, I was about eighteen years old. For two years, he cut his teeth in the legal field as I continued defending my title in taekwondo. I had begun to win a bit of prize money from the tournaments, competing within Ghana as well as internationally. However, knowing that taekwondo had a limited time-horizon in my life, I took several paralegal courses in the hope of working with my father and eventually taking over his practice.

And then, suddenly, he was gone.

His death came like a bolt out of the blue, when I was twenty years old. He died pointlessly and without warning in a coffin on wheels. The man driving the car, a friend of my father, ran into a truck that was parked on the side of the road. Incurring a brain injury in the crash, my father died of internal bleeding at the scene of the accident.

Starting that day, in the middle of an otherwise average week, we had to figure out how to survive without him. So many mouths to feed. So much responsibility to shoulder. I have always been more driven by anger than by fear, and my father’s death ignited a new fire within me: a fire that burned toward God. All of the typical questions flashed through my mind again and again: Why me? Where was God? Could it have been avoided? What if they’d taken a different route that day? Was it fate? Was fate real or was it just something we’d made up to cope with our helplessness in the face of reality? Was God real, or had we made Him up, too?

All of these questions boiled inside of me, but I couldn’t let them show because I didn’t want to disappoint my mom. While I was confused and angry, she became even more loving, patient, and grounded in God. In time, I would come to understand that real love cannot be made unloving by ill-treatment or misfortune. Everything, including unkindness and disregard, is oil to its flame. Love loves because it loves to love, not because something outside it was nice to it.

At that time, however, I had no room for such ideals. Anger and duty crowded out everything else. As I surveyed my options for supporting my family, taekwondo stood out as the obvious choice. I could channel my anger into my opponents and get paid for doing it. So, for the next six years, the activity that had been a serious hobby for me became a career. I became was a prizefighter in the truest sense of the word: I did it for the money. I traveled around the world, from one crowd of spectators to the next, sweating, punching, kicking, and bleeding to keep my family fed, clothed, and sheltered.

Several articles were published referring to me as the new face of taekwondo in Ghana. When I passed a particularly rigorous exam in South Africa at age 22, I became the youngest international taekwondo referee in all of Africa. However, my age prohibited me from reffing outside of Ghana, as international regulations stipulate a minimum age of 25. At 24, inspired by a vision of the future of taekwondo in Ghana, I formed my first LLC. My vision was to bring martial arts together in Ghana to form something like the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) in the United States. I did everything I could to gain acceptance for the idea, but it was not well received. Today, whenever I see the ongoing success of the UFC, I kick myself.

While I was doing all this fighting, investing in violence, my mom was still investing in love. Finally deciding to fulfill what she’d always felt was her calling in life, she went back to school to become a priest. I did my very best to support her so that she could focus on her studies, and after two years she began serving as a priest for the Evangelical People’s Presbyterian Church in Ghana. In a way, watching this process was like seeing a butterfly emerge from its cocoon. To my eye, the priestly stuff inside my mom was there long before she acquired the official credential. As one who has known her behind closed doors in every season, I believe that her qualifications were born out in the cauldron of her life far more than by obtaining a title.

Into The World

At 26, I stopped actively fighting in tournaments. The reason had ten little fingers and ten little toes. My mother named her Mone, which means “Mother.” Among the children of my siblings, Mone was the first daughter in the family, so she was a big deal for all of us. In my case, her arrival made me want to be more careful with my life. So no more competitions. But I still needed to support my mom and siblings, and now also my lovely little girl.

Owing somewhat to our loss of standing in Ghana, I found that I was able to earn more money in other countries than I could at home. So, much like when traveling from one tournament to the next, I would go wherever I could and make money however I could. I’d leave for Italy, Germany, Australia, or the U.S. and be gone for months at a time. Thanks to the way I was raised, I was able to create rapport with others everywhere I went. I worked at restaurants, parcel companies, and health care jobs. Sometimes I tutored people in martial arts. Other times, when I was able to enroll in classes at a community college, I did jobs around the campus. I always went home to visit, but then I would have to leave again.

As the arc of my journey was gradually leading me to put down roots in the U.S., my wife and daughter were both living with my mother. Even though my wife was there with her, for the first few years of her life, Mone was basically raised by my mom. Even amid all her other responsibilities, my mom always seemed to have room for one more. That’s just how she is. Love is in her blood.

As a young man trying to make my way in the world, some of the months abroad were quite dark for me. I had to make long-term decisions with no long-term stability. I didn’t know if I was doing it right. But whenever my mind was in a tailspin, I knew that I could call my mom. No matter what I was struggling with, she would talk me through it, and I would find myself again. Sometimes I didn’t have to call at all. I would simply picture my mother’s strength, and in my mind’s eye, I would see her telling me what she always told me: “You can do this, Anthony. God will show you the way.“

Speaking of God, my anger toward him eventually subsided, and my faith slowly revived. This, too, was a result of watching my mom’s example over the years. I know it sounds unrealistic, but the truth is, I literally never saw my mom angry. I never saw her lose her temper while raising a small army of children. I never saw her fly into a rage at the man who came home with other women’s babies. I never saw her lash out at him for the affairs — of which there were certainly more than those that produced children. (In all, my mother raised eight children from six other women.) Nor did I see her become resentful and bitter after my father’s death when all the people who had promised to be there for us were not.

Her ability to live this way was not a result of trying hard to be holy. She didn’t practice the kind of self-conscious self-sacrifice that makes people severe judges of those who do less. Such an approach never produces good fruit, but rather only strengthens the stronghold of self. My mom had that rare ability to attend not to her actions — serving appearances — but to her beliefs, which are the seed and root of all action. She believed in a God who loved her (and who loved everyone else just as much). This belief — because she truly believed it — governed the meaning of everything that came her way: it was all a gift from the One who loved her and had promised to help her see it through.

Slowly but surely, in one interaction after another, she ever so gently removed the cloudy scales from my eyes. I would come to her in a rage, yelling about some thorn in my side. She would let me yell and complain and yell some more. Then she would say, “Are you finished? Now let’s talk.” While I huffed and puffed and clenched my jaw, she would say, “God put you in this place for a reason. He is the only one who knows why you’re going through this.” Then she would tell me to read about someone in the Bible — Abraham or David or Peter — to show me that what I was going through had happened before. Usually, when she told me that, it would only fuel my anger. But I’d keep quiet, out of respect for her. When I finally cooled down enough to read the Bible passage, somehow it always brought me peace.

Such conversations were my lifeline while going through law school in Phoenix. In 2004, I moved my wife and daughter to live with me in Arizona, where I was attending law school. At that point, I was still trying to follow in my father’s footsteps, vocationally speaking. Silvia, my wife, had agreed to support me in my quest to become an attorney. In the beginning, she would sit with me and help me study. But before long, things started to come apart at the seams. The kids were too young, and I was chasing the goal so hard that I didn’t give my family enough time. Silvia came to see my education as the enemy. Looking back, I can see that without realizing it, I expected her to work the kind of miracles my mom had done so naturally: doing everything while needing nothing.

In the end, I wasn’t able to practice law as I had hoped, but I still pride myself in my many legal degrees. Through my mom’s encouragement, I found the strength to complete a master’s degree in criminal justice administration at the University of Phoenix, as well as a post-graduate legal certificate at Pima Community College. Although Sylvia and I battled it out for another 10 years, we finally went our separate ways in 2015. Today, I’m a single father of three beautiful children: Laura Mone Yaa, Anthony Makafui Kwame (Junior), and David Kwafo Kwame. Since my two sons and I were each born on a Saturday, we all share the traditional birth-name of Kwame.

Of One Spirit

While I was earning my degrees and growing my family in the States, my mom was still in Ghana, raising my younger siblings and coming to life more than ever before. As you can probably guess by this point, my mother is a born community-maker. I don’t recall a single day in Ghana when our home didn’t have guests because of her. People simply gravitate to her. They love to be near her warmth. I’m no exception. It may sound strange, but when I was traveling internationally, it was harder to be away from my mom than to be away from my wife.

Once, after getting home from Italy very late at night, people came knocking on our door at 5 a.m. I was so tired and grumpy, it was all I could do not to beat them with a stick. When I asked what they wanted, they said they were part of a Bible study group that prayed with my mom in the mornings. I told them, “I don’t care who you are! Unless you’re God, you’re not getting in my house at 5 a.m.!” After I went back to sleep, my mom probably let them in any way. She says it’s her calling to help such people, to make them happy, and to support those who need it. In the simplest terms, her life is a picture of prayer and sharing the word of God.

She now lives in Accra, the capital city, in a house that I built for her. When she goes out, although she could drive, she chooses to walk so that she can touch people: so that they see her as one of them. She walks in order to reach others right where they are. In a city of 4.5 million (roughly 60% Christian, 30% Muslim, and 10% traditional African religion) she is known to all as a peacemaker.

Her home is an unofficial refuge for countless people in her community. They come to her for help will all kinds of things, from the mediation of family problems to the taking of communion. Have you ever known anyone like this? The last book of the Bible describes believers as “priests and kings.” My mother reminds me of these ancient things: she is a motherly mixture of shaman and chieftain.

Even today, at 75 years old, after serving for 32 years as a teacher and 16 years as a priest, she still gets an average of 50 invitations per month to officiate weddings, funerals, and other occasions that call for a respected leader. Her volunteer work extends to all parts of Ghana, but the nature of the work varies with the needs of the people. Funerals, for example, are an occasion when Africans spend lots of money to honor the deceased. But my mother, wearing the traditional scalf and priestly collar, often performs these rites for free, just to help the grieving family.

For the living, it’s a shame that even people like my mom have to die someday. With a lifetime of wisdom and experience, she is such a valuable resource to the people around her. She has mastered every part of cultural African life; so much so that she is respected across cultural and religious lines. It would be impossible to measure her impact on society. Some of the children she inspired as students in her classroom are now doctors, lawyers, and other professionals throughout Ghana and around the world.

Another woman whose positive impact will be sorely missed is my mom’s older sister, Mrs. Rose Mortagbe. My aunt Rose is another incarnation of the same spirit as my mother. Through each of the trials I’ve mentioned, she has been a pillar of support in our lives. As strong as my mother is, I don’t think we would have made it without Rose. She was there for us not only personally but financially as well. Once, when I needed money to travel while supporting my family, she gave me $2000, nearly all of the money in her bank account.

In her own work, Mrs. Mortagbe has sent hundreds of girls to educational programs in the United States. The girls then return to Ghana and contribute to the improvement of our country. Unlike most of our other relatives, Rose was there for our family after my father’s death, and continued to be there for us through the deaths and burials of three of my siblings.

Battling Bereavement

Although this is not the place to chronicle the details surrounding each of my sisters’ deaths, I will share a bit about the third and hardest death. I hope it goes without saying that my mom loved each of her daughters dearly — including the three who are no longer with us, all of whom were hers not by blood but by choice. If her affection during their lives hadn’t adequately shown her love, her pain at their passing left no doubt. As any bereaved mother could attest, the death of one’s child is like watching in utter helplessness as part of your soul and years of your life wash down the drain into a place you cannot follow.

Justina was the ninth child in our family and the older of two daughters from one of my father’s affairs. As she grew up under my mother’s care, she developed a sweetness that endeared her to all of us. To this day, if someone mentions Justina when we are together, our eyes well up with tears. In a spiritual sense, she was almost more my mother’s child than I am. She absorbed my mother’s way of caring for others and added her own unique flavor to it. She was, indeed, the darling of the family. Everyone knew it, and, simply because she was so disarming and lovable, no one contested it. We loved to love her.

Isn’t it amazing that a person can fall in love with the product of a relationship they are supposed to hate? I think this part of my mom’s life is another window into the power of belief. If my mom had been someone else, she could easily have rejected Justina and all the others. She could have reviled the women, the children, the man, and the universe that could cast such insults in her face. She could have pled her case — and she would have been right! But instead, she got something so much better than being right. Because she believed in love, love is what she got. Her belief in love not only redeemed what the world regards as an unconscionable cancer (infidelity) but from the cancer itself, brought forth goodness and light.

As I said at the beginning, you’ve never known anyone like my mom.

There is another happy result of my mother’s love, but it’s not one that anyone could have predicted. My mother really loved my father. For all his faults, she was still drawn to him as a man, as a lover, as a person. Perhaps she even saw that his faults were the flip-side of qualities that she admired, such that decapitating his vices would have slain his virtue as well. In any case, my point is this: In the days when these little bundles of my father showed up on our doorstep, no one could have known that he would be gone in a few short years. And yet in choosing to embrace his misbegotten children, my mom had drawn to herself parts of him that she could hold even after he was gone.

Some of those parts are now gone, too.

By the time Justina died, my mom had officiated many funerals in her role as a minister and priest. Although she did not perform the funeral service when the first two girls passed (in 2008 and 2012), she did officiate Justina’s service. Not only had there been a certain x-factor in my mom’s relationship with Justina, but after having buried her husband and two other daughters, she was becoming something of a veteran on the civilian battleground. Even so, as she stood there behind the lectern in August of 2020, guiding others in the grieving process, she was wrestling with demons of her own.

As you know by now, my mother is a woman of uncommon faith. But despite her love for God and her certainty of his love for us, the deaths in our family have exposed a raw nerve in her. She considers the death of my father and my half-sisters to be the result of a curse on our family — a curse rooted in the shame of infidelity. This, more than anything else, has strained and challenged her faith in God’s goodness. It’s not that she doubts the righteousness of God’s judgments (if you believe in a good and perfect God, it follows that He is justified in all He does). The struggle comes from the desire to continue serving God out of love rather than out of fear. The demons she battles are those that whisper, He does not love you, He does not see you, He does not want you. Here’s your proof.

To some extent, I think it has to be this way with titans of the faith. In whatever sense demons are real, they are not entities that can simply stand by while people like my mom untie their knots and destroy their victories. Only hearts of faith can douse their fiery darts. What an odd thing human life is: a battle of heart, mind, and soul, played out in a realm of bodies and marriage and a final curtain waiting for us all.

Entrepreneur After All

Sadly, I wasn’t able to make it home for Justina’s memorial service, due to travel restrictions. I was then, and still am today, living in Tucson, Arizona, running several businesses while completing my doctoral dissertation at Grand Canyon University. For the record, the doctoral process has given me a new respect for the degree. The process has been an absolute nightmare — one that, in my opinion, no amount of bragging rights could ever justify. So if you’re considering it, consider well, my friend.

As you may recall, I said above that while I was growing up, my parents always had a side-hustle. Following their example, I told myself that no matter what I’m doing in life, I will have some kind of business to support myself and my family. Over the years, I’ve developed several startups to varying degrees of success. These include a martial arts program, a taxi and shuttle service, a tour agency, packing and shipping supplies, an adult care home, a limo service, a fitness program, and an after-school program. Today, we even have a foundation (The Akator Foundation) that donates tablets and computers to daycares.

I’m always on the lookout for ways to implement the kind of open-hearted generosity that I learned from my mom. One way I have been able to do this is by letting my taekwondo students live with me for free. In this way, whether living in Ghana or the U.S., I’ve been able to share my home and my food with others during a period of need.

While this practice has brought much good into my life, it has also taught me the sting of the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” For example, one of the students who lived with me in Ghana for ten years told stories about me that contributed to my divorce. Another time, two young Ghanaian entrepreneurs came to me for help starting a clothing boutique. Later, they surreptitiously forced me out of the business that I helped them start, voluntarily, with my own capital.

They say, “Once burned, twice shy.” If so, being twice burned has doubled my wariness again. I now choose not to do business with people from my home country. For some reason, we haven’t yet embraced the basic ethos that makes free-market operations possible and sustainable. The pirate mentality has to go before it’s safe for anyone to build wealth. That is one of the things I admire about the United States and the rest of the developed world. Yes, materialism and greed have their pitfalls, but they are the growing pains of progress, not the desperation that colors universal scarcity.

If I sound like a political policy theorist, it’s because I am. I really care about the conditions necessary for people to thrive. As audacious as it may sound, I believe that I may hold political office one day. Possibly even president. This, of course, is all because I have a mom who believed — and still believes — that I can do anything, and that good things are always on the road ahead.

Epilogue

Now you know how a little girl from the Volta Valley region became one of the unsung pillars of our capital city. She lived her life before God in the secret place far more than she lived it before man. Her impulse to share God’s love has changed its expression throughout her life, from baked goods and donuts in her younger years to mentoring, coaching, and counseling now in her latter days.

My mother has had a very full life, fuller than this account contains, to be sure. Many particulars (her period of service in Russia, for example) have been omitted in the interest of highlighting others. She is a fathomless person whose example we would do well to emulate. She’s like a rock wrapped in velvet: firm, solid, and principled, but also gentle, patient, and sensitive. She understands what people need in order to bring about their own changes of heart and attitude.

I’m afraid my mother will not like this book. (Are you still reading this, mom? Did you make it through to the end?) For me, the point of this book is to honor my mom and to bless others with a true story of something good in this world. For my mom, she would want a book about her life to further the same goal that her life was devoted to. Just as she dedicated her strength and her breath to making God known, so she would want the telling of her life to point to Him.

Since I credit my mother with my success, and she credits God with hers, I suppose I have to credit God, too. In this same spirit, she would want me to assure you that she is nothing in herself. If she has shone with any brightness, it is a brightness that has shone through her or reflected off of her. Her one small role, if any, has been to let that light fall on her face when she was tempted to hide behind hate and fear. Just as Jesus has whispered in the pages of Scripture for two millennia, the rest has taken care of itself.

Mom, I love you more than even all these words can say.