“I’ll beat you!” she said, sizing me up while I punched the focus mitts. She grabbed her wrinkled yellow hand wraps, winding them around her knuckles. She looked young, no more than a teenager, her hair shorn, her body all muscle and bone, as she shadow boxed close enough I could smell her—a mixture of Shea butter soap and sweat on damp skin. I was a white woman in her world: a neighborhood boxing gym, tucked away on a clay red dirt road beside a polluted stream snaking its way along the railroad tracks in Accra, Ghana.
Those were my daughter’s first words to me.
She wasn’t my daughter yet. Neither of us could have imagined the future on that hot November day: how often we would train together, sparring, a pounding fury of feet against pavement, fists against bags, and gloved fists landing on each other’s jaws, breasts, and bellies. All that energy brought us closer together, forging something like family, until the day the judge at the Cocoa Affairs Court on High Street pronounced me legally her mother three years later.
At age 46, I thought I had long ago missed my chance at motherhood. “It’s ok,” I told myself. “I’m not the mothering type.”
My friends concurred. “If you really wanted a baby, you’d have married a man who wanted more kids.” My stepdaughters confirmed my shortcomings. “I like earth mothers,” my older stepdaughter said, after I smashed an offending cockroach with my hand. “You’re not like that.”
She was right. I did not like talking about my feelings. I hated yoga. School bake sales intimidated me. I could not sew. I did not fit the maternal stereotype—so how could I be a mother?
Then I met Grace. “Fast hands, Grace, but who you gonna fight? You’re a girl!” the men teased. In a sea of men’s sweat-soaked bodies, we stuck together, round after round, practicing our drills: jab, cross, roll, and hook, over and over again. We fought. We fought again and again.
She started to call me Auntie. I asked her if she was in school. She wasn’t: No one to pay the fees. She lived in a tiny room with a corrugated tin roof behind the gym: free, with boxing lessons, in exchange for washing floors, bathrooms, and piles of mildewing towels.
I started worrying about her. “Do you want to go to school?” I asked.
She moved in with us so she could go to school. Wrapping her in a new bath towel, I noticed scars down her back.
One morning I came down to the kitchen to prepare coffee. She was frying an egg. “Mommy,” she said. I paused. “I dreamt about a big, scary man trying to hurt me. But you fought him, Mommy, you fought him and he ran away.”
I held her tight. I still don’t bake cakes or make Halloween costumes. But I’m in her corner. I’d fight anyone who threatens my daughter. Call me Mom.
