Halfway house.

I’m the youngest of 3 children. I have 2 half brothers. I do not advocate for step families. No offence if you came from one, but that is a situation where everyone loses.

My dad had 2 sons. It never matters when it is supposed to matter, but always matters when it shouldn’t

Let me break that down for you.

My dad passed away in on the 22nd July 2021 at 3am. Before 5pm that same day my eldest brother was sending his little siblings screenshots of documents he’d forged saying that dad left him property and as a result he should be allowed to come to England to oversee the funeral. Please bear in mind that by this point my dad wasn’t even fully cold, and appreciate that my brother was sending us documents that showed him personally stealing our birth right from us. By this point we still expected our dad to split everything evenly.

Then comes the funeral. I was privileged to pay 1/3 of the cost of my dad’s funeral. My elder brother, who’d spent a tonne of money getting to the UK contributed too. I appreciate the hell out of it. The one that sent us fraudulent documents instead of asking how we were coping? 0 dollars and 0 cents.

Now my dad needs a tombstone. I am privileged to be able to contribute again. I’m paying for half. Why? Because it was my expensive ass that wanted a tombstone better than anyone else’s tombstone for my dad. He was an incredible man and this is my last act of love. So it has to be special for him. Seeing as I can’t send him on holiday to Germany for his 75th or buy him an Audi. Yes I had legit plans to do both those things for his 75th. The man merely needed to give me 4 years to save. But God called him home.

So I need to talk about my relationship with my eldest brother, start to finish. Starting at birth and finishing in the present day.

Birth.

I am 15 years and 4 days younger than my eldest brother Leslie. Which means he has been an adult my entire memory of life. And my earliest memories of my dad are of him standing at the phone in the living room, livid as hell at something or other my brother had done. Things didn’t change until dad died. A regret of mine is that when dad got Laryngeal cancer the first time I should have thought that cancer of the voice box could have only come from a man who had spent 20+ years furiously correcting his eldest child. The writing was on the wall. They said that laryngeal cancer sufferers are 90% smokers, and 10% bad luck. My dad fell into the “bad luck category” but it didn’t need to be that way. Leslie brought this on us.

The first memory was when Charlie (the other brother) was turning 16. The British government had a scheme to ensure families were reunited providing the youngest one was under 16. My dad was in the race against the clock to get them both to the UK…Then Leslie sabotaged it.

Then the war broke out. They had to go to Guinea, then Ghana. My cousin did something monumentally stupid and stole a motorbike. Then my elder brother did the same thing a few years later. My cousin got deported for it. My brother just got beaten up for it.

Then there was smoking, drugs (no idea what kind) the drinking and big friends. All because my dad funded his lifestyle.

Then, when I was 13 there was the famous “I’m not a refugee” speech. Which never did make him go get a job. Finally, he met a woman and had 4 kids with her. Those kids became a noose around my dads’ neck as he couldn’t let them starve for lack of father. My brother on the other hand, was perfectly content to let them starve. My dad paid for the eldest grandchild to go to school until he died.

Then there was the stealing. Name 5 people in the world my brother hasn’t stollen from. Seriously.

His uncle in law when the kids were young paid his rent for a year $5,000 in a nice neighbourhood in Ghana so he could get a good job and his kids could grow up stable. So he skipped the country rather than pay them back. They went to Liberia.

He stole from his best friend from school. Alex, (the same one he believes will pay for him to go to England) he stole from the Liberian government, he stole from my cousin Ethan who provided him a house for 4 years whilst he abandoned his children. He stole from my dad 3 times tens of thousands of pounds in fraudulent selling of my dad’s property, whilst he was still alive. He was floored by dad’s decision to cut him out of the will. Then there has been 3 bouts of fraudulent rehab when he’s requested thousands for rehabs he’d never been to. Ditto for fraudulent courses.  He stole and stole and stole, he abandoned his kids for 4 years at a time and has abandoned them again. His disfunction is truly breath-taking. It came from a place of pain when dad didn’t send for him and Charlie first. Dad sent for Ethan and Amelia first. He used that pain as a rod to beat the entire family with for almost 30 years.

But I have good memories too. He did call for a few days after dad passed. When I was a small child I’d email him and Charlie and Adam in Ghana when the internet was in its infancy and he’d go to internet café’s and read the emails of his baby sister and respond as if I actually made sense.

We do remember birthdays and when the family turned their back on him after the funeral, I stuck up for him out of humanity.

The tale of my eldest brother is one of what happens when you let pain consume you. You never heal and you leave a trail of destruction everywhere you go. Please use his as a cautionary tale.

Grace and Courage.

Annetta Mother-Smith.