We Eloped to Accra, Then Had to Tell Both Mothers

Then the quotes came in.

Between the hall, the caterer, the decorator and the aso ebi coordinator my cousin insisted on, the total was larger than the deposit on the flat we had been trying to buy for two years. We sat at my kitchen table one night in March, with the quotes spread between the plantain chips, and Dami said very softly, “Do we want a wedding, or do we want to be married?”

I did not answer for a long time. Then I said, “Married.”

The idea

Neither of us can say whose idea Accra was. I had been once for work and kept talking about a small beach in Labadi where I had watched the evening fishermen pulling in nets. Dami had a friend in Accra who knew a registrar. By the end of that week we had booked flights, two nights in a guesthouse, and a Saturday morning slot at the registry.

We told no one. That was the rule we made, and it was the part I regret most and the part I would do again.

I packed a dress I had bought online for a friend’s engagement, simple ivory, with sleeves. Dami packed a navy suit and a pair of brown shoes he had polished the night before, twice. I bought a small bunch of flowers at the airport in Lagos, and they were wilting by the time we landed, so a woman at the guesthouse replaced them with hibiscus from her garden.

The day

I want to describe the ceremony properly, because it was so small it can be forgotten if I do not.

The registry was a cool room with a ceiling fan and a plastic plant. Our two witnesses were the registrar’s assistant, a young woman named Abena, and the guesthouse owner, who had come in her church clothes because she said a wedding is a wedding. The registrar read in a slow, clear voice. When she reached “in sickness and in health,” Dami’s hand, which had been steady all morning, began to shake. I held it with both of mine.

We were married in eleven minutes. I counted afterwards because Abena timed it on her phone and showed us, laughing.

Afterwards we walked to the beach in Labadi. The fishermen were there, as I remembered, and a group of children playing football on wet sand. Someone was selling grilled plantain and groundnuts. Dami bought two bags and we sat on a low wall in our wedding clothes, eating from paper, while the sea came in slowly.

A man walking past with a bucket of fish stopped and said, “You are newly married?”

“Yes,” I said.

He put down his bucket, raised both arms and said something in Ga that I did not understand but that was clearly a blessing. Then he picked up the bucket and went on.

I have been to grand weddings with three hundred guests and I have never felt more blessed than I did in those ten seconds.

The silence

For a week after we came home, we told nobody. I know how that sounds. I know it was unfair to them.

We kept the rings in a drawer. We went back to our separate flats. We lived like two people hiding something wonderful, which is exactly what we were. Dami called me every night, and each time one of us nearly said it, and neither of us did.

Then my mother called on a Thursday and said, “Why have you been avoiding my calls?”

I said, “Mummy, I have something to tell you.”

The calls

I will not describe the call word for word. I will tell you that my mother was quiet for twenty seconds, which for her is a long time, and that she then said, in a voice I had never heard, “Did I do something to you?”

That question went through me. In my head, I had been protecting our savings, our peace and our sanity. In her head, I had decided my mother could not be trusted with the most important day of my life.

I told her about the quotes, and the flat, and the kitchen table. I told her about the fishermen and the plantain and the stranger with the bucket. I told her it was never about excluding her. It was that every time I pictured the big wedding, I saw a performance, and every time I pictured the registry, I saw us.

She said nothing for a while. Then she said, “I wish you had let me cry in advance.”

Dami’s mother took it differently. She laughed, then prayed over the phone for ten minutes, then asked whether we had eaten. She said, “You have saved your father a lot of money, and God will repay you.”

What came after

Two months later we held a small thanksgiving at my parents’ house. Sixty people, jollof, small chops and a cake my mother ordered in secret. She had planned to be upset at the party and she was not. She stood to give a toast and said, “My child married the way she wanted, on a beach, with nobody to impress. I am learning from her.”

She did not say she had forgiven us. She did not need to. She spent most of the party showing my aunties the photographs Abena had taken at the registry.

I will not tell you that eloping is the answer. It cost us something. My mother still brings up the “wedding I did not attend” when she wants to win an argument, and my sister told me I robbed her of a bridesmaid dress she had already saved for.

But I will say this. We had a marriage before we had a wedding, and that changed how I planned everything after. When the thanksgiving came, I did not care about the napkins. I cared about who was in the room.

If you are standing at your own kitchen table with the quotes, ask the question Dami asked me. Do you want a wedding, or do you want to be married? Both are valid. Just know that you will have to answer to your mother, and that the conversation will take longer than eleven minutes.