Goodbye Reckless

"Amina, I'm getting married."

That's when it all began, that phone call changed my life.

"Of course you are Papa," I said attempting to humour him.

"Amina I'm being perfectly serious."

Now usually when my father said he was being serious he meant exactly the opposite. He was always the kind of Dad who would practice his evil laughs with you when you were eight, or who buy you that t-shirt which Mum said looked tacky when you were going through your rebellious teenager phase. But when it came to marriage I guess I had to attempt and take this side of my father seriously.

My mother died when I was five. She is a vague memory in my mind, merely a shadow of a woman I can never really reach, wrapped up in a scent of lavender and homemade lemon muffins, which my father is incapable of baking.

My father has been married four times.

Not including my mother.

His first wife was Cecilia Hampton, my favourite 'mother' whom my father married when I was 5. She was a pretty brunette who frequented the same classy American Abercrombie and Fitch stereotyped world that runs in accordance with her surname. From this marriage there is only one child called Ryan, born shortly in the first year of their nine-year marriage which ended just after Ryan's ninth birthday and when I was 14.

His second wife was a blonde Russian bombshell named Svetlana with a surname that I cannot even pronounce, who had a fetish for fur coats. The only evidence that this marriage of a year and three quarters really ever existed is the set of blonde and happy tyrannical twin girls of 9 years old at present.

The third wife Elaine Richards, a British interior designer; who already had an adopted girl from Uganda called Precious. This marriage lasted a record breaking four months when she got bored of my father and ran off with a NASA astronaut, leaving Precious with my father.

The forth wife was a woman from my father's native land: Germany. A businesswoman who went against every German stereotype: she never drank beer, was a vegan, didn't drive a BMW or a Mercedes Benz and especially; she refused to wear Birkenstocks. Her name was Vera Wiesner. They lasted for almost two years, maybe it was because she was German or maybe it was because she was constantly on business trips that they never got to spend enough time with each other to realise what the other was really like.

So at 22 years old I already had a half bother and two half sisters and an adopted sister, four stepmothers and a lonely father who had four divorces behind him and had never really gotten over the death of my mother.

My mother was American, she went to Germany on a school trip when she was in the last year of high school studying German, and in Berlin she met my father. My father has always been talented when it came to languages, having spent a year in England to improve his English, so this way he was able to understand my hysterical mother who had gotten lost in the city maze of Berlin and was separated from her friends unable to find her way back to where she was supposed to be.

And from there the romance blossomed. Letter's and long phone calls kept them close once my mother had to return to America. My father had promised to fly out to America once he got a job, which through some utter miracle he did.

America always was the ideal for my father, so he flew over in high hopes of the American Dream and once in Chicago, where my mother lived, opened his own small book-publishing house.

It was enough to win over the heart of my mother's parents, seeing the dedication with which my father worked in order to please my mother and prove his worth in being able to secure their lives together.

Grandfather Joe and Grandmother Catherine were thrilled and a year and a half later the wedding bells rang and so Kate Glenway became Kate Sanders. A year later I added to the already joyful family portrait, blabbing away in a mix of English and German; two languages that would always be present in my life each as fluent as the other.

My parents never left the honeymoon period, staying in their puppy love phase until the very last day when my mother was in a hit and run accident.

I remember only certain parts of that day. Instead of Mama picking me up from school it was Grandma Catherine who looked very pale and pained. She explained with as much patience as she could to the five year old me that Mama was in hospital after a bad accident.

I was allowed to see her that afternoon. Tubes were everywhere and she looked very bruised and blue. She wasn't awake and apparently she couldn’t hear anything. In my childish innocence I insisted that she could, I told her I loved her and I promised I would look after Papa.

A promise I have yet to break.

She died two hours later.

My father never really got over it and the loneliness in my opinion brought about the crazed obsession of marrying.

When I was seventeen my father's forth marriage to Vera had been annulled and from that point in time my father remained the most eligible bachelor in Chicago.

He held this title with blissful pride, for five years until I was twenty-two.

It was three weeks after my twenty-second birthday party that the phone call came.

It was from then that nothing stayed quite the same.