As we grow, so many things in our lives change, and one thing that always accompanies maturity is responsibility. There's no escaping it as you grow older, different ages simply bring different burdens. I remember my first day at school clearly. I was very small, younger than the other children there. My mother took me to that kindergarten herself; I'd never been away from home in an unfamiliar place before. I knew the teacher, since she was a family friend I often saw at home, and I remember a neighbor boy who was also starting that day. I assumed my mother would stay and attend class with me. I was shocked when she left. Those were the days when I was still milk-fed, and this was one more step away from that. My mother meant the whole world to me, and I cried loudly when she walked out. The teacher told me all sorts of gentle lies to calm me down, and eventually I settled and told myself: whatever comes, I'll face it.
Around ten that morning I was taken to my first class, full of strange faces. I'd found some comfort in the teacher's words, and I knew our two families, so I felt a little secure, but sitting in a room of strangers was still hard. I asked her to take me back to my mother. She told me my mother was coming back for me, and pointed me to a seat next to a small girl I didn't want to sit with. She moved me to another seat, this time next to a girl who was kind to me. In our system, I was joining the baby class, where most of the other children were already older than me, some by quite a bit. The teacher introduced me to the room: "This is our new member, my son Andrew. From today, he's part of this class." I felt relaxed knowing she'd be my teacher, until, to my surprise, she left the room, and I couldn't stay behind. I grabbed my bag and followed her, other children laughing that I was too young to understand. She turned, saw me trailing her, and told me to go back to class. I told her I wanted to be with her.
She had another class to teach (the middle class, between the top class and the baby class) so she let me follow her there and sat me next to another girl. She handed out books, gave me one too, assuming I knew nothing since it was my first day. She asked if I knew my name. I told her, and she asked me to write it down. To everyone's surprise, at not yet three years old, I wrote my full name and already knew some of what she was teaching. Afterward she took me to her office, gave me tea, and asked if I'd liked the class and would want to join it properly. I said yes. She asked if I'd ever been to school before. I told her no. Where did I learn to write my name, then? My mother taught me, I said. And the alphabet, also my mother. There was no turning back after that: on my very first day, I'd skipped ahead a class.
School always ended around midday for the youngest children, so it was about a quarter past twelve when my mother came to collect me. I was happy to see her again. The teacher told her I was intelligent and thanked her for all she'd already taught me at home. The next day, I was placed in the headmistress's office, since she was really the only person at that school I felt comfortable with, and it turned out she taught all three classes there, baby, middle, and top, and wherever she went, I went too. I was still barely more than a toddler among children who hadn't even started talking yet, but I was already past that stage. By my next morning I was sitting in with the top class, and even there I could follow some of what was taught, though my handwriting lagged behind the older pupils'. My first exams were the middle-class exams, that same term; by the second and third terms, I was sitting the top-class exams and placing among the best five. People were baffled, kindergarten was meant to take three years, and I'd done it in one. Even I could hardly believe it.
From then on I was often surrounded by people much older than me. As my former classmates moved up to middle class the following year, I moved on to primary school entirely, an unbelievable thing to everyone, including my own family. There had always been something unusual about my development: I spoke my first words at only a few months old, which worried people, since that isn't normal for a baby that young. I started walking around one year old, also unusually early. My mother, I think, sometimes wondered what exactly she'd given birth to. That pattern of surprises followed me through school. In Uganda, primary education usually takes seven years; I finished mine in five, and I still don't fully know how. By the time I reached secondary school, I was five years ahead of schedule. I enjoyed learning for its own sake (social studies was always my favorite) but the faster my growth moved, the faster my responsibilities had to grow to match it.
I remember going to the bank with my mother once. She told me to pay attention to everything, what was being done, and where. She knew I had a memory that didn't easily let things go. On the way out she asked if I'd understood what happened inside. I told her I was sure. She pressed me, was I really sure? I said yes, not realizing that every time I said it, I was quietly taking a little more responsibility off her shoulders. Then one holiday, when she wasn't feeling well, she asked if I could deposit money into her account for her. I said I'd try. And then came what I now think of as her poetry: "Andrew, however young you are, never believe in trying, because the more you think you're trying, the more likely you are to fail. Just do it, without a second thought." That was a hard sentence for a seven-year-old to sit with. She handed me the money and her account number on a slip of paper and sent me to the bank.
At the door, a policeman peppered me with questions. I told him I'd come to deposit money. He laughed and asked my age. Seven, I said, and he told me to go home. I told him, respectfully, that I was there to deposit my mother's money. He said I was too young for a bank, which, fairly, I was, young, short, and small. He handed me off to a customer care attendant, who asked if I understood what I was saying. I told her yes; she asked if I'd ever done this before. Once, I said, watching my mother do it, so I knew how. She asked where my mother was; I told her she was home, unwell. She gave me a deposit slip to fill in, and because my mother kept these same forms at home, I'd already practiced filling one out before I even left the house. She helped me carry the money to the counter, then gave me a sweet and told me how impressive I was. I went home not knowing that, having passed this test, I was destined for far bigger responsibilities than I could have imagined at that age.
When I got home, my mother thanked me and told me that from then on, this would be my job whenever I was home from school. I agreed, and slowly, responsibility kept accumulating on my shoulders, by twelve, I was already carrying a fair amount; by eighteen, a great deal. I loved it, in a way. It kept me disciplined and made me more ambitious than I'd otherwise have been.
This is how love behaves too, I think. When it's young, it's like an infant waiting to be spoon-fed. As it grows, it demands more responsibility, and real sacrifices have to be made to keep it alive. When I was young, love asked nothing of me. Slowly that changed, first it was just wanting to see Elizabeth at school, and a glance across the room was enough. Then, as the relationship grew, the responsibility grew with it: I had to make time to talk to her every day, which for a while I managed well. Later still came the responsibility of actually meeting, in person, to talk, harder than it sounds, given everything else pulling at my time. I had to make real sacrifices for that, and there were stretches when I failed. Appointments were missed (more than I'd like to admit) and I found myself constantly explaining, constantly trying to be understood, the way any relationship demands once it grows serious: every wrong thing you do needs an honest account of it, or doubt creeps in on both sides.
There was a period when I nearly lost her over exactly this, missed appointments, mostly. She grew distant, cooler, and told me plainly that someone else had entered her life. I respected the decision, even as I understood I was now fighting from the ground up to win my way back into it. I played it carefully, never once letting her know I was aware of who'd taken my place, working instead simply to be present in her life as a friend. It was one of the quietest, longest battles I've fought, three years of patient, undeclared effort, never showing my hand. I'd spent seven years in one community without saying a single unnecessary word to anyone there, so I knew how to hold something back. But holding this back was harder, because she was the person I'd actually loved, and pretending otherwise, even as a friend, cost me more than it looked like from the outside.
Slowly, as my mother always said time would, the truth settled. She came to see that however young and clumsy I'd once been about it, my feelings had always been real. Some of what I said still struck her (and others) as strange; my life, my path through school, sounded almost invented, like a tale, though every word of it was true. From there I did what I could, and it worked: we found our way back to each other, and this time I understood that the earlier version of us had been built on shaky ground. I set about building it on something steadier. I felt, for a while, like the happiest person alive, like recovering something I'd genuinely lost, the particular relief of getting back what you thought was gone for good, and never wanting to risk losing it again.
Time helped, too. We'd both grown past the high-school version of this, both past eighteen now, both more able to understand and treat each other with real care. We knew what we wanted from our lives, could see a future forming, knew what sacrifices it would ask of us. Transparency became the foundation of everything between us. Even in stretches when we barely spoke, we understood why, and every conversation circled back to what the future held for both of us, we even prayed for each other's futures whenever either of us went to church, an idea she embraced as much as I did, and it only strengthened what we had. There were still times I got frustrated and made mistakes, but forgiveness always came quickly. She'd tell me there was nothing to forgive, though I always felt I owed something back when I'd been in the wrong. Her phone would sometimes be off for reasons she'd later explain, and an apology would follow, and I understood, my mother had always told me that a good relationship is built on forgiveness and understanding, in equal measure.
For a long time I believed responsibility was tied only to personal growth. I saw the same pattern in animals, even: puppies become dogs, and the responsibilities that once belonged to their mothers slowly become their own, until eventually they learn to survive without her at all. Love works the same way. Teenage love, especially high school love, is unsettling precisely because everything in it feels beautiful and uncomplicated at first. As two people grow up together, though, things shift, you start listening more, caring less about the sweet, easy words (though they still matter) and more about the actual foundation you're building the relationship on. That's the point where couples who aren't naturally inclined toward that kind of care can start to drift, because they assume everything will simply continue on its own. It's here that many relationships quietly begin to break, simply from a failure to keep renewing what they have, and everything, love included, needs renewal once the easy words run out.
I knew Elizabeth well enough to think I understood exactly what she would and wouldn't do, and she still managed to surprise me. One surprise I'll never forget was a Christmas message she sent me on the 24th of December, 2009, the only Christmas message she'd ever sent me in all the years I'd known her:
"This message will xplode in 5 seconds...
:05 04 03 02 01
((((BOOM))))
=MERRY:- X-MAS &
A HAPPY....NEW
YEAR > God bless you."
I'd never known her to be the type for something like that, she was intelligent, strong academically, and I'll admit, when it came to schoolwork, better than me. But creatively, socially, that side of her rarely showed itself; that side was mine. So when I read this message, I read it slowly, turning over every part of it. "This message will explode in five seconds", our love, I decided, was about to become impossible to ignore. The five-second countdown was five years, the length of time since we'd first met. Counting down from five to one traced each of those years, arriving at 2009 as, in my reading, a year that belonged to love. The stars in the message meant she saw herself as her own kind of star, meeting me as an equal. Christmas, as always, was a time to set aside whatever had happened between us. And the new year, wrapped up in that exaggerated "BOOM," held all the love still waiting to be shared, with us, and with everyone around us. "God bless you" felt like an acknowledgment that our relationship had survived every hardship by the grace of something larger than either of us.
For someone I'd always assumed had little interest in that kind of creativity, she'd proven me wrong. To most people it would have read as an ordinary chain message. To me, it was one of those rare messages a person sends only once in a lifetime. My mother had always thought of me most around the end of the year, and since she'd passed, that particular kind of attention had been missing from my life. Over the years, my inbox filled up every December with holiday messages from friends, but one person had always been conspicuously absent from that pile: Elizabeth. Reading her message finally arrive felt like being lifted somewhere entirely else.
It answered a lot of the questions I'd carried for years, and it brought back something my mother once told me during one of our private conversations: that the busiest, most rushed times are exactly when people stop thinking clearly. She used to ask me why there are so many accidents during Christmas, Easter, and the other holidays that pull families together, and answer it herself: because people are trying to reach their loved ones, and time never quite stretches to meet that need, so people rush, and rushing is where mistakes happen. "Andrew, my most treasured jewel, I love you very much, and that's why every December 4th, I think only of you, because that day reminds me of everything you mean to my life. Please, Andrew, never let me down, or let down the people who love you. We rarely have money or gifts to give, but never let down those who care for you." She told me this, and I could see she was close to tears. "How many people have wished you happy birthday so far?" It was already the 24th, and the honest answer was none. "They don't care about you the way they claim to," she said.
That conversation was the last time we sat down and talked about something that serious. The next time we spoke, she was on her deathbed, asking me to always respect my aunt, telling me she was someone I could lean on for everything. Many people had loved me, she said, but few had actually cared, and she was grateful for the ones who had. Elizabeth sent me that Christmas message twenty days after my birthday, and I remembered my mother's words from that same date, sitting under a tree in our small compound that no longer stands. Elizabeth loved and cared for me, I understood then, in a way that's rare where I come from, that kind of quiet, deliberate creativity. I felt like crying, though I was happy at the same time. Thinking about my mother has never come easily, especially at Christmas, when every word she'd once said carried extra weight, she often spoke in something close to parable, and it sometimes took me years afterward to understand what she'd meant. She used to tell me not to worry if I didn't understand her right away: by eighteen, she said, I'd understand everything she'd told me since I was two years old. She asked me to pray she'd still be there when that day came. She wasn't. By the time I turned eighteen, she was already gone. I believe she watches over me still, and over Elizabeth too, and thanks God for helping shape the life I've had, because shaping a life is not an easy or quick thing to do, especially for someone like me, prone to holding people I feel superior to at arm's length.
I've been an inspiration to people without meaning to. A friend once told me she'd nearly given up on her education until she heard my story, and it pushed her back into school; today she's built a life for herself because of it. I've watched that happen more than once. And yet, even while inspiring others, I was quietly falling apart myself, caught between the past and an uncertain future, overwhelmed by responsibility I hadn't asked for but couldn't put down. I'd leave home in the morning, go to the Orthodox church for my duties, come home hoping to rest, and instead find someone needing something from me, advice, help, a favor. In every community I've lived in, I've ended up at the center of things, sought out to help sort out other people's problems, even though my age rarely matched the weight people put on me. People respected me to the point of fearing me; even now, when I ask old friends why, they say I was too quiet, too hard to start a conversation with. I understand it. I'm an analytical person by nature, something my mother trained into me deliberately: always study a new environment fully before acting, whatever that takes.
The more I pushed myself, the more worn down I became, and by then my mother wasn't there anymore to help carry any of it. Even the people I might have leaned on mostly wanted something from me in return, respect that, over time, curdled into a kind of fear, or worse, indifference dressed up as care. I was barely twenty, already carrying weight that had nothing to do with my age. Physically I was still a teenager; mentally, I was already an adult. It was around this point that Elizabeth came fully into my life, and thinking about her gave the constant noise of other people's problems somewhere to rest. My heart, full of everyone else's hard stories, found room for something lighter when I thought of her. Every Sunday at church I prayed three things: to live my life in service of others, for Elizabeth, and for myself, and looking back now at where I've come from, I can say plainly that some things I once thought impossible have happened, one by one.
Many people told me I'd never end up with Elizabeth, and there were times I believed them. I look back now at what I'd call the golden days, when people called me an over-ambitious boy who'd amount to nothing, and I laugh. I remember the arguments, the misunderstandings between us, and laugh at those too, because today we understand each other in a way that once felt impossible, back when I genuinely thought she might simply be too much for me. I think about the people I've known since (ministers, bishops, cardinals, ambassadors) and the friends I've lost along the way, and I'm grateful, even for the losses, because hope carried me from the back streets of Kampala to rooms with people like that. And even while others saw a success story in me, I still had unfinished work inside myself: I'd inspired people without managing to inspire myself, weighed down by responsibility I hadn't chosen. Even my aunt, who I turned to and loved deeply after my mother died, couldn't quite reach that part of me. It took another person named Elizabeth doing that instead, and that, I think, is the power of love: it turns hopeless situations hopeful, lifts up what's been pressed down, and offers refuge you can't always find even inside your own family. Love kept its hands open for me, even in the times I couldn't feel it, and I found that open hand, finally, in hers. As we grew older, our understanding of each other only deepened, and today I stand on the foundation she and I built together, wherever I go.