I’m going home today, after a bit of a while. I am healing several parts of me, and I am feeling very sentimental about my father.
An article I wrote about my father, on the 19th of January, 2017.
“I’m a family man” he’s always said.
That is how I know my father.
“You three are my sole purpose on this earth” he always speaks, looking at my brother, my sister and I.
He has never had to speak it for it to be true. I can see it in his eyes, in his very being. He doesn’t have to tell me he will protect me for me to believe it. I believe that with my soul, like I believe that the sun will rise every morning, and that the rain will come every year. I have never stopped for a second to question why that is so; because it simply is – factual, if you may.
“You are my wife, the mother of my children,” he says to my mother.
My mother, she that changed her name as soon as I was born. “Mayi a Ntha”. That is her name. Everyone around me calls her that. I never stopped for a second to question that. She is my mother, right alongside my father, two roles they had beautifully dressed each other with and they wear them so well; motherhood, fatherhood, parenthood.
I recall one morning around 1am as my friend woke me up on that cold bus and told me, “You are home”. I woke up from my slumber and checked my pink wristwatch that my father had gotten me at the beginning of that term.
It couldn’t be. It was only 1 in the morning. I always got home at 3am, and if not, 4. I opened my window and saw very familiar surroundings. Indeed, I was here. I looked at the door for my father’s face, none in sight. I looked around for my father’s car, nowhere to be seen.
But of course, it was only 1 in the morning. My father would always be here by 3am waiting for me to return from boarding school. For the first time, I was scared of this place. For the first time, this did not feel like home. It did not feel like home because my father was not outside the bus waiting for me. You see, home was more than a place for me. Home was the presence of my father.
I took that for granted you see; how my father took care of me, the way he always prioritizes my life, and how our family is all he lives for. To me, that was how a man should be. To me, it was, as you may, a fact. Today I realize, we base our facts as children from what we see around us. From our parents, our friends, their friends, those we come in contact with.
I got off the bus trembling a little, and found the next landline to reach my father. I have known my father’s phone number by heart for as long I can remember. I recall the Saturday mornings when my mother and father would sit my sister and I in the living room and ask us to recite their phone numbers as we had done our alphabets and multiplication tables, before we kissed them both on the cheeks goodnight. I did so with pride; getting better and better by each day. I took pride in knowing their phone numbers by heart.
Waking up from his slumber; I could hear my father’s voice from the other end of the line, half asleep and half scared for my dear life. He too could not comprehend how I had gotten here so early. My home, you see, was nowhere near here. My home, or house, was nearly 2 hours and perhaps a hundred kilometres away.
I will never understand how he managed to get from home to where I was in a matter of an hour or less. To me, then at least, it was how it was supposed to be. He had to show up, he had to come get me, he had to be here. He did so over and over and it has been the way he has lived his life for as long as I have known him – Family first, always. I never stopped for a second to ask myself why I believed it so. To me, that is my father – my protector and my owner. I belong to him, never alone. He has proven it countless times, and I never for a day think any less.
Growing up, I saw the world as it is. The facts I once believed, now diluted. I have met men, countless. Some great men. Some disgraceful men. Men that prioritized their drinks, their cars, their money, their wit. I fail to comprehend how this could be a man; because the first man I knew, at the top of his hierarchy of belongings I know he has a wife, and he has three children. For the first time, I am able to see that it was not factual that he had to choose to be a family man. It was his nobility and choice of decency that he chose a life where he would be the best man for his children.
I left my father’s home with many lessons but this stands most important; family over everything. And if anyone must ever ask me to describe a family man, I will never for a second even stop to think – my father. My father, the best family man I will ever know.
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