Life Story: Lost Love Between Father And Son

The father who birthed me constantly told me I was ugly and he consistently verbally assaulted me. He said we couldn’t possibly be father and son. That man called me all kinds of unsavory names, stupid was chief amongst them. He attacked my personality and physical appearance, he said I was too dark skinned to be his son. His prediction was that I was most likely to grow up a criminal. The physical and emotional abuse I suffered at the hand of the man were many and varied, and definitely too painful to write them all.

Even though I was the oldest child, I was given the least amount of money to take to school,even though I was the only one amongst my siblings who had to walk five kilometers to school. My younger siblings were given more money, and they had the luxury of joining a school bus. This was just one of the many injustices I had to endure in my father’s house.

Whenever my parent’s quarreled, I could be drawn into it and lashed mercilessly. The breakdown between father and son caused me much agony,  I was a child, I needed love and protection. Instead, I got hate and blame.

In secondary school I ued to run to the shower and cry whenever I saw the relationship between some of my friends and their dads. I was in the boarding house, and  my closest friend had a great relationship with his dad. The father  visited his son almost every weekend with good homemade food. They used to call themselves nicknames.

My dad visited me only once in 3 years. Apparently, he came for a funeral around the school and wanted to say hi. He didn’t even get out of his car. I opened up to this friend of mine about my dad and I. We discussed what I had to do to improve my relationship with my dad. We decided I had to get him birthday cards, christmas cards and out of the blue thank you cards. It was agreed I had to do all house chores without fail and many more.

I believed we had made a great plan, I was stoked! Father and son were going to have a great healthy relationship, so I thought. I was dead wrong.

So I propped myself with a new agenda for a great relationship. I sent the old man a few cards. Got home on vacation and made sure I did everything right. Daddy called me to his room one day and told me the cards I sent, all the effort I was making and the new me he was seeing wasn’t going to work.  He said if I was doing all of that  to gain his love and approval,  then I had not been paying much attention. He said he just couldn’t love me and so I should stop trying to impress him. 

I criiiieeeeeeeeeed. Even as I’m typing, tears are rolling down. All the canes broken on my back since when I was a kid didn’t match the pain I felt that day. I was crushed; and I “died” inside. I was just sixteen.

That was the day the love, any love I hoped would brew between us was lost. The fire between father and son was put out, never to be rekindled. 

From that day, I took a stern position. I wasn’t going to  love him if he didn’t love me. I changed overnight. He refused to pay my fees for tertiary, he told me to go learn a trade; carpentry or AC repairs. He said was not smart enough and I won’t do well at the University.

Overtime, I grew taller and bigger. I did what pleased me and he dared not talk about me. He grew scared of me. I paid for my own tertiary education and lived like I was fatherless.

He was sick for a long time before he passed on. He wanted to be closer to me then but I was so distant from him I just couldn’t connect with him. The father and son love door was closed. He wished for me to  be with him always. But My heart had become too distant then. He complained to my aunties to talk to me. That didn’t work.

I still love my father and will always love him. But what he told me when I was sixteen broke something in me. Something irreparable.

I have kids now and I love them with all my heart. I won’t let them go through what I went through. That’s not possible. Because my own experiences with the father who couldn’t love his son, has taught me the pain of emotional neglect. And I intend to spare my children that agony.

Difficult childhood? Learn from people who have overcome childhood adversity.