Father's Day for the Forsaken and Delinquent
When you grow up without Dad, family is a three-legged stool with one leg missing
I don’t love ‘Hallmark’ holidays at the best of times—the sappy sentiments of picture-perfect relationships are a turn-off, but Father’s Day leaves me feeling especially unsettled and adrift. My heart lacks the experience it needs to connect with this day and make it meaningful.
My father arrived in Scotland in the early 1950s as a foreign student from Kenya. He had one pair of long pants and a borrowed raincoat that was no match for the blustery chill of Edinburgh.
He was there because he was sponsored by a Scottish missionary who had approached my grandfather hoping to buy land for a hospital. Grandad came up with a deal so that, instead of paying cash, the missionary would facilitate my father’s education with the goal that Dad would one day be a doctor in the hospital.
So Dad came to Scotland and my parents met at St Andrews University. Over the ten years that followed, they married and had three children with me in the middle. Then, when I was about seven, Dad went back to Kenya. He had been seriously ill for several years by that point and it was hoped that being ‘home’ would help him heal. It didn’t and he died without me ever seeing him again.
Family is a story we tell ourselves, and each other, but I come up short on stories about my father. He spent increasing periods in the hospital before he left, and I was still so young. I have fragments of memory; my mother wrapping white gauze around his dark abdomen, running to the newsagent on a mission to get him a golden pack of cigarettes. I remember him teaching me about colors on a small chalkboard, and how to use a front door key.
I have the letter he wrote to me shortly before he died, it says, “You have a good brain, Beth, don’t waste it.” Education was important to him but the stories that confirm that have all been told to me, first by my mother and, later, by his sisters. I have added stories from my own life experiences, and from what I’ve learned about colonialism and racism.
After all this, it’s unlikely that my father would recognize what I believe to be his point of view on any of it.
The biggest gap, the yawning chasm in my understanding of my dad and therefore of fatherhood, is how he shaped the dynamics of our family. My mother speaks of her great love for him, their hopes and plans for our family.
I was given the name, Kangai which means a gift from God at an auspicious time—Dad had just earned his medical doctorate and Mum passed her driving test. I’m told I was the apple of his eye but I have no recollection of how it felt to be included in the shape of my parents’ life.
To be a child in a one-parent family, feels to me like sitting on a three-legged stool with one leg missing. I have learned how to balance but I still wonder at the kind of stability that others with traditional, two-parent families take for granted.
I am curious about the difference between being one of three fixed points on the earth, and being one of two; between a two-dimensional relationship that allows the freedom of freewheeling exploration and a three-dimensional foundation that offers a stable base and jumping-off point.
Many of us form the legend of our family’s dynamic during the self-discovery of adolescence. When reinvestigating mine, I found myself returning to a poem in The Tradition by Jericho Brown (winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry). There seems to be so little I have in common with Brown, a gay African-American man, but As a Human Being resonates deeply for me.
The poem encompasses a plot worthy of a novel, a story that is at once specific to the poet’s biography and transcends any one family or culture. The lines that capture me are the bookends of this story.
The first are about the distance between “the happiness you have and the happiness you deserve” Brown says, “They sit apart from one another, the way you and your mother sat at opposite ends of the sofa after an ambulance came to take your father away”.
The poem goes on to reveal the fight between son and father, the injury and its anticipated aftermath. The son has fought back, elbowed his way into adulthood with violence, established his selfhood as a third and equal plane of his family triangle.
In the end, he reflects—" you sit understanding yourself as a human being finally free now that nobody's got to love you”.
And yet, and yet—I wonder endlessly what the shape of a family with a father feels like, what it means to have two parents so you can triangulate to find your bearings.
I wonder about what happens when nobody’s got to love you instead of, or better than the other person, but they do it anyway.
As a Human Being by Jericho Brown
There is the happiness you have
And the happiness you deserve.
They sit apart from one another
The way you and your mother
Sat on opposite ends of the sofa
After an ambulance came to take
Your father away. Some good
Doctor will stitch him up, and
Soon an aunt will arrive to drive
Your mother to the hospital
Where she will settle next to him
Forever, as promised. She holds
The arm of her seat as if she could
Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing,
And it is since you've done what
You always wanted. You fought
Your father and won, marred him.
He'll have a scar he can see all
Because of you. And your mother,
The only woman you ever cried for,
Must tend to it as a bride tends
To her vows, forsaking all others
No matter how sore the injury.
No matter how sore the injury
Has left you, you sit understanding
Yourself as a human being finally
Free now that nobody's got to love you.
I wish you a Happy Father’s Day—whatever the day and fathers mean to you.
Warmly,
Beth
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