Another fatherless child!🙁

If there’s something I’ve noticed ever so keenly is that fatherless children are quite different from children with both parents alive and available. A lot is said about the presence of a mother, rightfully so too, but we cannot neglect the boychild even more than with fatherless children.

If I had to single out one trait that fatherlessness bequeaths a man/boy, it is self-doubt. Any boy who grows up without his father’s love is left with a deep void. His mind is often wrapped in a host of questions that never entirely disappear:
What is wrong with me? What have I done? What’s missing in me?
Who’s gonna teach me how to ride a bike? How to drive my first manual car?
Will I have someone to teach me how to change a tyre, or to spar with?
Someone to remind me of how being strong takes persistence and pain?
Is this how a family man is suppose to act? Is this manly? No, it’s rather girly, ain’t it?

For daughters, it’s sometimes even worse to not have a ‘perfect’ manly figure to look up to, and often leaves most ladies with a loathing of men who would not meet their absent father’s traits.

Fatherless boys though, almost never blame their fathers. For a long time, they may not even think of their father at all. They turn their longing for their approval into self-hatred, they convert their neglect into reasons to find fault with their own being. They tear themselves apart rather than redirect the hatred to where it more fairly belongs.

Fatherless children is a particular category of human beings for whom life is never going to be easy, but who portray much that I learn from. I always believe, there’s nothing more they would need than a friend/companion/mate who can be an especially tender and kind when need be, but who would also, in demanding times, be the one to slap them back to the reality, that their father, in as much as we hate to admit it, is not coming back!

For this category, whatever success they achieve later in life, however much they may one day present to the world as accomplished men and women, there will always be a little child inside them imagining the pat on the back of a proud dad. Dads may never say it, but the child would know when he is proud, when he is disappointed, irate, or just plain delighted that his son/daughter is very much as he was in his teenage days. But success for such children always leaves a bitter-sweet taste in the mouth, coz a part of them will always look around for paternal love and mostly find only a void or contempt. And so they swallow their success with a painful joy, and get on to the next task, hoping that if by any magic means their father returns, he would find them accomplished, successful, or better than the father expected.

Those who form relationships with fatherless children may notice an absence of the entitlement and arrogance that can flow too easily from the sense of one’s right to exist. The fatherless lady is likely to be modest. One notices the self-doubting child in their eyes. The fatherless man will probably laugh very easily and often at themselves – and all their errors and being an idiot; they won’t be overly proud; they may be sadder than the others but also more apt to see and value the sadness in life.

Fatherless boys might, given the masculine absence, have spent an unusual amount of time around women with whom they can identify especially well; hence why most end up with rather ‘female’ traits.

Fatherless boys may also make unusually good fathers, for what better father can there be than someone who appreciates in detail what it’s like to have had a father around? Fatherless girls, choose husbands that they would have loved their father to be, or that their father was. They carry in their psyches a precise map of what their own little boy will need - a father; the exact converse of what life gave them.

I only recently realized that one of my closet friends lost a father just before joining campus. Must have been the toughest time for his mom to now try to pay inflated fees by herself, while only months ago she knew she’d have a help. And I realized, fatherless children often spot one another in social life. They sniff each other out, they can tell, maybe by small signs of modesty or self-deprecation, those who have the same wounds as they, on the basis of which unusually deep and warm friendships are built.

I would never wish fatherlessness on anyone. That masculine presence alone goes a long way in instilling great values, and shaping a part of what their children get to be.

✍🏽Quote of the Week

😃You might have missed my most popular writings😍(so far..)

1. You forgot your mother's🤰🏽 prayers! - Our mothers have always been hustlers. Fighters, not strugglers. Beaten down to pulps yet arise stronger than before. They stop at nothing, not even their own lives, to ensure their kids get the best of what they themselves couldn’t have.

2. The past was not in black and white👴🏽. - I bet you assume everything from 1999 going back was in black and white😅. I know I am not the only one. Yet those of the past, lived in a world as fresh and brightly coloured as ours – and were as deluded, anxious of the future, and mortal as we are.

PS: If you have a few seconds to spare, please hit the <reply> button and let me know what you thought of this email. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it and what could be improved. It also reminds me that there’s another person reading it on the other end of my screen😅. Thanks.

Have a wonderful week ahead!

✍🏽Reagan.