The Sins of The Father

For most of my life I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I’ve always known that I do not want to be like my father. Growing up, he was a very angry man; he was also a very large and strong man with violent tendencies when it came to disciplining his children. As the first son and second child, a lot was expected from me, and I constantly made it my mission to under deliver as an act of rebellion. So you can guess how that worked out for me: a few beatings here, a few death threats there, and some withholding of financial aid when possible. Nothing too crazy though, as you can see, the kid turned out alright (heavily traumatized, but for the most part, alright).

I didn’t know much about my father back then, and I still don’t know much about him now, but I do understand him.

You see, sometime last year, I looked in the mirror and I saw my father’s face clear as day, which was strange to me, because I’ve always been told I look like my mother. But here I was, with Like Him, by Tyler The Creator blasting in my ear, and my father’s face staring right back at me.

Somewhere down the 23-year line, I had become the angry man, and I didn’t realize it. It wasn’t apparent to me because I wasn’t violent like he was, I wasn’t handing out death threats, and I was still quite generous. But all that didn’t matter. I was angry. I was very angry. Constantly and consistently, the fire in my soul meant to burn for my passions was burning me alive, and I didn’t realize it until it was too late. I lost a lot of what mattered to me and a lot of myself.

A staple of my upbringing was everyone — including myself — trying to instill in me what I should not become, rather than what I should aspire to. I was raised by an angry man, but he was also a very scared man. He did not want to get it wrong. It was his first time being a father, and his lack of knowledge became frustration, which was expressed as anger. He tried what he termed his best in the same way I thought I was giving what was mine, and in the end, we made the same mistakes.

Years of intentionally trying not to become what I hated, I somehow managed to evolve it into something new, something worse. It was both morbidly comforting and terrifying to find out that I wasn’t the only one slowly morphing into the creature that raised them.

There’s this unkindness that is consistent when I hear some people talk about their parents, and it worries me. Not because I have love for their parents, but because I have love for them. It has been a constantly jolting experience watching people turn into their parents because they do not acknowledge what made their parents that way.

I remember during the End SARS period of 2020 a popular moniker was “We did not inherit the silence of our parents,” and it made me wonder: Which parents? The ones that constantly protested during their university days? The ones that lived through the civil war? The ones that survived multiple military regimes? Surely, it cannot be them. Then the massacre happened, and suddenly, the uncomfortable silence that was sworn off became our reality. And I do not think most people even realized at that point that their parents’ subservience did not come naturally, but it was beaten and shot into them. This isn’t to praise the wisdom of the proverbial elder with all-seeing eyes, but to highlight the failure of said elder in passing on their experience because they are too busy shouting at their child, whom hubris has pushed to climb an Iroko tree.

There is a disconnect between my generation and the ones that raised us. A chasm that for the most part has only been bridged by trauma, but not trauma that bonds. An unrelatable trauma that either side believes they have a monopoly over. I do not know whether it is because we were born and raised in different times, but it seems we believe that our experiences hold no similarities, and considering the cyclical nature of human existence, that is strange. One party thinks their experience is superior due to the age of it, while the other believes that recency supersedes the past, with the actual lesson being lost in the debate: you cannot be better than what you do not understand.

And so the pattern goes on ad infinitum, and the cycle continues. From the mischievous group chats mimicking the roles of the gossiping aunties to the stoner boys that can’t put the blunts down and are quickly resembling the reckless beer-drinking, drunk-driving uncles, we have effectively proven that the generation that raised us is truly obsolete, as we have adequately subsumed their vices. But at least we do not have silly traditions like always having to greet and never giving someone else an item with your left hand. Our customs are much more simplistic but not limited to not double-texting and being apathetic as a show of maturity.

The terrible thing is most times you never know it’s a cycle until you’ve been at both ends of the wheel. We do not have to end up telling our teenagers, “You will understand when you are older,” before it clicks. It is tragic to see people turn into the parents they so despise. And then the sins of the father are repeated by the son. The damage need not be permanent before we can see it.

Unfortunately for me, the years I had in adolescence were more than enough for some havoc to have been wrought. Now, between the god complex inherited from my parents and the people pleasing that evolved into a savior complex, I will have to suffer for the sins of both the father and the son. It is my only hope that you do not.