Deoye Falade
In 1995, a few months after my brother’s birth, our home was attacked by a band of robbers. I was just about leaving for school and my dad was in front of me, only for us to step in front of a gun as we opened the door.
He pushed me back inside as the robbers went in on him, hitting him and asking for our landlord, a Customs officer. I was inside when I heard the gun go off and abandoning all reasoning, my sister and I ran outside to look for our father, crying our eyes out. We didn’t find him.
Almost an hour after the horrifying ordeal, our dad and another tenant, Dr Oke walked through the gate. Apparently, the robbers got distracted and they both found a way to escape. The gunshot wasn’t for them but the landlord, but it wasn’t a kill shot. Nobody died.
That experience kicked my overactive imagination into overdrive. What if my father had died? This train of thought wasn’t helped by the ton of grace to grass Nollywood films at the time where a family gets ruined once the breadwinner dies.
I thought about this a lot and concluded that if I was to lose a parent, I didn’t want it to be my dad. I simply wanted to be well taken care of and while those were pretty dark thoughts for a nine-year-old but I couldn’t help it. Another tenant had lost his wife a few years prior, but they seemed fine, grief notwithstanding.
Once my brother was six-months-old, my mom went back to school in Nsukka for her second and final semester. She was still pregnant with him when she did her first.
It’s always been that way since I was four. Every now and then, she’d take a study leave to pursue her degree, so a good part of my formative years was punctuated with having just our dad running the home. We missed mom when she was away, but we were fine.
My father wasn’t just a parent, he was our source of financial security.
Between 1998 and 2000, that financial security hit the rocks. My dad’s business struggled and my mom, a civil servant had to pick up the slack — admirably so. We moved from our rented apartment in the pretty decent New Oko-Oba to our then unfinished house in Iju just to stay on budget.
My pretty sheltered existence was suddenly overtaken by a new reality. For kids who watched cable TV and had played every video game manufactured till date, we now had to live in a house with no power supply while we walked some kilometres away to fetch water.
Sometimes, my dad had to borrow transport money for me to go to school and I suffered academically. We all did. I even had to repeat a class.
Things took a turn for the better towards the end of the year 2000. Dad took centre stage again and all was fine with the world till I graduated. He wasn’t home often as he worked outside Lagos, but my school was in the same state. If I wanted something, all I needed to do was ask and I got it — well, most of it.
What I’ve failed to mention in between was our strained relationship. My dad had a temper and could be critical with his verbal expressions. I on my part felt I was failing to live up to his expectations of me as his first son.
So, I became avoidant. Thankfully, spending the remaining part of my secondary education (and my university education) outside Lagos helped. It was simple: if we rarely saw each other, I couldn’t piss him off.
Still, he showed up whenever I needed him. He always found a way to spend time with his kids (we preferred him when he’s had a beer or two though — he was more jovial that way). Sometimes he’d come home and take us interstate to work and back.
During my third year at Olabisi Onabanjo University, we were studying advertising law and ethics. We were given an assignment on advertising byelaws at local government level. My dad drove me round Ijebu-Ode as I gathered materials for the assignment. He usually made himself available, but I was the one who wasn’t talking/opening up — I was still too wounded to.
As a result, we barely understood each other — or he didn’t understand/know the young man I’d become. Rather than ask me what was up with me, he’d ask my mom because I always had the default answer — “Everything’s fine”.
Was I still dating the girl who used to call his phone to speak to me when my Motorola broke? Was I happy at work? Did I need money? Was I being hassled by cultists? Were my grades good?
“Everything’s fine.”
We just didn’t talk. I wasn’t talking. Or more appropriately, I didn’t talk till I needed something, and he did his part. On my own part, I was quiet, had few friends (before social media) and rarely lost my head to warrant getting talked about.
Everything was fine.
But then I grew to not need him anymore — at least the part of him I’d considered valuable since that robbery attack in 1995. He on his part was winding down his active career as a veterinary doctor and was contending with existential issues of his own.
Can a man still be called a father when he can’t really provide any more or his family doesn’t need him as they used to?
This was ugly but he rolled with the punches. He pissed us off, we pissed him off, fought both verbal and silent wars. He’d wonder if we were only bold to disagree with him since we now had our own money. We’d tell him money had nothing to do with it.
It didn’t help that mom had a while before retirement and he was mostly home. As always, she was the other shoulder to rely on, but this bruised his ego and he felt undermined, sad and at certain points, contemplated death.
But he got over it and it wasn’t till he did before I began to understand what he’d gone through. My dad only had two things — work and family. He had very few friends and outside work relationships, we were the only friends he had. He was back home; I was back home and we finally had to deal after years of a one-sided avoidance.
At the end of the day, money didn’t matter. If you ask me now which parent I wouldn’t like to lose, I’d say both because I consider myself incredibly lucky to have them alive. The wheels have turned now and we’re the ones sending money home but having my dad bombard me with WhatsApp prayers daily is not something I’d give up.
It wasn’t usually the best of moods or circumstances, but my dad has always been around when it mattered.
I’ve had to take a long journey to loving my dad. I went from fear to avoidance to tolerance to forgiveness to respect to acceptance and then love. I’d rather not have gone through this, but we were both on separate journeys.
I guess perspective helps; I’d always thought you had it all figured out if you’re older but seeing my dad go through the years made me realise he’s had to find himself at every stage, just like I’ve had to — constantly.
Ageing doesn’t just give you answers; it poses new questions as well. We still don’t talk much but like everything else, we’re
