DAD STORIES: My father is my superhero

Dad, you were always present in my life. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

What you need to know:

  • You brought up five boys almost single-handedly.
  • With unmatched ease, you taught me how to prepare meals.
  • I always doubted grandmother’s stories that you were a mean child because I have only seen your kind and generous side.
  • What would you like your dad to know this Father’s Day? Can you say it in 800 words? Email: [email protected]

If mum is our guardian angel, then daddy you are superman.

As is tradition, when I am growing up, mum tended to the crops in the village as you, almost single-handedly, raised five boys in Nakuru.

So present were you in my life that the only time I truly felt that mum should be living with us is when we made the journey through the valleys in the rift and the plains west of the rift to where mum lived.

Four decades later, I still remember you carrying me to the hospital when I was unwell; I remember you besides me on my first day in nursery school with teacher Margaret Wangila; I remember you seated there on my graduation day from nursery school as you clapped to “Oh I am the music man” – the poem I had just recited. A year later you took me to primary school.

Your working shift always began at four in the morning and ended at nine in the evening.

Everything in between always fell in place with a surgeon’s precision; I am amazed by how you made us master the routine.

While rich kids from Prairie Estate rode BMX bicycles, you allowed us to occasionally ride on your old bicycle.

YOU TAUGHT ME WELL

With unmatched ease, you taught me how to prepare meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner – and true to the good book, “raise your kid in the right way and he shall never depart from it”.

I still don’t understand why you insisted that tea had to be taken hot from the kettle, and I will request an explanation when I deliver your Christmas suit in appreciation for the numerous gifts you religiously bought me during Christmas, when I was growing up.

A protestant you are by faith and yet so liberal by yesteryear standards that you allowed me to attend Catholic masses.

I used to be a bit embarrassed when my schoolmates told me that they saw you carry the church’s flag. You never gave up on the local church and the doctrine.

I always doubted grandmother’s stories that you were a mean child because I have only seen your kind and generous side.

Your brothers lived with us when they were looking for work and there was always enough food, shelter, love and compassion for all of us. You educated many extended family members, and this is not to say that we were not occasionally sent home to collect school fees. But you always had and still have a big heart.

In your now fragile state, and as you battle acute memory loss and asthma, and nobody seems to understand you, know that you are the best dad that ever lived.

As you remain Jacob Eneyia to everyone else, I will always call you man J, the name that the late Bernard Lochok, our brother from another mother in Maralal, gave you.

***

What would you like your dad to know this Father’s Day? Can you say it in 800 words? Email: [email protected]