Father’s Day Celebration

‘Happy Father’s Day’ will be said to fathers all around the world and millions of cards will be sold so people can have an opportunity to say thank you to their fathers and any father figures in their lives. It is nice that there is a day set aside to specially celebrate fathers and the role they play in their families and wider societies.

I lost my father before I realised how big a deal ‘Father’s Day’ celebration was in other parts of the world. Growing up, everyday was Father’s day; every time my father took time to tell me a story was my father’s day. When he chose to spend his free time with us rather than hang out with his friends was my ‘father’s day; as he left the last piece of meat for me, I was thankful I had a father.

My father sat still and let me plait his hair even though it would have been uncomfortable, he waited at the top of the road for me as an adult because he couldn’t wait for me to get home, he paced up and down if I was poorly, sitting an exam or attending an interview.

My brother recently published a book titled, ‘The Power of Visualisation’ and the genesis of this is that our father leveraged this with us by constantly taking us to places and putting steps in place that helped us to have a vision of what the future could look like.

A trip to the university was to show us what the experience could be if we studied hard, a tour on a military helicopter was used to sell us the vision of someday going into incredible places by air. He turned my stories as a young girl into a book by getting his secretary to type and print a copy and a local binder to turn into a booklet to show me I was a writer and an author. It’s no wonder that writing is an effortless and joyful process for me today.

All these and more told me every day that I had an incredible father. One of the many books my dad bought for me when I was in primary school is ‘A Guide to Confident Living’ by Norman Vincent Peale and that taught me the importance of confidence decades before I ever thought I would live outside of my home country and culture.

Today I reap the effects of having a great father and I am reminded of the need to celebrate him everyday rather than on one chosen day. For every accomplishments that I have, I look up to the skies and say thank you to God and to my father; every success reminds me of the privilege and benefits of having had a good father.

It has been twenty three years since he passed and he is still the first person I want to share any accomplishments with because I can trace every accomplishment to something he previously said or did. He made us dare to dream and many of my successes today have a dotted line to those dreams. Many conversations would have started with, ‘daddy, do you remember when …..’ and when I am worried, the conversations would have started with, ‘daddy, I don’t know if I can ……’

There were problems that I took to him that he helped me to figure out the solutions for, others he took ownership and solved but the ones that have stuck with me the most were those problems when he would tell me I could handle them and would be able to figure out the solutions myself. Even though I was a bit disappointed in those moments, my self belief and confidence would rise up as I repeated the mantra, ‘I can handle it, I can figure out the solutions’.

And I always did. He understood when I truly needed help versus when I needed to vent my frustrations or moan. He reminded me to cut myself some slacks when I felt like I wasn’t keeping up and he didn’t hesitate to whoop me into shape if I was getting out of hand.

A happy Father’s day for me happened each time we shared an accomplishment with him. He would listen intently to us narrating the experience, process, journey and outcomes. He would ask questions to get even more details and there would be this look of pride, joy, gratitude, happiness, faith, belief and satisfaction at a job well done all rolled into one.

He would follow this up by sharing our good news with others and call us out to receive any compliments or congratulatory messages. Over and over again, he would ask us to tell him the stories and he never got tired of hearing about them.

For me a happy father’s day is every time, every day and every moment that I made his eyes twinkle and glisten with tears of pride, it is every day that I ate from his plate or sat on his lap (even as an adult), it’s every day that we studied books together and discussed or debated science, art, history and philosophy together.

It’s those days when I asked him the difficult life questions like, ‘who is God’s mother’, ‘how did we get here’, why did a cockroach die and where has it gone to, why is milk white and will my skin become white if I drink milk?

A happy father’s day was him having my back when I chose to defy certain societal norms to buck trends that were expected of me as a young child and it was him training me to never let fear hold me back.

As we all celebrate Father’s day, I leave you with the kind of statement he would have said which is, “Imagine what you could do with all that potential living under your fear.” Unknown

Happy Father’s Day to all the incredible fathers and father figures who are not perfect but do their very best, every day, to nurture and grow their families. And for the rest of us, Father’s Day is every single day so make the most of it.

Thanks for reading and my post. Have a great week.