As I mentioned earlier, my father talked to us a lot every opportunity he got. The man could talk. He had a lot to say. That is why it amazes my siblings and I that in public forums, you never heard my father speak unless he was given the platform and even then, he kept his remarks very brief. He cautioned us not to be limelight seekers who are in every gathering, invited or not, making lengthy speeches until the microphone is snatched away from us. That is how I know, the lengthy and frequent talking my father did to us was targeted and purposeful. We did not see it that way back then and we hated each one of those Kamukunjis, but we were respectful, we sat still and listened. That was our training from childhood. Always maintaining respect and paying attention to everything and everybody.
We did not heed most of the advise he gave us back then, but when we became adults and started our own families, we started digging deep into our memory banks to retrieve nuggets of wisdom we heard from our father over the years.
Without realizing it, we have become our father. I know I have. The advise and tone we take with our children, is a repeat of our fathers’ words, verbatim. We finally realized the words are worth repeating because they are time tested and they are the beacons that we followed, to safely navigate our lives from childhood to adulthood. We still are. There is this quote I love that sums it all up “The wisdom acquired with the passage of time is a useless gift unless you share it”. That is why we are channeling our fathers wisdom to our children hoping they can carry it forward to future generations.
Like majority of adults, my father had plenty of tough experiences in his own life that shaped who he was to us in our growing years. He had seen the good and the bad in life. He had experienced success and failure. He had experienced joy and pain. In his lengthy talks to us, my father was attempting to draw from his well of wisdom and pouring into our young lives. He was giving us a roadmap of life because he had traveled that road successfully, and he was familiar with its twists and turns.
I once heard this sentiment expressed by a desperate father to his defiant only child “the greatest pain in life is acquiring so much wisdom with nobody to share it with”. That resonated with me because that is exactly how I feel as an adult, and I am sure that is what my father and so many other parents feel, especially when dealing with their children, the next generation.
There are so many circumstances of our youth that shaped and greatly affected our adult lives. When we look back, we wish we knew then what we know now, but there is no turning back time. That is why we want to pour our experiences into our children, in the hope that they can avoid some of our pitfalls. We can see danger ahead, on some of the roads our children chose, oblivious of what is ahead.
That is how we become our parents without realizing it. We want to sit our children down and talk to them all day long if that is what it takes to get them to understand what life holds for them and how their choices today affects the rest of their lives.
