Life Spent

My father started working with the UN before I was born. Prior to his post with the organization, he held a position with the WHO. Although my father had completed his formal education with the ninth grade, he was well-read and self-taught in a lot of disciplines, with the English language being one. His knowledge of French put him shoulder to shoulder with some of the best academic students. We called him Papa. He wanted his children to carry on the legacy of being polyglots, knowing that language would be the doorway to many opportunities. 

When I was about five years old, my parents decided to enroll us in a French-speaking school. This is how I would start learning French. The majority of my parents’ friends had their children enrolled at an English curriculum-based school. And how I wished to be a part of them. To be with the kids I thought were part of the in crowd. I loved to hear them speak English among themselves. I would pick up a couple of English words from their conversations that sounded familiar to my ears. I recognized these words mainly due to the fact that most of the programs that came on TV were in English.

My father was the type of person who would pull surprises out of his hat. He never really let on about how much he knew until you asked him. One of these surprises was when he decided one day to find out how my siblings and I were progressing with our grammar. He pulled out a green chalkboard that had been hiding somewhere in the back of our house and set up a classroom in one of the empty bedrooms. Our different ages no longer mattered as they did in school. My father asked all my siblings and I the same questions about possessive pronouns and gender agreement.

My older brother had to learn how to write with his right hand in school. Doing so with the left would have been considered impropriety. This reminds me of another little exercise my father had taken us through. He said, "Today, we are speaking only French. Anyone who speaks another language will be met with a punishment." The punishment was to wear an old, rusted sifter around your neck for the remainder of the day. I secretly wondered whether my mother was included in this exercise, knowing that she did not speak French. My father dismissed everyone after the challenge was announced and we carried on with our tasks. I did not see it coming, but soon enough, the old, rusted sifter was dangling around my neck. I had uttered a sentence in our native tongue that led to my embarrassing sentence. As time went by, I adjusted to the francophone life. I made friends at school, and for the most part, my teachers were pleased with my work as a student. By the time I reached CM2, I grew out of the desire I had to attend the English-speaking school. Long enough, it was time to uproot and move again.

The nature of the work my father did was such that he was away from his family for the majority of the time. This meant that he could at times be away for two years before receiving a leave of absence. Rare were the times when he would be stationed in the same location where his family lived. I missed him a lot when he was away, but I did not know how to express this to him. Although he was mostly gentle in tone, my relationship with my father was based on the reverence and respect I had for him rather than on affection. His constant absence had a tremendous effect on my perception of what the ideal image of a father looked like. This was the image of the father who would wake up in the morning and have breakfast with me before dashing out the house to work. It was the father who would come home from work, and we would all sit at the dinner table listening to the details of the kind of day he had at work. It was the father who would spend countless hours asking me about my school life and attending P.T.A. meetings as his schedule would permit. This was the father who would go in to work a few hours late in order to drop me off at school on days I would miss the school bus. He was the father who would sneak up in my room and find that I had fallen asleep while reading a good book, and would turn off the light, planting a kiss on my forehead. This was the ideal image of a father that was painted in my mind as I observed it among other children in my surroundings. It was the image of a big chunk of my life that I felt was missing.

What was it about this type of father that made it the center of my focus and desire? It is possibly the mere fact that I was searching for what I never had and what I thought was the standard for a normal happy life. I felt starved of affection, and it became one of the things I longed for the most. Admitting to this lack in my life has always proved to be somewhat difficult. I felt as if I was a deprived child waiting for crumbs to fall from the table of other families that were openly loving and affectionate.

What finally awakened me to the fact that my father was an absentee father was simply that: the fact that he was absent during certain moments of my life. It is this realization that has helped me to begin to understand why I felt a certain way about things I felt were missing, and about different things surrounding my childhood.

There was so much in the little girl that I was that needed to be healed. That healing is finally coming to me. It would take coming to terms with losing my father for me to start healing. Many years passed before I realized what I had in him. The consistent guidance he gave, the selfless sacrifices he made when I was growing up, and the laughter he brought to my heart are some of the remnants I now hold dear from the life spent with him.