Patience

I can’t summarise an entire person in one word, let alone my father.

The man I know as my father has donned the costume of a husband, a brother, a uncle, and a work colleague. To reduce this man’s life journey—the essence of what makes him the man I call “Dad”—down to a single word is not only insulting, it is quite frankly impossible.

And yet I think I have one: patience. Because it is something we have both needed as father and son.

I’ll begin with me:

Ironically, the earliest memories of my father are of him not being there. He was a freelance software developer, and an internationally recognised one at that.

IBM. Dell. Microsoft. Qatar Petroleum. The kind of resume that most people would stand back in awe of. But it was a list of accolades that kept him away. I only ever saw him at weekends. And, even when he was at home, he was never really “at home”.

Home life clearly made him uncomfortable. He was aloof around his children, me most of all. I was the eldest of three siblings after all. I became a teenager and a young adult when he wasn’t looking. To him, I was a complete stranger who just so happened to live in the same house as he did from time to time, so he spoke to me as a boss speaks to an employee. By that point, it was all he really knew.

When we did spend time together, it was never organic. My father is not a natural raconteur, and he really never understood the art of small talk. I must admit, it’s something that I’ve always been envious of other people, the way they can banter with their parents like old friends. My father is much too analytical for that. Anything abstract or woolly—if you’ll pardon the expression—won’t compute with him (it’s probably why he’s so good at what he does for a living).

It means that the subject of humour is a thorny issue. You have to really catch him in just the right mood. Often, this means you have to wait for him to come to you with a joke, commonly as an anecdote lifted from the headlines. It rarely pans out successfully the other way round. I think it comes from a sense of intellectual pride. He is not an arrogant man, but he is a stubborn one.

In computing language, there are definitive answers. Whatever command you input into the software the computer will carry out that instruction to the letter. It will not question your motives, ask for clarification, nor debate you.

People have no definitive answers. They are a web of contradictions. They can be irrational and impulsive in ways that can’t be calculated. Children even more so. Becoming a father was his first project that, possibly for the first time in his life, he didn’t have a definitive answer for. He’s been improvising ever since.

What he’s been oblivious too all this time was the path it set me on. I began missing him, detouring through the lonely wilderness of indifference, before finally sinking into the mire of resentment. Then people around me began to use the word that inspired this essay.

If I’m being brutally honest, I’m still learning. I still see him quite often and it still proves to be an awkward experience. But I have learnt not to be so quick to judge.

Which leads me to his side of the story:

IBM. Dell. Microsoft. Qatar Petroleum. A resume that most people would stand back in awe of. But it was one that kept him away from us. And it killed him to do it.

He tried his damnedest to make it work with us. In an era before Face Time, he made international calls to my mother every single night of the week. God knows how extensive the phone bill must’ve been. He then proceeded to fly back on the weekends, again at great expense and endure a flight that would see him arrive home in the early hours of the next day, only to have to repeat this marathon on the Sunday and show up for work somehow chirper and bright-eyed the following Monday while still suffering jet lag.

He did this for years, putting a considerable strain on his finances and physically exhausting himself in the process, when a lesser man would’ve just stayed away altogether. It was an arrangement that unsurprisingly caused many arguments between my parents. Yet he persisted anyway, knowing that what he was doing would give my siblings and I the best possible chance in life.

And what was his thanks for doing all this? I gave him a hard time. I acted out constantly in school when I should’ve given him one less reason to worry. I kicked up merry hell at home knowing there was no father figure to punish me when my mother could’ve used the extra support.

Worst of all, I convinced myself that I hated him.

As I said, a lesser man would’ve stayed away from all of this. My father didn’t. He was and is a stubborn man. Only a stubborn man could have had the patience he showed all those years to deal with the kind of brat I was. Hell, maybe I never stopped being that. Either way, we are both still learning, but I am still a long way from reaching his level of patience.

Because when we meet now, he still says nothing when he’s the butt of a joke he may not appreciate.