By Bob Kisiki
My friend is a single father living with three teenagers and a pre-teen.
The pre-teen is a boy so are the older two of the three teens. Only one of his children is a girl — and they do not see eye-to-eye.
It had not always been like that, though. For the longest time, Fred (just a name I am assigning him to desist from saying “my friend” all the time) and his daughter, whom we’ll also assign the name Anne, used to be best of friends, so much so that the boys sometimes complained that their dad did not give them as much attention and time as he did their sister. They still do, actually, because though the girl now detests her father, he has yet to give up on trying to draw her back to himself.
It all began with the death of Fred and his estranged wife Nancy’s last child, Tonia. The little girl had been the family “angel”; so fond of her was everyone that they outdid each other in doting on her.
Then she caught some strange disease and, after a two-year fierce battle, Tonia passed on at the age of seven! They were all devastated, but none more than Nancy, who accused her husband of not having done enough to save Tonia.
“My baby would not have died if you had cared enough,” she constantly berated him. Even when everyone else believed that their father had done all in his power to save Tonia, Nancy insisted there was a lot more he could have done. Ultimately, she left the home and settled somewhere else.
That is what made Anne snap. Anne, though fond of Tonia like everyone else, was particularly inclined towards her mother in a special manner.
Nancy was the girl’s embodiment of everything good in a person and now she was gone. So though Anne had initially argued in favour of her father, saying that he had fought to see that Tonia makes it; after her mother left them, she blamed her father for not ensuring that his wife stayed with them. Now Anne lived her life like her father had never existed — she does not speak to him, and when he takes the initiative, she does not respond.
If he wants her to accept a dress or anything else he buys, he has to get one of her big brothers to act like they bought it.
She does not eat with the family, because their father ensures that the family eats together. So if she is to eat, she waits in her room till everyone else has gone to bed, before she creeps out and nibbles on this and that.
This is a 12-year-old child, for goodness’ sake! How does a parent get her to understand the dynamics of parenting and, worse, marriage? Because this has little to do with Fred’s parenting style and everything to do with his and Nancy’s conflict resolution methods, as a married couple.
Whether Fred put in his all when their daughter was unwell or not; whether he had done enough to deter Nancy from leaving home or not, the fact that the two did not agree on how this would affect their children makes them both culpable.
Everything we do as parents will directly or indirectly affect our children (positively or otherwise), and we must always be conscious of this fact.
Frustrated love will break even an adult; now imagine a child who believes that her father was the reason two of the people she loved are no longer with them!
The writer is a parenting counsellor and a professional teacher.
