Your Father Is Just a Boy By Adetutu Adedoyin

There is a particular kind of grief that does not announce itself with weeping. It arrives quietly, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, when you catch yourself wondering why a phone call from home can still make your chest tight. Why certain people leave and you cannot say, with any real certainty, that you did not deserve it.

You have been sitting with this grief for a while now, still learning balance. Turning it over in your hands, the way you turn over a stone to see what has been living underneath. What you keep finding surprises you - not more pain, but more people. Real, full, frightened people who made you and broke you and loved you in the only ways they knew how. A love like that has no manual, only lessons and remembrance.

Your father is just a boy.

Consider your father, not as a figure of authority or disappointment or comfort, but as a person who arrived on this earth with no map. He had dreams, most of which you  will never fully know. He had desires that were never quite satisfied, expectations of himself and the world that the world did not honour. He settled, in the way that people settle, not dramatically, but incrementally, trading certain possibilities for others, until the life he was living no longer looked like the one he had imagined.

He was a boy once. And in many of the ways that matter most, emotionally, spiritually, in the quiet places where we are most ourselves, he may still be that boy: bewildered by grief, whelmed by uncertainties, fumbling toward joy, trying to welcome the end of things with some measure of grace while also remaining open to beginnings. He does not always manage it; None of us do.

To hold this image of your father is not to diminish him. It is, if anything, to make him larger, to restore to him the full complexity of personhood that the roles we assign people tend to flatten. He is not only your father. He is also a son who was once a child who needed things he may not have received. He is working through that inheritance the only way any of us can: imperfectly, and in real time.

There was an afternoon not long ago when you came home and found him on the three-seater, asleep, a toothpick balanced at the corner of his mouth. You crossed the room quickly and eased it out from between his lips, holding your breath, trying not to wake him. He stirred but did not open his eyes. And you stood there for a moment, toothpick in hand, looking at the man who raised you, the broad shoulders, the face gone soft in sleep, the slight rise and fall of his chest, and something shifted in you. Something quiet and irreversible.

He needed looking after. This man, your father, who had always seemed to occupy the permanent and unshakeable category of adult. You think for a moment that he could be hurt by something as small as a toothpick or the quiet hands of sleep. He could fall asleep without meaning to, defenceless, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. He was not invincible. He had never been invincible. You had simply been too young, and then too angry, and then too distant, to notice.

You thought about him later, about the questions he has started asking, awkward and careful, about your life and your choices. About the time he asked, genuinely bewildered, why things did not work out with someone who had seemed, to him, perfectly suitable. There was no malice in the question. Only a father trying to understand a world that keeps shifting under his feet, a man learning, late, that the children he raised have become people he does not always recognise. He is adjusting. It is costing him something. You can see it in the way he asks. You can see the things words sometimes cannot quite capture.

He is just a boy, trying.

Your mother is just a girl.

She loved, hotly, wholly, coyly, and perhaps watched that love go cold, leaving her in the particular loneliness of a woman who gave everything and found herself quietly wondering, in the hours when the house was still, whether she made the right choices. She wanted to be cared for as much as she cared. That wanting did not disappear simply because the years passed and the children grew and life moved forward without pausing to ask how she was holding up.

She is a girl who became a woman who became, among other things, your mother. But underneath all of that, she remains the girl she was, hopeful, wounded, trying. When she reaches out and you recoil, or when you accept her help and find yourself resentful anyway, what is happening is not simply the old tension between parent and child. It is two people carrying their own interior weather, each trying to love through the fog of it.

You had a conversation with her recently about marriage. About what she hoped for you, what she worried about, what she wished she could give you. And somewhere in the middle of it, you realised something that has stayed with you: she could only help you to the extent that she knew. She was not withholding. She was not indifferent. She was a woman who, with each child, has had to learn to be a mother all over again, because each child is different, each season is different, and no amount of experience fully prepares you for the specific, singular person sitting in front of you.

She is figuring you out at the same time you are figuring yourself out. She is doing it with love and with limitation, the way we all do everything that matters. & with a certain trust the same way night-wind trusts the trees with its everything.

You noticed it in the things she no longer brings up. The conversations she has quietly stopped having, the worries she swallows, the questions she has learned not to ask because she has read, in your silences, that they cost you something. There is a kind of grief in that, too. Not in what she says, but in the shape of what she no longer says. The outline of things she wished she did not have to hold alone.

Your parents are just kids. Figuring it out. Trying and failing the way a child learning to walk tries and fails, not out of bravery, but because there is no other option. And your response to their love, to their stumbling attempts at getting it right, sometimes says less about what they have done and more about the depth of your own unhealed places. The tender spots in you that cannot be touched without flinching.

You are beginning to see this; It is not a comfortable thing to see.

Because then you have to look at yourself, too. You have to look for what’s left to be looked at.

You looked for love in all the wrong houses. Knocked on doors you knew would not open for you, stood in the corridor after, asking what you could have done differently. You were lost, distracted by the kind of love that takes everything from you and leaves you standing in an empty room, genuinely confused about how you let it go so far. When you were wrong, it was a real kind of wrong. But it was also true. You were not performing devotion. You simply could not see clearly.

And when you could not find love that stayed, you made homes out of motels. Temporary arrangements you treated as permanent, begging to be let in by people and situations that were never built to hold you. You knocked and knocked. You decorated the lobby and called it belonging.

But here is the thing you have been slower to admit: you did this to other people, too. You checked into lives when you needed warmth, and checked out when the novelty wore off. You got bored after the thrill faded. You treated permanence like a suggestion. And when those people left, or when you left them, you folded it into your collection of wounds, when really, it was something you had also given. A game of hearts.

The heart protects itself through selective memory. Yours is no different from anyone else's.

There comes a point in healing when the old story begins to feel unstable. Not false, the hurt was real, the betrayal was real, the grief was real, but incomplete. You have rehearsed the narrative of your wounding so many times that it has hardened into certainty, and certainty, when it comes to other people, is almost always a simplification. So, you begin to ask the question that frightens you: what, exactly, did they do so wrong? Why did it feel like the deepest betrayal at the time?

The question does not give you clean answers. It gives you something more useful and more difficult, space. Room to consider that the people who hurt you were, in many cases, doing the best they could with what they had, handling their own dirt. Which is maddening. The best they could have was sometimes nowhere near enough for you. And it is still true. Both things can be true at the same time, and learning to hold them both without collapsing one into the other is some of the hardest work there is.

The heart of man has no compassion. You know this because you have looked inward and found the evidence. Yours was no exception, until something shifted. Until you encountered grace that did not ask you to earn it first, and found yourself slowly, imperfectly changed by it. That kind of change is real. Which means it is available to everyone. Which means your parents are not finished becoming who they will be. Which means neither are you.

So, you begin to ask a different question— Not what did they do wrong, but What can you put down.

Because carrying all of it, every grievance, every missed moment, every love that did not last, every version of yourself you are ashamed of, bends the back. It is a weight that grows heavier the longer you insist on holding it. And the only person paying that price is you.

Last week, you stood in front of the mirror and looked at yourself for a long time.

You noticed that your eyes are no longer sunken. That the folds you used to flinch away from no longer make you shudder, they have reduced, yes, but more than that, you have stopped needing them to. You stood there and looked and did not immediately begin the old inventory of everything wrong. That is new. That is not nothing.

The bitterness is slipping off you. You can feel it going, the residue of things stolen, of emotions in which you were abandoned, of love that left before you were ready. It does not leave all at once. It leaves the way a fever breaks: slowly, then suddenly, in the sheets in the middle of the night, and you wake up lighter than you were.

You watch love stories now, and something has changed in how you receive them. The desire is still there; you have not become someone who does not want to be loved, but it is no longer desperate. It no longer curls at the edges into desolation when the credits roll, and you are still alone. You can watch two people find each other and feel something closer to hope than to hunger. That is new too.

You are healing. Not in a straight line. Not cleanly. But genuinely.

What you are slowly learning is that the inner child is not only a wound to be healed. It is a self to be befriended. The boy inside your father who never got what he needed lives in you, too. The girl inside your mother who wanted so badly to be held is part of what you inherited. And the child inside you, the one who knocked on wrong doors and made motels out of people and confused hunger for love, that child deserves your tenderness as much as anyone else does.

Your parents are just kids, figuring it out the best way they know how.

You are just a child too, standing at the edge of something you cannot yet name. Learning, one hard day at a time, to welcome what is beginning, even while you are still grieving what has ended.

You are learning that dancing comes after the tears, or sometimes before them, that grief and joy are twins, and you cannot have one without the other passing through. But whatever happens, you move. Not because the ground is steady, but because you are anchored in something steadier than the ground. In the truth of a love that did not ask you to earn it. In grace that found you before you knew you needed finding.

You are not sure what comes next.

But you are still here. You are still turning toward the light. And some days, that is more than enough.

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Adetutu Adedoyin writes about the people we come from and the people we are still becoming. She is an assistant brand manager, writer, and children's teacher living in Nigeria. When she is not writing, she is listening to Ludovico Einuardi or looking at art. Find her on Instagram at tutu.a__ or on Medium: https://medium.com/@adetutua.