Miss me?
I caught myself.
Not in a dramatic way. No rock bottom moment, no thunderclap of self-awareness. Just a quiet Tuesday evening, the boy testing the absolute outer limits of my patience over something — I can’t even remember what it was now, which tells you something — and the threat forming in my mouth before I’d made a conscious decision to form it.
The voice. You know the one. It isn’t even loud sometimes. It’s the specific temperature of a sentence that says: we are done negotiating. And behind it, unspoken, the implied consequences. The raised hand. The smack that may or may not land but whose possibility does all the work.
It stopped the situation. Immediately. Cleanly.
And I stood there for a second and thought: oh. So this is how it happens.
Not to bad parents. Not to people who didn’t try. To me. Person with the books. Person with the awareness. Person who has actually written things, publicly, about parenting, that people found thoughtful. It happened to me, on a Tuesday, with no announcement, because I was tired and behind and the boy was not reading the room.
The research on this, by the way, is not ambiguous. Decades of it. The American Academy of Pediatrics. Meta-analyses covering thousands of children across nine countries. Harvard. The consensus is unusually clean for social science: physical punishment produces short-term compliance and long-term damage. More aggression, not less. Anxiety. Depression. A brain that learns to respond to the world as a threat. You get the immediate result you wanted and plant something you won’t see the bill for until much later.
So why does the hand still rise? Why does the voice still drop to that temperature?
Because it works now. And now is very loud when you’re tired.
Here’s the thing I actually want to talk about. The part that doesn’t come up in the gentle parenting discourse because it requires a level of uncomfortable honesty that disrupts the aesthetic.
Raising a child the right way — the present, attentive, emotionally available, story-at-bedtime, validating-the-big-feelings way — requires the same resource as building a stable future from nothing. Not similar resources. Not related resources. The same one. Time. Cognitive bandwidth. The part of you that is actually there and not running calculations in the background about what happens if this quarter goes the wrong way.
And being from a country where poverty is not a concept but a recurring character in your actual life — where the distance between fine and not fine has been close enough to feel on your skin — then you know that the work of staying ahead of that distance never fully stops. It quiets sometimes. It recedes when things go well. But it doesn’t leave the room. It sits in the corner, and you feel it, and the only answer to it is more work.
So: you have one resource. Two valid, real, non-negotiable demands on it. No clever scheduling resolves this. You can manage the conflict better or worse, but you cannot make it disappear, and anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or has a different balance sheet than you do.
And in the gap — in the moment where both demands are making noise simultaneously and you are running on fumes — the shortcut presents itself as management.
Now. My father.
I built a complete picture of him. Over years. Filed everything. The absences. The emotional vocabulary that didn’t exist, or existed somewhere he couldn’t access. The specific frequency of being in the same room as someone who had gone somewhere inside themselves you couldn’t follow.
I thought the file was complete. I thought I knew him.
I knew the outputs. I had no inputs.
This is where I want to be careful, because I have watched people use this logic as a full exoneration, and it isn’t one. There are parents whose children went without and the explanation wasn’t survival — it was something else, and that something else doesn’t get laundered through hardship. Let me be clear about that.
But I want to be equally clear about this: poverty does something specific to the mind. Not in the Maslow way we usually say it — the hierarchy-as-neat-pyramid version has been picked apart by researchers who found that people in genuine deprivation still love, still connect, still need belonging even when the rent isn’t covered. The pyramid is tidier than real life. What’s actually happening is more brutal: financial stress consumes cognitive bandwidth. Measurably. Studies that gave people financial hypotheticals and then tested their mental performance found that scarcity thinking — the specific mental loop of how do I solve this — occupies the kind of processing space that is supposed to be available for everything else. For patience. For presence. For the energy required to sit with a child’s frustration instead of shortcutting through it.
Your parent wasn’t necessarily choosing work over you. They may have been so deep inside a resource problem that the choosing felt like survival, not preference. And the tragedy of it — the part that took me a long time to sit with — is that this is true and it changes nothing about what you needed and didn’t get.
Both things are true. They don’t cancel each other out.
Growing up, you don’t get to know your parents as people. You get to know them as parents — which is a role, a position, a performance of varying quality, and almost entirely incomplete as a picture of a human being. The version I assembled of my father was a child’s version. Accurate to my experience. Missing the entire interior of someone fighting a different fight entirely, in a different room, that I couldn’t see into.
I see into it now. Not because I’m wise. Because I’m in it.
Some evenings I sit after the boy is asleep and I think about what I’ve been carrying that day that he had no idea about. The email I haven’t answered. The thing that didn’t close. The calculation that lives in the background of every decision I make, the quiet hum of you cannot afford to stop. He sees a father who shows up, who does the bedtime routine, who knows which cartoons are currently in rotation and what foods are acceptable and what the word for the blue car is.
He does not see what it costs to be that father and also be the other thing simultaneously. He shouldn’t have to. That’s not his weight.
But my father had a version of this. I know that now. I couldn’t know it at nine or nineteen.
I still catch myself on the exit ramp. The threat still forms sometimes, before I’ve decided to form it. The easier route is always right there, clearly marked, no toll, immediate results.
I take the longer road most days. Not all days. Most.
The boy is fine. Probably going to be more than fine, if I stay honest with myself about when I’m actually parenting and when I’m just managing.
What I didn’t expect was this: doing the harder thing didn’t just make me a better parent. It made me understand a man I thought I’d already figured out. Made me extend something — not forgiveness exactly, not yet, but maybe the beginning of the thing that comes before forgiveness. Recognition. The acknowledgment that the picture I was holding was missing most of the light.
Some things you can only learn from the inside.
Happy Father's Day Mzee.