A reflection on family, responsibility, the exhausting business of caring for others, and discovering that becoming your father’s son doesn’t mean becoming your father.
My father had an extraordinary ability. He could bring relatives together, educate other people’s children, listen to everyone’s problems, offer counsel, and somehow still find the energy to invite half the village for Christmas. I watched him do this for years. Then he died, and someone, somewhere, apparently decided that I was his replacement.
Now, I was barely figuring out how to raise my own toddlers. Suddenly, I was expected to become the chairman of an extended family whose membership could comfortably fill a small conference centre. Nobody offered training. There was no induction programme, not even a handover document. Just expectations. I tried. I failed. I ran away.
And somewhere between writing a book to understand myself, trying to organise nearly a hundred cousins, building a men’s community, and discovering that people can enthusiastically join groups they have absolutely no intention of attending, I began asking myself a rather uncomfortable question: Was I really trying to care for people, or was I trying to prove that I was my father’s son?
How do we end up caring so much, and still find a way to make sense of it?
Over the last week, I have been contemplating whether we care enough, whether some of what passes for care is a charade, and why caring can sometimes leave us wanting to disappear from the very people we hoped to help.
One of the principles of care, as I understand it, is to begin with the people closest to you. Your family. Those whose lives are already intertwined with yours. Before you set off to save humanity, perhaps check on the human beings who share your surname. Although, depending on your family, saving humanity might look like the easier assignment.
Even this principle raises questions for me. Sometimes we are required to take on responsibilities we are ill-equipped to carry out. We are inexperienced, overwhelmed, or ushered into a role without anyone asking whether we are ready. One day you are struggling to manage your own life. The next, people are looking at you as though you have been appointed chairman of everybody else’s.
As time has passed, choice seems to have become more elevated than duty, and preference more persuasive than expectation. In the families and communities many of us grew up around, there were social consequences for failing to take responsibility for those considered to be under your care. What mattered to the family, the community, and sometimes the nation carried considerable weight. Respect, diligence, honour and care helped people live and work together. Discord, disrespect and selfishness were shunned, at least publicly. What happened behind the curtains was another department.
As that social fabric has frayed, we have gained more room to decide which expectations we will honour. Some of that freedom has been necessary. A community can hold you up, but it can also sit on your chest and call it belonging.
For some of us born in the eighties, we witnessed how strongly community could hold. We watched our parents take care of their siblings and beam with pride at the outcome. Brothers and sisters put one another through school, lifting their families a step higher through education. Someone’s salary arrived already divided among people who did not work for the same employer.
We also saw the other side. Families used those same expectations to put one another down. Distrust, complaints and quiet sabotage could exist alongside the insistence that everyone remain close. You were required to attend the gathering, smile at people you suspected were undermining you, and pass the salt.
Some of us watched the sacrifices and thought them worth continuing. We saw the reciprocity, the progress and the pride. Others heard the complaints, saw how much the giving cost, and quietly promised themselves they would never live like that.
The version of Western individualism many of us admired offered an attractive alternative. It looked advanced, progressive and considerably less crowded. Gradually, family interactions became fewer. Fewer people travelled to the village. For some of us, the connection became more visible on paper than in practice. We remained related. We simply stopped relating.
Many of us now have closer friends outside our families than within them. The silence has grown, and so has the distrust. The stories we were told, or those we told ourselves, have sometimes become more powerful than any actual interaction with the people who should be closest to us. We know what someone is like because of something they did in 2007. There has been no appeal hearing.
In the past few years, I have tried to do something my father did exceptionally well. And the older I grow, the more extraordinary I realize he was.
He took up the mantle of caring for his older and younger siblings. He offered counsel and helped educate their children. He was present. Every December, he brought people together, celebrated them, and took the time to understand their situations and get to know their children. He made it his business to know what was happening in people’s lives.
When he died, I was asked to step up. I was barely learning how to father toddlers, let alone understanding how my father had operated. I buckled.
I stepped away, deeply frustrated with myself. Somewhere inside, I felt called to hold others and help them rise to their full potential. Yet I could barely find the strength to carry what was already mine. There are times when you feel called to something long before you feel ready for it. The gap can leave you feeling inadequate, insufficient and ashamed of your own limits.
For me, it became a depressive period. I did not have the emotional strength, motivation or ability to walk with so many people. I certainly did not have my father’s gravitas. People looked at him and saw someone who could hold things together. I looked at myself and had several follow-up questions.
I ran away. During that same period, I wrote my first book, Self and Identity, to understand myself. I could not yet make sense of the person expected to do all this caring.
My father had made enormous sacrifices, often for people who would never repay him. I never really got to ask him why, or how he managed the responsibility of holding so many different forts. His example left a deep mark, but watching a man carry something does not mean you understand its weight.
I had lived a sheltered life under him. He had grown up with a widowed mother in a patriarchal society, with poverty a constant presence in a large family of boys and girls. After a sibling died, he had to step up early. He became a close support to his mother when some of his older brothers would not.
I grew up with four sisters and a loving father who doted on us. I was protected and entertained for much of my privileged life in a lower-middle-class family. We did not lack food, shelter or clothing. In the Kenya I knew, that could feel like Beverly Hills, only with different roads and a more ambitious relationship with dust. Poverty and laughter danced intimately around us, although perhaps I have always had a sunny disposition.
What I had not understood was how much of my parents I carried within me. These were two people with deep empathy, who cared intensely about society and others. At some point, what I had inherited from them seemed to start demanding more of me than my comfort was willing to give.
I cannot neatly explain the depressive stretches of my early twenties, the restlessness or the hopelessness. But I remember finding it difficult to understand why, despite having a good job, I hated what I was doing at twenty-five. Why, at twenty-seven, I resisted advice and rebelled my way into a marriage despite almost everyone in my large extended family asking me to pause. Why, in my thirties, I left a structured job that might have led to considerable corporate success had I been patient enough to stay.
My instinct was to go and discover what else the world had to offer. Perhaps that is why I love backpacking. Perhaps it explains why I can sit so still when someone is telling me something new, novel and different. Give me an unfamiliar idea, and for a while even my restlessness behaves itself.
Recently, I have begun to appreciate how much my journey is influenced by my father, my mother and their union within me. There is this desire to show empathy, help people become more self-aware, and free them from their own internal prisons. In many ways, I have been using myself as the test laboratory. The research subject has not always been cooperative.
For a long time, I struggled to do what my father seemed to do instinctively: reach out to people. The old man attracted people like shit attracts flies, and I say that with no apology because he had some shitty friends. They used him well, well. But he also had good friends, and they all came. Almost daily, someone would sit with him while I remained alone in a room, reading, studying or ruminating through my teenage years and early twenties.
We barely talked, and when we did, our conversations were brief. What he left me was the richness of his actions, his conversations with friends, and the listening ear he offered anyone who came for wisdom or simply to sip tea in silence.
I would be there, utterly bored. Now, sitting comfortably in my forties, I understand something of the joy of silence with other men. You can sit together, say very little and still leave feeling that you have been somewhere worth going.
Trying to connect as he did felt like pulling teeth in my twenties. In my thirties, reaching out often felt like disturbing people’s peace. In my forties, I am learning to be intentional about one relationship at a time.
Relationships grow through small, repeated gestures, and vulnerability matters. That has required some adjustment. Growing up, I found layers essential for protecting myself from the world. I wore many hats comfortably. As I became more self-aware, I began integrating some of those personas and letting others go. It is difficult to connect when everyone keeps meeting a different version of you, including yourself.
My attempt to build a men’s group was, in some ways, my second attempt to prove to myself that I was my father’s son. The first had been bringing together my cousins, who number close to a hundred. It worked after months of planning, but the victory left a slightly bitter taste. I had wanted the gathering so much that, at times, it felt as though I was dragging people across the floor while they cursed and gnashed their teeth. Perhaps some of that resistance existed in my imagination. The exhaustion certainly did not.
Bringing strangers together then became a course in negotiation, psychology, sales, marketing and self-improvement rolled into one. I was mad enough to attempt it twice a month. Often, it felt like an echo chamber where I was mostly talking to myself, while many who joined watched quietly and turned up only when it was convenient. I had imagined a community. Some days, I appeared to be operating a reminder service.
The frustration built. Self-doubt followed. Again, I wondered how my father had done it. Then I remembered the occasions when he would invite someone, they would fail to turn up, and he would shrug. I had watched that shrug without appreciating how useful it might become.
I was castigating myself for failing to bring people together for what I believed would be their good. Somewhere along the way, their attendance had become a verdict on my effectiveness, perhaps even my worth. I could learn to organise better. I could communicate better. I could also stop conducting a personal tribunal every time someone failed to appear.
After a few months’ break, during which I worked on my self-doubt, self-concept and self-belief, I turned to the debate series. I thoroughly enjoyed it. We were some distance from Oxford, but men spoke, challenged one another and enjoyed themselves. That mattered.
I would have loved to continue. The effort, drive and community needed to sustain it, however, were considerable. Wanting something to exist and having what it takes to keep it going can be two very different experiences.
As I have built the Clarity Room, I have continued asking myself how to show up week after week, help where I can, grow as I must, and care in a way that has an impact. I am also learning to recognise when my desire to help becomes tangled with my need to prove something about myself.
What keeps coming alive is the need to be vulnerable and to strengthen my sense of self by examining the biases and limiting beliefs I carry. Recently, while doing a training on money habits, I was shocked by how many beliefs we can carry without knowing they are there. They influence our decisions with the confidence of people paying rent, yet we have never asked how they moved in.
My quest, I suppose, is to uncover as many as I can. It has been uncomfortable. I have faced rejection, ostracism and pushback. There have been moments when I felt as though I was standing in a room full of mirrors, unable to tell whether I was seeing other people clearly or meeting another reflection of myself.
Still, I am becoming more resolute about what matters to me and what deserves my attention. Some of that clarity has come from trying things I was told would taste heavenly, only to discover they tasted like hell dirt. There are experiences for which the advertising department should be held accountable.
I have questioned social constructs that seemed essential in my twenties and found that some have little use in my forties. Along this painful path, peace has become easier to find. I smile more. I have grown to love solitude in its many forms. I am also beginning to understand the difference between enjoying my own company and using it to hide from everyone else’s.
Strangely, my creativity has grown too. Things that once took months now take only days to go from imagining to acting. My imagination seems eager to explore new ground. Perhaps there is more room for it now that I spend a little less time arguing with myself about who I am allowed to be.
You may ask what any of this has to do with care. Everything and nothing. Everything, because how I understand myself influences how I treat the people around me. It affects whether I reach out, whether I listen, whether I can love without quietly turning every interaction into an assessment of my usefulness.
I want my actions to become more intentional, and for that intention to become habitual. I want care to have a place in the whole of my life, including how I treat myself. I am learning that I can invite people, make room for them and offer what I have, while allowing them to decide whether they will come. My father, it seems, had already learned something about that. Hence the shrug.
Perhaps a lighter Edwin will find it easier to connect, to love and to keep showing up. Perhaps he will manage, in small ways, to do some of what his father did so well. And perhaps, as he learns to care in his own way, he will finally stop needing every gathering to prove that he is his father’s son.
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