"Hello VC, I need some advice kidogo. I know you’re not a therapist, but you’ve made it comfortable for some of us to slide into the DM and pour out. You may not have an answer for me, but maybe you know someone who does.
My son hates his father too much. My son is 20 and has hated his dad since he was 4 years young. It never used to bother me but now it haunts me daily I’m becoming depressed.
21 years ago I met this fine gentleman on a flight from Malindi. He was a flight attendant and I had just gotten a job in a popular lifestyle magazine so I was feeling on top of the world. We dated and I got my son a year later. We moved in together and he took care of us.
When my son was 2 years old, I was living the best of my life. He was paying all the bills and he let me use my salary to buy ‘something nice’ for myself. My salary wasn’t kidogo either at the time. Since he would always be away at work, especially on weekends when he would stay at his last destination of the flight, it wasn’t long before my weekend out with the girls became a riot. I’d have a lot of money and we would just drink and party, especially within the media circles. That’s one very slippery space btw. The media isn’t for the weak principled.
Anyway, my man got a new job with Emirates and he was now interning as an international cabin crew. More money for us. Before long his training was over and he was officially based in Dubai. More partying for me and the girls.
About 6 months after his Dubai job, he moved me to a nice flat in Westlands and paid me a deposit for my first car which I could easily pay with my idle salary. I had a vehicle which now made the girls and I make weekends in Nairobi scarce. This was at a time when Nakuru was Nax Vegas and Naivasha was the camping capital. One day, during one of our excursions, my girls and I found ourselves invited for a camping trip by male colleagues from different media houses and it was long before some of us started misbehaving. One such misbehavior got me pregnant by senior staff from a radio station and as fate would have it, my man found out. My best friend secretly emailed him with ‘evidence’.
When it rains, it pours. Two months after the incident, I got retrenched as the magazine was relocating all operations to S.A. I was now pregnant by another man, who immediately disowned me, fired, and with a 3-year-old son. My car got repossessed.
My man just forwarded me all the emails from my friend and blocked me on all platforms. He never fought. He never insulted me. He never confronted me. He just left.
It took me a year of near suicide and abandonment, life change, and having to move back home to my mum’s before I accepted that it was over for me.
I delivered my daughter and stayed at my mum’s for another 3 years before I got a job at an NGO and picked myself up again. As my son became conscious, he once asked me about his father. I remember I was working on a report on my laptop and he was nagging me about his friend’s dad who used to pick him up from school. I told my son his dad abandoned us when he was a baby. I didn’t realize what I had said. I buried myself back in my work. The next day, my boy asked me if his father left because he, my son had done anything wrong or if it was because his little sister wet her bed.
When I got my new job, I sort of felt like I had proven to myself that I was strong and so I suppressed all empathy and I found myself not caring at all because, well, I had gone through the storm alone. Some sort of toxic heroism I felt.
I told my son that his father left us because he didn’t like to see me, a woman who is more successful than him. At the age of 7, I made my son look at men as bad people. Suffice it to say, when I moved to my mum’s home, I told her my fiance had been abusive and promiscuous. That’s exactly who my mother had said my father had been so I knew she’d be on my side. My mother hated my man until she passed on.
My new friends also heard the lie and the sad truth is, I started believing that lie as I grew older.
My son became introverted and if I see him doodle things hateful about his dad, whom he doesn’t even have a picture of because I destroyed all memories of him when my son was very small.
We relocated to the UK 3 years ago after I found a job here and my children, my daughter included have grown to hate any man who I try to date. Last year, I saw my former fiance online after being appointed to some board and when I searched for him on FB, I saw how happy he was with his wife and kids.
I broke down VC.
This man was nothing but good to me and I messed up. And I have made an innocent boy hate an innocent man.
My kids are all I have. My mum passed on and my sister always felt I was the wrong one so she excommunicated me. I told some friends back in Kenya and I was shocked at how many women normalize 'killing off the character of a father of a man they fall out with.
I started going to church and my mentor here told me to start dealing with the truth. If my children know the truth, I will lose them. They will hate me. I will have no one.
So here I am, a silent follower of flipside hustle, wondering what to do with this truth. I have regained financial freedom and some element of stability, I have purchased land in Kenya where I intend to build my kid’s home. But how can I live with this lie?
If you choose to share please keep my identity private"
The world is a tough place.
