Listeners share how absent parents shaped the way they see themselves and others
Katlego Sekhu
There are things you only learn when someone is there every day. Not in a formal sit-down, lesson-of-the-day kind of way. Just in passing. A comment here, a demonstration there.
That was the conversation Siz The World on Tuesday. Sizwe admitted that for the longest time, he assumed every household looked like his. Two parents, both present.
It was not until he was around twelve or thirteen that a conversation with a classmate made him realise that was not the norm for everyone.
“The penny dropped,” he said. “This is real.”
One listener shared that she was raised by her father after losing her mother at the age of five.
Growing up with a man and a grandmother who could farm and brew like nobody’s business, she absorbed a different kind of upbringing.
She laughed about having picked up certain tendencies along the way. “I am a woman because I was raised by a man,” she said.
Another listener described watching her husband with their children and feeling something complicated stir in her. “When I look at my husband with his kids, that man will do anything,” she said. “He will strip himself.”
The conversation took a tender turn when a listener shared that she had lost her mother just six weeks earlier.
“I just lost my mom on the 22nd of March and wow, it is the toughest thing ever,” she said. “I miss the phone calls, the daily phone calls.” She described reaching for her phone to make a call about something small, only to remember.
Her father is there and she is grateful for him. But the gap her mother left, she said, is its own particular shape.
To hear the full discussion, listen to the podcast.
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The post The ways growing up without a parent shows up later in life appeared first on KAYA 959.
