I’m excited to Disappoint my Parents

I know the moment it happened. Usually I find it quite boring, being able to recall the very moment some big revelation happens. But I did and I can’t help it this time. What, you ask? The moment I realized I was an adult.

Trust me I have had my fair share of adult-becoming moments: there was the time I was stranded in a random city in England with no more than £10 in my account for the week. Very close second, I believe. However, not the moment I am talking about. There was the time I had to cover my younger sister’s travel fare. No, just another older sibling's responsibility. Moments like these may have rumbled up my childhood belief systems but never did any real damage to the foundations.

It was the moment I saw my parents talk to me about a version of myself that I no longer was and could hardly remember being. I entered university with wide eyes and a dream to change Kenya’s public healthcare system. A beautiful aspiration but slightly misdirected as I now know I am no scientist. I may be good at math and can grasp some really interesting concepts about lung capacity or the contents of the Earth’s mantle. Unfortunately, I am not made with the endless, unsettling curiosity to solve scientific problems. How do you manage to finish a degree in Biological Sciences, one may ask? That is between me and my God. It’s taken me a while to learn that but I’m pretty content knowing it. What I now see in myself is a core to be and do good: my super power.

This all happened in the span of a year, so it’s not a time element that has made myself and my parents become disconnected. It’s the type of change. I’ve had an astronomical shift in the way I view the world and in the process forgot to fill my parents in. Through the scheduled weekly calls with my mother, I would remember to talk about the beauty in the leaves forging into newly coloured lives each season, the warmth on my cheeks and in my heart when I met a new furry friend in my dog-walking jobs, and the wonderful ways in which I was moving my body to stay alive and present. In the background, I was silently mourning parts of myself that I hadn’t planned to shed. When I decided to pick a cinematic nature trail over killing myself an extra few hours in the library, I was redefining what success looked like to me. Each time I picked up a call from the chosen family I have curated, I was sowing new roots for the future me to be grounded in. When I looked at myself in the mirror with tear streaks, I saw a life worth living and not a person made only from the admirable grades she had been accumulating since she was 7 years old. I was making my existence enough; every other choice for myself and others became a bonus. 

It was heartbreaking because I have always taken pride in the closeness I share with my parents. My dad made each of his daughters feel like royalty every time he took us out on individual dates over the weekend. As a teenager, I would roll my eyes at my mum’s attempts at being hip but knew deep down that I loved when my friends would come to me and call her “cool” (their words, not mine). I see now that all the incredible memories I have stored away throughout the times I lived at home, was due to my parents’ commitment to making them happen. There is so much work and effort that goes into making things look effortless.

Now that I have watched what careless abandon fabricates into, I have a job to do. I’ve peeled back all the layers that were smacked on my beautiful, authentic center over the years and feel nourished enough to see the importance of my parents’ presence in my life. The elements of my life that I know they will appreciate hearing about will require my, much less filtered, communication with them. I want to voice my needs, expose my delicate core and let my parents discover all the bits of me that I have unknowingly protected. These bits and pieces are such precious artifacts. I was trying so hard to shine and polish them without realizing the most human part comes when I put them on display for those that I find deserving. It may take some time and a bit of unteaching of who I used to be to get to the new foundation that I want to form with some of the most complicated, adorable humans I know. I’m very excited for my parents to get to know the new, adult me.