I realized my dad didn’t like me when I was in JHS. He would treat my younger sisters like eggs and treat me like a tennis ball. I was beaten for every little mistake I made. When I needed money for something—anything at all—and I told my dad, he would scream at me and tell me he doesn’t pluck money from trees. But when it came to the turn of the two girls, he didn’t complain. He gave them what they didn’t even ask for.

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I was sad and crying. I felt all alone in a family where I was supposed to receive love. I asked my mom, “Are you sure I’m his son? Why then does he treat me like that?”

My mom got angry and gave me a piece of her mind and told me never to say that again.

My dad sent me to a boarding school when I was in SHS just to forget about my existence. After taking me to school, everything I asked for turned into a tug of war. My mom had to talk and talk before my dad would provide for me.

My dad wasn’t someone you would call poor. He was a lawyer for so many years before he was called to the bench. He wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor. We could live comfortably without any stress, but when it came to my needs, he tried not to provide.

In my second year at the university, I was tired and frustrated and had even thought about ending it all so he could have his peace. One day, when he didn’t want to pay my fees because I didn’t wash his car for just a day, I told him, “When I get the money, I will do a DNA test. I swear you’re not my father.”

That day, it was my mom who pounced on me and gave me two dirty slaps. “How dare you talk to your father like that? Are you going mad?”

Apparently, what I said hurt my dad so badly, or maybe he had started having doubts about me being his son. I was in school when he came for me, saying I needed to do a blood donation. It turned out it was a DNA test. He did that on all three of us, and it turned out none of us were his children.

He never healed from the trauma. He divorced my mom and drove us away from his house. A few years later, he retired from the bench prematurely and, out of emptiness maybe, he died even before I could grow a beard.

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Mom was also never the same again, but she outlived her ex-husband by two years. She died last year without telling us who our fathers were. She left three children who don’t know where they could point and call home, so we are moving around in life looking for our fathers in places where fathers are not made.

—Nick

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