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Role Models
In my family, it’s tradition to grow up without male role models. My father, Ismat, didn’t have a father figure for much of his childhood, and he left me in the same position. Both of us are part of the intergenerational cycle of fatherlessness that makes young men vulnerable to people posing as authorities on masculinity.
Ismat was born in 1963 at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. I don’t know why, but his biological parents didn’t take him home after he was born, so he was cared for by the hospital until the age of one, when he was adopted by people who seem to have loved him dearly. From what I’ve been told, however, both of his adoptive parents had tragically passed away in separate incidents by the time he turned fourteen. He was then largely on his own, with minimal to no support from his adoptive relatives. In some of his most formative years, he was without parental figures altogether.
What Ismat had going for him was his hustle and intelligence. As a teenager, he used his inheritance from his adoptive parents to put himself through cooking school. He worked as an apprentice at the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi, then pushed for a transfer to the Hilton in London. He became a chef and embarked on a successful career working in hotels.
His life up to that point is an inspiring story of what hard work can do for you. I feel proud when I tell people about my father’s difficult start in life and how high he climbed before he was even twenty. But that pride fades quickly when I begin talking about what his life became as he grew into adulthood. The lack of male role models in his life caught up to him after he met my mother.
Ismat met Pam when he was twenty-two years old. He had traveled to Toronto to attend the wedding of one of his adoptive cousins, who happened to be a co-worker of my mother’s. After their chance meeting at the wedding, my parents quickly got married themselves, and my father relocated to Toronto from London. They had three children, with me the first. The pressures of being a husband and father weighed on Ismat early on, meaning their relationship never really got off to a good start. By the time their second child was born, Ismat was already slipping in his responsibilities. He was at home sleeping while Mom gave birth to my sister Jasmine.
Ismat was a far more successful chef than he was a husband or father. In Toronto, he worked in expensive restaurants and built a strong reputation for himself. He even appeared on television a few times to promote the restaurants where he cooked. Meanwhile, Ismat the husband and father was largely absent. Many days he wasn’t around at all. I would go to sleep most nights not having seen or spoken to him. Mom would say it was because he was working late. Eventually I was old enough to see he was choosing not to be home because he had other places he wanted to be.
An important difference between Ismat the chef and Ismat the husband or father is that he had role models to help him learn how to cook. He went to school for it. He worked as an apprentice for years under the tutelage of chefs who showed him how to wash dishes, chop vegetables, work a fryer, use a stove, boil pasta, grill a steak and bake a cake. He just didn’t have the same education in being a husband or father.
As his oldest child, I’ve struggled to have empathy for Ismat. Certainly, I was hurt by his absence—and even more hurt by his terrible behavior when he was around. He was always yelling and bullying, as if he wanted us to be glad when he was gone. I’ve continued to hold a grudge against him as an adult because I’ve seen the consequences of his choices for my mother and sisters. I’ve also learned to look back at how he was as a husband and father, however, and remind myself that he, too, was a fatherless young man.
My family has one home video of us, on an old VHS tape from 1989. The video was a gift from one of Ismat’s friends in honor of the birth of Jasmine. In the film are scenes from the hospital where she was born and the days after she came home. When I watched it as a kid, I loved it because we seemed like the families I saw on television. There are images of my parents together, my father sitting on the couch, me playing with a toy guitar and baby Jasmine doing what babies do.
I haven’t watched the video in many years, but in my last few viewings I started to see something I’d missed as a kid. I could see Ismat’s struggles: the distant look in his eyes when he was around his wife and kids, his discomfort when showing affection, the emotionless expressions on his face. Our few family photos tell a similar story of a man who just didn’t know what he was doing. In a picture of the two of us sitting together on the couch, he looks like he doesn’t want to be there with every fiber of his being. A picture of him with his arm around my mom captures his forced and uncomfortable body language. He looks like he is posing for a picture he wishes wasn’t being taken.
Ismat’s ignorance of his role in our family also played out in the few interactions we had as father and son, such as on Father’s Day, which was one of my least favorite days of the year. In third grade, I came home from school with a picture I’d drawn of Ismat as a superhero, kind of like Balrog, the boxer character from the video game Street Fighter. I spent hours at school that day working on it. I tried to make my father look cool, and I knew he really liked boxing. The top of the drawing read “Happy Father’s Day.” I was glad he was home because I didn’t often get to see him. I handed him the drawing with high hopes for how he might react. When he looked at it, he seemed confused. “What does this mean?” he said dismissively. He then put it to the side, never even making eye contact with me. Not once.
There was something phony about the whole thing. My father didn’t deserve a day in his honor—nor did he deserve a gift from any of his kids. That damned teacher had set me up, I thought. She’d made me look like an idiot by forcing me to give him some gift he could toss to the side like it was worthless. And there I was, trying to reach out to him as a son, only to feel rejected once again.
Mom could see the frustration in my eyes. To cheer me up, she picked up the drawing and told me it was good. She put it on the fridge as if it was something valuable. Whenever I got upset with my father, Mom would try to fix things by showing me enough positive attention to compensate for his negative behavior. Sometimes she was successful at turning those negative moments into positive ones; other times she wasn’t.
If I could go back in time, I would love to ask her, “Is this what a man is supposed to be like? If yes, why? If not, then what should I grow up to be like?” Instead of having that discussion, though, we both just left things unsaid. We moved on as if nothing happened, but these moments stuck with both of us.
There was a period of time—when I was seven or eight years old and he was thirty—that I remember Ismat coming home from work very late at night. At least twice he woke me up to talk to me. I was really happy to see him. On the first of those nights, he told me about a new handshake he was doing at work—one reminiscent of a handshake Will Smith did on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I still remember it to this day, but I’ve never used it.
Copyright © 2019 by Jamil Jivani. Foreword copyright © 2019 by J. D. Vance