T.M. Kayode

Yes, it’s Monday, and I usually don’t post on Mondays—but here we are! I’ve missed two days of posting, so I’m making it up with today’s post. Consider this make-up post #1.

Last week, I started thinking about the possibility of crafting biographical stories for people. The main idea was: if I were to write a story based on someone’s life experience, how could I ensure it’s engaging and filled with enough vivid imagery to transport the reader back in time to that specific period? I wrote a little something below as an experiment. I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments!

And yes, have a great week ahead!

FATHER by Temitope Adeyemi-Kayode

Prologue
I was born after four stillbirths, or so I was told. Two more followed. Interestingly, my parents gave each of us the same name, as though it were a token passed from one fragile body to the next, waiting for a child who might finally survive. By the time I came along, they had given up on certainty. The village midwife recorded each birth, but no one could agree on when I had actually arrived. The records were a tangle of dates and names, each a fleeting attempt to capture something solid in a world that often felt as fluid and unpredictable as rain.

It was 1960, a year of great change—both for Nigeria and for my family. Maternal health care was rudimentary, birth records were unreliable, and in our small village, survival itself was a tenuous thing. The country, on the cusp of independence, was shifting beneath our feet, and I, born into this uncertain moment, was given the task of finding my way through it.

For the sake of convenience, I claimed March 12, 1960, as my birthday. It could have been earlier, it could have been later, but it didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was that it was a date I could remember. In those early years, my life felt similarly indefinite, a blur of sun-baked days and small village dramas, punctuated by the weight of my father’s expectations and the quiet solace of my mother’s presence.

My father, a primary school headmaster, was a man who believed in rules. To him, discipline wasn’t just a value—it was a survival tool. He had seen too much of life to believe in anything less than order. He ruled his classroom with an iron fist and brought that same authority home. If a student misbehaved in school, he would meet my father’s cane. And if I misbehaved at home, I would meet the same punishment.

It wasn’t that I sought trouble, but trouble seemed to find me. The village, with its dusty roads and endless bush, was a place of endless temptation for a restless boy. My friends and I would sneak off to raid mango trees, wrestle in the dirt, or lose ourselves in the thrill of games played under the hot Nigerian sun. Inevitably, I would be caught, and my father’s whip would find my back. His strikes were not the careless anger of a man prone to violence, but the calculated hand of a man who believed that every welt was a lesson—one that would eventually lead me down the right path.

But the lessons I learned weren’t always the ones my father intended.

My mother, a trader by profession, was the gentle counterweight to his severity. Where my father saw the world in black and white—rules, consequences, and order—my mother moved through life with a quiet grace. She navigated the chaos of the marketplace, bartering and bargaining, her hands quick and efficient, whether they were counting coins or smoothing the fabric of her wraps.

When my father had finished with his discipline, it was my mother who found me. She never questioned his methods; in her eyes, his authority was absolute. But it was her hands that soothed the marks he left behind. Her touch was always light, as though she could draw the pain from me with her fingertips. “He means well,” she would say, her voice low and calm. “He only wants you to grow strong.”

I heard these words time and again, as she applied whatever balm she could find, the smell of herbs and earth mingling with the salt of my tears. My father loved me, she would insist, but love was a different thing in his hands—a rigid, unyielding force meant to mold me, to harden me against the world he feared I would one day face. To him, my defiance was a weakness to be eradicated, a flaw in my character that had to be burned out.

For all my mother’s tenderness, she understood this too. She had lived a life of quiet endurance, never resisting the forces around her, always bending just enough to survive. In the marketplace, her ability to negotiate, to move between worlds—both the traditional and the modern—had given her a kind of power, one that my father’s strict rules could never grant. Yet even she, with all her patience and resilience, knew the importance of my father’s discipline. Without it, she feared, I might grow wild, like the unkempt bush that surrounded our village.

And so, I lived between them—between my father’s iron will and my mother’s gentle hands. Between the world my father wanted to build for me and the one my mother sought to preserve. In some ways, I was a child of two opposing forces: one pushing me forward, toward a future full of uncertainty, the other pulling me back, toward the comforting familiarity of our small, unchanging world.

But even then, I sensed that the world would not stay small forever. Nigeria itself was changing, casting off the chains of colonial rule, stepping hesitantly into independence. My father believed that discipline—education, order, obedience—was the only way to navigate this new world. My mother, though she rarely spoke of it, seemed to understand that the world was something to be adapted to, not controlled.

As I grew older, I began to see my father’s discipline for what it was: fear. He had grown up under the shadow of colonialism, seen the ways in which power could be wielded against the powerless. Now, as the country stood on the edge of self-governance, he feared that the same chaos would swallow us whole. His rules, his punishments, were his way of keeping the darkness at bay, of forging a path through an uncertain future.

My mother’s comfort, on the other hand, was a different kind of strength. She knew that not all battles were fought with rules and whips. Some were fought with patience, with quiet endurance, with the ability to bend and not break. She taught me that the world could be harsh, yes, but it could also be navigated—if you knew how to move through it with grace.

In the end, I realize now, I needed them both. My father’s discipline gave me structure, a sense of direction in a world that seemed to spin on its own chaotic axis. But it was my mother’s quiet wisdom that gave me the resilience to survive that structure, to endure the harshness of my father’s love and the unpredictability of the world around me.

Looking back, I see that my childhood, much like the country I was born into, was a battle between control and adaptation, between the rigid structures of the past and the uncertain promise of the future. And just like Nigeria, I was shaped by both—by the whip that sought to tame me and the hands that soothed the wounds it left behind.