Elders especially in Africa feel it's awkward for adults to apologize to someone way younger than them. In my tribe, it's even said that a younger person should apologize to an elder whether he's right or wrong.
I have an awesome father who takes our matter seriously but I'm not sure I've seen him apologize to us when he is wrong. I unconsciously picked this trait that it seemed tasking to apologize. I'm grateful to have unlearned that trait later in life.
I recalled an incident while I was a teenager.
I had issues with a few subjects in my final exam in secondary school so I had to resit. Before I wrote the exam I was enrolled in a tutorial center close to our home. During this period, I made friends with a set of twin both boys. We were quite close though. After our tutorial we had our exam written again. We were able to check the results weeks later. Fortunately for me 😁😁 I had issue with Chemistry alone. This automatically meant I would write the exam for the third time.
Days after checking our result, my twin friends came in company of one other friend to check on me and ask about my results. These boys didn't come in, they sat outside the gate and placed a call through to me so that I would come out. I was home with my brother when they visited.
On my way to see my friends, my dad came back from his outing. I had no choice than to tell him the boys were my friends. Little did I know that I had triggered my father's anger. I attended to my friends, saw them off to the junction leading to our house and came back home.
On getting home I got a shocker...ghen ghen
At the entrance to our living room I saw my baby brother on the couch sitting across my dad on the other couch. My dad placed his food on the stool and kept his usual grinding machine belt next to him. My brother didn't understand what was going on because he was sleeping all the while, hence the reason for his sitting, facing my dad to know who he wanted to deal with.
Immediately I entered, my dad stood up and gave me lashes on my palm, I can't recall how many.
I was infuriated but what can I do? I didn't even have the privilege of being told what I did wrong.
To him he thought I was at the verge of getting boyfriends while I was naive about it at the time. But thankfully, he made me understand.
My mom sympathized with me but it wasn't enough since she wasn't the sinner here 😂😂.
Days later my dad started acting weird, he felt he wronged me but he never spoke about it. I sensed he realized I did nothing wrong but he couldn't bring himself to apologize and that pained me more.
This made me plan a payback
I determined not to allow the flogging go in vain.
Fortunately for me, one of the twins asked me out. I didn't hesitate. Although all we had were phone calls, I only see him briefly once a while in the evening when I use getting recharge card as excuse to leave the house. Even with that, I can't stay too long.
The relationship became epileptic when we both got admission to different schools. Seeing the situation, I called off the child's play in 200level. The relationship was a payback anyway but mission was accomplished. The interesting part was there was nothing beyond the phone calls.
However, I still feel like I will find a way to explain to my dad what he did years ago. I want to know what I did wrong in particular and get my apology that have been over 10 years overdue.
Will I ever get an apology??
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