Growing up, everybody has different dreams, visions and also a beautiful life to live but sometimes life happens. Our backgrounds are different and so even the behaviours differ. It’s not easy to grow up without your biological parents where you have to eat one meal a day, not because there’s nothing to cook but because you have nobody to cry to.

Growing up like this made me the greatest person and taught me how to be responsible. It taught me a man can’t just abandon his own child. Some fathers are absent in their kids’ lives not because they want to be but because of situations that lead them to. But again, there’s no excuse for leaving an innocent child.

Sometimes life isn’t fair. I completed my matric but everything happened so fast, and I found myself taking an unforeseen gap year.

I was living with my mother’s family and I knew nothing about my father and his family. The only thing I knew was his surname. Every child wishes to have that father figure in their lives, more especially males. That person who calls you my son and you call him daddy, and teaches you how to face manhood challenges.

Two years after I had completed my matric, I met a beautiful girl called Thandolwethu and approached her. We dated for about 16 months and everything went well in our relationship.

Meeting Thandolwethu and having her in my life was an exciting moment in my life, indeed it was ‘my AHA moment’. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to know her family, and I think that was God’s plan.

I loved her, I guess she loved me too but then life happened and we were forced to break up because it turned out we were siblings. She was my father’s daughter, just using her mother’s surname.

I got to know my paternal family after I had dated my sister, after I slept with my father’s daughter unknowingly that we had the same blood. We accepted the truth as painful as it was.

This experience changed my whole life, I wish every man would be responsible and not leave their own kids because these things happen. Our father died when she was 16 years old, she knew that she had a brother but little did she know that she’d one day fall in love with him.

I’m still working towards knowing my whole father’s family. Our father had only two children, and I’m the eldest. Step up and be a great father to your child because God trusted you with them. I hope this could change the readers’ lives too.

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