SOME MEN ARE SOCIAL ACCIDENTS

Sir,
 
Why should a woman play a role of both a mother and a father to her children when the father is still alive? This is a question likely to be asked by a woman who is going through the emotional burden and responsibility of raising children alone.

Among all the many things which don’t make sense in this world, the issue of absent fathers is one which doesn’t make sense on purpose.
Do you ever wonder if those men who decide to abandon their children ever regret their decisions or if they ever think about the children they have left behind? Does guilt consume them?

As a man, under what circumstances would you be okay with not being a part of a child’s life you know you fathered?  It is actually hard to draw a single answer to all these questions because there’s common knowledge, though hardly accepted, that some men just don’t abandon their own flesh and blood, but they do so because some women push them out of their children’s lives. As some sort of self-defense, some men say they also wonder if mothers who abandon their children have the same social obligation to feel guilt. This attitude helps no one but frustrates everyone; the child and the parents.

Ask any young adult who has had to go through life without a father figure in his or her life, and they will tell you how heavy emptiness feels. It is much easier to go through life knowing you don’t have a father because he passed on while you were still young, but it’s not so easy to learn that your father is alive but for some reasons only him can tell he never saw the need to raise you. When people who were favoured by the universe and had present fathers in their lives share their stories of how great their fathers have been, you just listen and say ‘wow!’

Every person who assumes the role of being a father should remember that one day his child will follow his examples more than his advice. But whose foot-steps must an abandoned child follow? Maybe absent men should have the decency of admitting they don’t deserve to be called men because they don’t know what fatherhood is. They are just social accidents.

J J Matsenjwa

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