The Mentoring Father 5 | #FathersDay

Culled from The Mentoring Father by Fola Daniel Adelesi. First published in 2017. Ebook available on | amazon.com/author/foladanielspeaks | payhip.com/foladanielspeaks | okadabooks.com/user/ediblepen

5 | Delayed gratification

I do not believe that a man could be said to have died intestate - not having made a legally valid will – if his children and the people around him have a lot of lessons to learn from his life though my father left a will before he died.

I have only come to realize that there is more to the last will and testament of a man than what he physically transfers to you after his death. A will without wisdom from the life that made the will is the will of destruction for the beneficiaries of the will.

In some of the things that I do, I still find myself setting boundaries and restraining myself based on the lessons I have learnt from the actions of this great man. Daddy had his challenges but we certainly were not a hungry family. Though I must say that we had at some points eaten miracle meals.

My new lesson here is how he practically and constantly delayed gratification to get things done the way they should be done. I remember seeing some of my dad’s friends changing cars so often and I saw those who were younger changing cars like they were changing an apartment or even changing their clothes.

Many travel for vacations and they could boast about their knowledge of several foreign countries. It seemed like a good life and everything appeared rosy. When I was much younger, I would wonder why daddy didn’t tow the path that many others were towing. We also wanted those big cars parked in our compound. We wanted vacations like some other families. Looking trendy and appreciated was important to us. It’s not that it wasn’t important to daddy but he just stuck to the basics of life. There were no luxury items or anything of the sort.

None of these things that moved many people seemed to move my dad. He had other priorities and those were the things he focused on. While others were busy changing cars as the occasion or trend demanded, daddy used his Volkswagen beetle for seventeen years (17) before he bought another car. During those years when he went about in his beetle, as we called it in Nigeria, there were those who underrated him and concluded that he had nothing. There were some other people who also came to realize that he was different from the image or impression that his car gave them. I remember a few instances when my dad said some people wanted to visit him and they requested the house address. The first thing that surprised them is that the street is named after the seemingly common man they were coming to visit who goes about in his Volkswagen. When they eventually got to his house, they finally realized that there was more to this man than driving a beetle and not living large.

You would have thought that the reason he delayed gratification was just to have a roof over his head. It turned out there was more. He bought his first plot of land in the early 80s and gradually began to build. When he completed the first story building, one would have thought he was going to stop. Here didn’t stop there and never gave himself a reward for that.

He immediately moved on to the next building. He wasn’t earning much so it wasn’t a situation where he had the money piled up somewhere and he was just taking what he needed per time. He had to wait and when the money came in, it was going to the building project. This went on well with the other responsibilities in the house. He could have relaxed and focused on living what seemed to be a beautiful life at the time.

I was fully aware of the many people who told him to change his car. He listened to them but decided otherwise. Something was more important to him. For many people, buying things on current trends would have become a priority but that wasn’t my dad. He wasn’t also moved by what any other person had so I guess that made it easier for him to delay gratification.

He never for once thought that the way to live large was to have a big car to ride in when you do not have a house of your own. I admired all the big cars around and I expected my dad to have one of them but when I grew older I saw things differently and I got to know about people who drove in cars that could buy them fairly good houses yet they lived in rented apartments. For some others, I am fully convinced they saved up enough money to buy cars when the same amount could have bought them lands to start with. He constantly pointed these things out and they were what he would have called misplacement of priorities. He didn’t talk to me about them but he talked to a few friends about them and sometimes he talked to my mum about it.

His lessons on delayed gratifications are so clear to me and he had set me a challenge that I cannot afford to overlook. When I reflect on his sacrifices and the comfort he managed to provide for his family, I always say daddy worked so hard for me not to be born in a rented apartment. As I said earlier, he didn’t have it all together but he had the foresight that determined the direction of his resources.

If I don’t know anything about fatherhood, at least I know that being a father is not necessarily about having children, going by what my father has proven from the way he lived for us. He was not a writer but he always had something to say to people so I guess he would have said, ‘set your priorities right. Some things will come later but you need to deny yourself now.’

Culled from The Mentoring Father by Fola Daniel Adelesi.

First published in 2017.

Ebook available on:

amazon.com/author/foladanielspeaks

payhip.com/foladanielspeaks

okadabooks.com/user/ediblepen