Free And Then Life Happens by Auma Obama

fact, responsible for it. Not only did I sense that he did not grasp how great my loss was, behaving as if everything would soon be back to normal, but he had also been too much of an absent father for me to share my feelings with him. Previously, he had only rarely done anything with us of his own accord. When my stepmother was still living with us, she always planned a family outing on the weekends, and my father always submitted to her wishes. Or if nothing was planned with the family, he met up with friends after he had read the newspaper and solved the crossword puzzle. At the time, it was basically quite all right with us children that we didn’t have all too much to do with him. We were in great awe of him and were glad when he didn’t meddle in our affairs. We also had my stepmother and each other.
    But there were also times when I asked my father for help, such as one day when Abongo was playing soccer with his friends and he refused to let me join them despite my persistent pleading and begging. I fetched my father, who put his foot down. My brother reluctantly gave in and made me goalie. Unfortunately, I did not last very long. After a short time, a ball hit me with full force in the belly, knocked the wind out of me, and brought tears to my eyes. That ended the game for me for the time being. I ran to my father, who immediately rushed out of the house and reprimanded my brother.
    â€œYou have to do a better job of looking out for your sister,” he shouted at Abongo, comforting me.
    â€œThat’s why she shouldn’t play with us,” my brother replied angrily, trying very hard not to sound impertinent, for fear of getting in trouble.
    â€œIf she wants to play, she can play,” my father said decisively.
    Although I sometimes took advantage of my father’s authority to prevail against my brother, and Abongo himself constantly threatened to tell my father about my misdeeds, we usually tried to resolve our quarrels between ourselves and preferred not to get him involved.
    To sit with my father relaxing and listening to music on a weekend at home seemed completely absurd to me. It was not only that I was afraid of him as a figure of respect, but also that the anger over our lost family and the longing for my vanished mother were rumbling in me rather powerfully. If only my father had taken an interest in us earlier, we might have had a different relationship, I thought repeatedly as the poignant music filled the room. Now that he had to deal with us on his own, without my stepmother, he knew how to relate to us only as an authority figure whose word was law—or, on nights like this, as a broken man.
    Agitated and full of conflicting emotions, I listened to the flutes and violins of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and could not shake the thought: Why can’t everything go back to the way it used to be?
    At that time, I fully comprehended that my father needed the music and the conversation to drown out the emptiness that had permeated his life, but I did not grant him that escape. What about me? Didn’t he see that I was going through the same things he was? Had he ever seriously thought about my feelings at all? I suspected that my father didn’t ask me any questions about my emotional state because he was afraid of the answers. Nor did I demand an explanation from him. I avoided an honest conversation, because as a well-bred child I was not allowed to rebel against my parents’ decisions. I was strictly forbidden to talk back to an adult. So I remained silent and merely listened in frustration to the music.
    With the distance of years, I grasp better what was going on in my father’s life in the sixties and seventies and what political struggles dominated his everyday professional life. He had returned highly motivated from his studies in the United States and believed that he could make a significant contribution to building up his native country. He moved from