There is a particular kind of Father's Day question that nobody puts on a card. What are you actually handing down. Not the watch, not the property, not the bank balance. The thing underneath all of it that determines whether your children know who they are when nobody is around to remind them. I was born in St. Thomas, Jamaica, raised across St. Thomas, St. Andrew, and Kingston, and the majority of who I am was shaped in a city that taught me how to read a room and hustle without apology. That is not something I bought. It is something I was given, and I am still trying to figure out how to give the same thing to three children scattered across three different countries.
Why Family Stories Matter More Than Most Fathers Realize
I have written some of the hardest stories of my life on this journal, including the chapter where I came out of jail in 2003 and was still absent when Jahiem was born that September. I tell that story to my children directly because a family story that gets hidden does more damage than the original mistake it tries to cover. Children build their sense of where they come from out of the stories they are told and the silences they notice. Both teach them something. I would rather mine teach them the truth.
Jamaica is full of oral tradition, the griot voice in different form, the practice of passing knowledge through spoken story rather than written record. I grew up inside that tradition without naming it as such. It is why I write the way I write now, in long unbroken thoughts that sound more like someone talking to you across a table than someone lecturing from a podium. That instinct came from somewhere. It came from a culture that trusted the spoken word to carry weight across generations.
Preserving Traditions Across Three Countries and Three Childhoods
Amelia lives in Kingston with a degree in International Relations and a composure that still catches me off guard. Jahiem lives in Canada with a degree in Financial and Business Economics and a kindness that loves its own company without apology. Avi lives with me in New York, ten years old and full of opinions, and Reggae at six in the morning is hers the same way it was mine at her age. Three completely different childhoods, three completely different countries, and I am trying to make sure all three of them carry the same root even though the branches grew in different directions.
The tradition I protect hardest is language and rhythm. Not forcing patois on children who did not grow up surrounded by it daily, but making sure they hear it, understand it, and feel ownership over it as something that belongs to them, not just something their father used to speak. Jamaica's national anthem is the only one in the world that functions as an actual prayer, and I make sure my children know that fact not as trivia but as evidence of where their values come from, whether they grew up hearing it daily or only on visits home.
Teaching Children Where They Come From When They Did Not Grow Up There
Raising a Jamaican kid in New York means making constant decisions about what to keep and what to let go. Avi did not grow up in Kingston. She grew up watching her father navigate two cultures at once, code switching between the directness New York demanded and the warmth Jamaica taught him first. I cannot hand her my exact childhood. I can hand her the values underneath it. Respect that is earned through how you treat people, not demanded through title. A hustle that does not apologize for itself. A sense of humor that survives almost anything because it has to.
The hardest part of teaching a child where they come from when they did not grow up there is resisting the urge to romanticize it. Jamaica is not a postcard. It carries real complexity, real history, real tension between popularity and justice that I have written about elsewhere on this journal. I want my children to inherit the pride without inheriting a fantasy. The full picture, not the curated one, is the only version of culture worth handing down.
The Father's Role in Shaping Cultural Identity
A mother often carries the daily texture of culture, the food, the language at home, the rhythms of a household. A father carries something different and just as essential, the sense of where the family stands in relation to the wider world. I watched Jamaican fathers growing up who did not babysit, they raised, and there is a world of difference between those two postures. Raising means you are responsible for shaping a person's understanding of themselves in the world, not just supervising them until someone else takes over.
I take that responsibility seriously with all three of my children, even from different countries, even with different mothers, even with three completely different daily realities. My role is to be the throughline. The one constant that tells each of them, regardless of which country they grew up calling home, that they come from somewhere specific, somewhere with values worth keeping.
Creating a Legacy of Belonging, Not Just Bloodline
Belonging is bigger than bloodline. I discovered that my three children, born to three different mothers in three different countries, all share the same life path number in numerology. I did not plan that. I am not surprised by it either. Each of them came into the world with something to prove and the instinct to prove it on their own terms, and I believe that instinct is part of what they inherited from me whether the geography matched or not.
The legacy I actually want to leave is simple to state and lifelong to build. I want each of my children to know, without question, that no matter where they live or which passport they carry, they belong to something specific. A culture. A history. A father who made sure the thread never broke, even when the distance between us made it harder to hold onto than it should have been.
"Out of many, one people."
Jamaica's National Motto