Every family has an operating system. Ours had a few core programmes running at all times.
Programme one: Education.
My dad was big on education. Not “do your best, dear” big. Top of the class big. The aspiration in our house was not to pass. It was to be the cleverest child in the room, to get 100%, to leave no marks on the table.
He came by it honestly. He went to Alliance, and if you know anything about Kenyan schools, you know that Alliance does not produce men who are relaxed about academics. He tells us he was always top of his class, and having grown up with him, I believe it completely.
If you were in the car with my dad, you were not simply travelling. You were in session. He would casually issue mental sums the way other fathers pointed out interesting birds. And I do not mean 5 plus 7. I mean 453 times 47. In your head. While the car moved. If it was not mental arithmetic, it was Newton’s laws of motion. Or reciting Shakespeare.
Other families had car games. We had a mobile examination hall.
And I would like the record to show that I sat those examinations while fighting motion sickness. Somewhere in that car was a girl trying to compute 453 times 47 while also negotiating with her own stomach. Nobody gave me extra marks for this. I am still waiting.
Programme two: Hard work.
Nothing in our house suggested that life would hand you anything. My mother made sure we all knew how to cook and clean. Competence at home was not optional and not negotiable. Both parents made sure we kept up with schoolwork, and then went beyond it. The school curriculum was treated as a minimum, a floor. There was always more to learn than what the teacher had assigned.
Hard work was not theoretical in our house. From age 13, during school holidays, I “went to work.”
My dad runs an engineering consultancy firm, and school holidays meant reporting for duty at his office. My job was mostly typing, taking the letters and documents he had handwritten and turning them into properly typed pages.
But here is what happens when you put a curious 13-year-old in front of a computer and the typing runs out: she starts exploring. That is how I began experimenting with making music on the office Wang machine. Yes, the same Wang from Day 48. My first coding, my first digital music, all of it happened between typing assignments at my father’s office.
And somewhere along the way, I taught the office how to do mail merge, so they could send out standardised letters faster. Thirteen years old, unofficially improving business processes on my school holidays.
Some children went to the village for the holidays. I went into office automation.
Programme three: Church and family.
Sundays were sacred in both senses. Church first. Then a family outing, very often swimming. There is a whole photo album of my childhood that exists only in my memory: five children in a pool on a Sunday afternoon, wrinkled fingers, chlorine eyes, nobody wanting to be the first one called out of the water.
And around our family was a wider circle: family friends we saw on weekends, homes we moved between, adults who knew us and children we grew up alongside. We were raised inside a community, not just a household.
Now. Here is what I find interesting, looking back from the edge of 50.
Not everything in that operating system matched my wiring. You may remember from Day 48 that I was never the memorise-and-recite child. Mental sums under pressure and Shakespeare on demand were my father’s language of excellence, and they were not naturally mine. Mine was slower, quieter, more sideways. I wanted to wonder about the question, not race to the answer.
But here is the thing about a strong foundation: you do not have to match it perfectly to be built by it.
From my dad I took the conviction that excellence is normal, that aiming high is simply what one does. He also, perhaps without planning to, gave me my first computer, my first job, and my first taste of making technology do something useful, which, if you know what I do for a living, explains rather a lot. From my mum I took competence, the deep usefulness of knowing how to do things. From those Sundays I took faith and the rhythm of rest. From the family friends I took the understanding that life is meant to be lived among people.
I run on different software than my parents. But they built the hardware.
And it has never once failed me.
Come back tomorrow for Day 44: sixteen, awkward, and (apparently) pretty.
Sign the guestbook
Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
