The Ghost of Father’s Day. When absence becomes its own kind of… | by Steve Lambati | Aug, 2025

When absence becomes its own kind of inheritance

“Happy Father’s Day! Unfortunately, I’m not there to cook you lunch, but enjoy your day.”

That’s how it landed — cold, uninvited, like a fly on a fresh wound. Father’s Day. If it hadn’t been for Liz’s chipper text, the whole damn day would’ve slipped by unnoticed, swallowed by the relentless gray tide of forgotten time.

Two years back, it was a radio phone-in show that delivered the same jarring news. I was in an Uber rattling from the airport into Hatfield, Pretoria’s simmering heat. The driver, oblivious, let static-laced messages from kids blast through tinny speakers.

“Happy Father’s Day to my superhero dad!” they’d gush, voices sickeningly sweet, filled with a certainty I’d never known.

For the first time, I was genuinely astonished. Wow. How was it possible that children could just feel all that for their fathers? The words tasted like ash in my mouth. I couldn’t relate. Not one damn bit.

Here’s something you might not have noticed: Father’s Day doesn’t trend like Mother’s Day does. Even in our WhatsApp groups, even on the sparse Malawian social media landscape, Mother’s Day floods timelines with photos and tributes. Father’s Day? A few awkward posts, mostly from people who feel obligated.

Maybe it’s because fatherhood itself is more fragmented here. More complicated. More… absent.

In Malawi, we don’t talk about the statistics, but we live them. Walk through any township, any village, and count the households run by women. Grandmothers raising grandchildren because both parents chased dreams across borders. Mothers juggling piece jobs while fathers become legends — stories told in whispers about men who went to Johannesburg, to Botswana, to anywhere but here.

The numbers, when they exist, are staggering. Malawi’s 2018 Population and Housing Census revealed that 23% of households are headed by women — but that’s just the official count. In rural areas like Chiradzulu, like Likalawe, the real number feels closer to half. Fathers aren’t just absent; they’re ghosts who send money in brown envelopes and visit once a year, if at all.

Labor migration has turned fatherhood into a part-time job. The men leave to survive, and the children grow up with mother’s love and father’s money — if they’re lucky. Most get neither.

So when Father’s Day limps into our calendars, borrowed from American culture like so much else, there’s something grotesque about it. We’re celebrating an institution that migration and poverty have hollowed out, leaving only the shell.

Forgive my ignorance. It’s a deep well, dug from the parched earth of a place you’ve never heard of: Likalawe. A village in Chiradzulu, Malawi. I’m certain you haven’t heard of it, and there’s good reason. Places like Likalawe don’t want to be found. They’re folded into the deepest creases of the map, tucked away like dark secrets.

I was born to a mysterious man — a shadow, a whisper, someone I never saw. Like so many things that form the skeletal structure of my life, I never truly lived them. Most of what passes for my history is wrapped in an impenetrable shroud of obscurity. Even my birth is legend, a grim fairy tale.

My mom carried me long past nine months, they said. A testament to what? Maybe just life’s stubbornness, clinging on in a place where it often doesn’t.

Then came the question of where I was born. Until recently, I knew nothing. Just whispers, the sibilant hiss of village gossip: some said I was born at home in the dirt, under the same thatched roof where chickens scratched. Others whispered Nguludi Mission Hospital — a mission hospital, a paying hospital, impossible luxury for people like us.

If that rumor is true, it was a goddamn miracle I saw daylight there. My people, my grandma — they could barely afford a handful of maize, let alone the gleaming sterile halls of Nguludi. The distance alone is legendary: roughly 30 kilometers one way. A brutal, dusty trek under a sun that bakes the very soul. I’m sure they walked. They can’t afford transport now; they surely couldn’t then.

But miracles happen. Or perhaps it was just grim survival.

I was a miracle, a survivor. My mom can’t say the same. A fever — some nameless plague that swept through the village like a hungry ghost — took her when I was two. A sapling, withered before it could root.

My father? He’s been nothing but a ghost. A brief, illicit encounter with my mom, the spark that ignited my cursed existence. Legend says I’m his carbon copy, a chilling reflection. Sometimes I look in the mirror, and that gaunt, haunted face staring back says it all.

You bastard.

So when Father’s Day arrives with its Hallmark certainty, its barbecues and neckties and “World’s Best Dad” mugs, I’m reminded not of what I had, but of what I’ve always lacked. The architecture of absence. The geography of ghosts.

Other people’s fathers are superheroes, protectors, lunch-cookers, advice-givers. Mine is a question mark shaped like a man, a story that begins and ends with mystery.

But here’s what I’ve learned in thirty-something years of Father’s Days that pass like strangers: absence teaches you things presence never could. It teaches you to be your own compass. To build yourself from scratch, brick by brick, in a place that forgot to give you blueprints.

Maybe that’s its own kind of inheritance.

Maybe that’s enough.

This Father’s Day, I won’t be cooking lunch for anyone either. But I’ll remember the woman who carried me past nine months, who walked 30 kilometers on dusty roads so I could draw my first breath.

Sometimes the parent who stays absent teaches you the most about the parent who never left.

And sometimes, in the hollow space where a father should have been, you discover something unexpected: the fierce, stubborn love of a woman who refused to let her son become another ghost in a village that swallows dreams whole.

That’s worth celebrating too.

But remembering isn’t enough. Every Father’s Day, we celebrate or mourn fathers in absolutes — heroes or ghosts, present or absent. But what about the fathers caught in between? The ones whose efforts go unrecognized because they don’t fit our neat narratives?

For the fathers sending money from Johannesburg: Those brown envelopes are love letters written in kwacha. Your sacrifice — sleeping in crowded hostels, eating one meal a day so your children can have three — that’s fatherhood too. You’re not absent; you’re just loving from a distance.

For the fathers working piece jobs in Lilongwe: Coming home exhausted, with callused hands and empty pockets, feeling like you’re failing because you can’t buy school shoes. Your presence at the dinner table, even when there’s barely food on it, matters more than you know.

For the mothers: You carry the visible load, and society celebrates you for it — as they should. But some of us grew up watching fathers break their backs in invisible ways. Both sacrifices deserve recognition.

For society: We praise mothers who walk 30 kilometers for their children, but we judge fathers who travel 3,000 kilometers for the same reason. We celebrate Mother’s Day with flowers and social media tributes, but Father’s Day gets awkward silences and obligation posts. This imbalance hurts everyone — fathers who feel unseen, children who learn to devalue paternal sacrifice, mothers who carry unfair expectations.

The problem isn’t that we celebrate mothers too much. It’s that we’ve forgotten how to recognize the different ways fathers show love — through remittances, through presence despite poverty, through staying even when leaving might be easier.

Next Father’s Day, let’s expand our definition of fatherhood. Let’s see the migrant worker and the present father, the provider and the nurturer, the man who stays and the man who leaves but never stops sending what he can.

A challenge: Share a story of unrecognized paternal sacrifice. Email me at slambati@gmail.com. These stories — of fathers working in the shadows, loving in ways society doesn’t applaud — need to be told too.