I’ve spent a lifetime adapting to loss, geography, people, schools and authorities I didn’t understand until much later. Someone once called me a chameleon. It wasn’t praise, but criticism. To them, it meant I lacked conviction. But for me, it became a kind of survival. I didn’t change because I had no core; I changed because the world kept shifting beneath my feet. Adaptation became second nature, like breathing.
I was six when my father died. They told me it was a car accident. But really, he disappeared twice: once on the road and again in my memory. I can’t recall the sound of his voice. Only echoes, told by others. I buried his image so deeply that it never made it back to the surface. There was grief in that erasure, but perhaps also a kind of survival. Sometimes forgetting is how we survive.
Now I’m a father myself: not just once, but three times over. My eldest is on the brink of young adulthood, caught somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the harsher realities of the world. He reminds me of myself: curious, questioning and often lost in thought.
Two years behind him, my younger son has grown quieter over time. He speaks little, but his focus is fierce: on football, school and doing things well. Words don’t come often, but his eyes do the talking. There’s a whole world in them, if you pay attention. And then there’s my daughter, still little, a spark of new energy. With her, I’ve rediscovered a different kind of gentleness in fatherhood. She makes me happy because almost everything is still exciting and fun.
I watch them grow up in a clean, stable Sweden, “almost perfect,” as people like to say. But perfection has its shadows. I wonder how to teach them about the messiness I came from, the history I carry with me: apartheid, instability, conflict and separation. How do I make them see a past that shaped their father, even though they never lived it?
I want to tell them how I once watched Nelson Mandela walk free on television, not knowing I was witnessing history. How I played with Black children in a racist regime without understanding the quiet violence of the system we were all living in. How I grew up in a white family whose house was cleaned by people who weren’t allowed to live in our neighbourhood. As a child, these things were simply part of the world. It took growing older to understand what that world meant.
That realization has stayed with me. If something so wrong could once appear ordinary, what else might I be wrong about? Perhaps that is one reason certainty makes me uncomfortable. My life since then has taken me through different countries, cultures and beliefs. Things I once thought fixed have become less certain. Ideas I once accepted have been challenged. People I disagreed with have surprised me. People I agreed with have disappointed me.
Sometimes my children ask me where I’m from, and I still fumble with the answer. Belgium. South Africa. Mauritius. France. Sweden. None and all. Home still feels like a question more than a place. Maybe home is what we find when we are accepted and known, despite the shifting colours.
And now, as my children grow, the questions have changed. Am I preparing them well enough for the world? Am I giving their roots enough space to grow? Am I sharing my past in a way that strengthens their lives rather than burdens them? I don’t know. Perhaps that is something I want them to inherit too: the ability to say those words without fear.
I want them to form their own opinions and find their own ways of living, without fear of what I might think. I hope they grow up with convictions, and I hope they have the courage to tell me when they think I’m wrong. But I also hope they remain curious enough to question the world they experience and the one they inherit.
Someone once thought being a chameleon meant I lacked conviction. Maybe sometimes it did. There have certainly been moments when adapting was easier than standing my ground. But I see it differently now. I still change colours, not simply to blend in, but because experience changes us. Other people change us. Evidence changes us. And occasionally, if we’re fortunate, we discover that something we once believed with certainty was wrong.
I don’t know what my children will eventually make of the strange collection of countries, people, beliefs and histories that made their father. I hope they have enough of a foundation to know who they are, deep down, but I also hope they never become so certain of who they are that they lose the willingness to question, change and adapt.