The parent and child relationship is a famously complicated one. It’s one of the few in life where the love is often so pure—and the bond so established—that both members expect to continually transition together through the different stages of life. But as children grow and develop their own identity, boundaries are redefined and the foundational rules drummed into us are questioned.
My own journey with my father has been a doozy. I grew up in a deeply religious household with a strong heritage to uphold within that belief system. So when I rejected those beliefs at a young age, and later came out in my early 20s, I wasn’t only challenging that religion, but my parents, too. Because of this, my father and I didn’t have a meaningful connection for many years. Yet the love between us was always felt—almost as though spoken in a foreign language since we no longer knew how to relate to one another.
I’m ashamed to admit that we both let this pattern last for more than a decade. I traveled to China and Eastern Europe, before deciding to move to New York City with my loving partner. I had all of the support I needed in my romantic relationship and close friendships. Yet the only person that has answered my calls within two rings has always been Dad.
So earlier this year, when my eight-year-relationship fell apart and I went down a rabbit hole questioning the decisions in my life, I decided it was time to turn to my father for guidance. He suggested we gain perspective together through a new travel experience: a safari trip that would take us to South Africa and Botswana.
I have long dreamed of bouncing around through wild sage in an adapted Range Rover, binoculars slung around my neck. But what I actually thought about most was how I wanted to use this opportunity as a chance to mend some of the damage of our relationship man to man. Not man to child.
In the run up to the trip, my father would call me almost every day: He had watched a documentary and discovered that we might see leopards. He decided that we should pack a painters kit and use the afternoons interpreting the bush. He ordered some mosquito-resistant clothing for both of us—the list goes on. It’s the most I’ve talked to my father consecutively in living memory.
Yet by the time the departure date swung around, I still hadn’t read the itinerary. I deemed myself too busy with work and heartbreak. I called my father and cautiously asked him the same thing. He hadn’t read it either. We laughed, and I noticed how our laughs sounded like echoes of one another.
Once we made it to Cape Town and settled in at the Silo Hotel, we sat down together and looked at what was ahead of us: an early-morning motorcycle ride around Table Mountain and then wine tasting, a helicopter ride above the Okavango Delta in Botswana to our first safari camp Duba Plains, then a mobile safari in the Moremi Game Reserve with Barclay Stenner Safaris. I felt like I was looking in a mirror. We were both sitting with our legs crossed, leaning back in our chairs with our arms behind our heads. I quickly changed positions.
This kept happening during our trip. When we first met our guide, Carlos, at Duba Plains Camp, we both walked up to him in the exact same manner which I normally approach people, with intense eye contact and my right hand outstretched, practically bumping into one another to get there first. Later, after spending the morning with a herd of elephants and catching a thrilling moment where a pack of African Dogs was hunting a Kudu, we met up with Map Ives, a guide and conservationist, for lunch to learn more about the Delta. As Ives was explaining how the yearly floods create a lush and completely unique natural landscape year after year, I kept getting caught up by my own natural phenomenon: my father and I unconsciously have the same body language.
The following days played out in the routine of most safaris: 5:30 a.m. wake up for the morning game drive, lunch at 1 p.m., free time until 4 p.m., when we then went out for an evening game drive, and back to camp for dinner around 8 p.m. This structure worked well for its purpose—to see as much wildlife as possible, which we certainly did, spotting nearly everything in our field guides. But it left little time for the heart-to-heart conversations I had envisioned having with my father, forcing us to become vulnerable and mend some emotional damage. And when we had time in the afternoons, my father wanted to rest.
This ended up being a blessing in disguise, though. As the days continued, and I sipped my rooibos tea in the afternoons while my dad napped, thinking back on a morning spent observing the beating heart of the natural world, I not only felt my own relationship trauma floating away in the dusty warm breeze, but the need to hash out my childhood qualms felt more and more trivial.
On the bush plane to the Moremi Game Reserve for our final leg of the trip, I asked my father if he noticed our body language similarities. “Of course I have,” he quipped, laughing. “You’ve always been so similar to me.” This caught me off guard. “No!” was my first reaction. Then I realized how much I’d been resisting this notion.
Curious to test out a new mindset, one in which I try not to let our similarities irk me, I felt hopeful to bond in a more natural way. But shortly after settling in at the Barclay and Stenner Camp, a laboriously set up oasis deep in the national park complete with its own king-sized bed, bucket toilet, and pull shower, my dad fell ill with a cold.
The next day, I found myself without my father, being led by the camp’s operators and guides, John Barclay and James Stenner, on a morning drive. We found a pride of lions and I was astounded when a young male cannoned out of the sage and playfully awoke his sister. She started stretching her back by placing her paws on a tree in an almost standing downward facing dog position, and her brother quickly wandered over and copied her. Watching their instincts and family dynamics expanded my own realization the day before on the bush plane: Humans (as animals) learn and grow through imitation and shared experiences. It was a spectacular sight, and one, I realized, I wished I was sharing with my father—even if we looked the same squinting through the binoculars to view it.
