For most of his life, Dr David Inniss had daddy issues. His father was there while he was a young student but never there, really.
Now that he’s all grown up and is the founder and chief executive officer of the management consulting firm, The Koci Group in Sacramento, California, he has captured his experience, and that of others, in his book Being the Dad I Never Had, in an effort to help people understand the long term effects.
As we spoke that night at a restaurant during his recent trip home, his two sons Jalen and Nico played. The love he has for his boys was evident in the way he glanced in their direction, and in his voice when he spoke of the things that they do together. It affirmed his belief that fathers are a necessary part of a child’s life.
“My life experience as a child growing up without a father has been I believe, central to my life, central to my existence, central to what I’ve become and central to how I’ve approached life. I think that what happened is that … in my teenage years I was really disciplined, got into the Barbados Cadet Corps, I was really focused, really disciplined, really never had to be prompted by my mother to do anything,” said the West Point graduate.
When he did the Common Entrance Exam back in 1986, he was the top male student in the island, an achievement he recalls with pride.
“It was a fantastic experience. I was a year ahead [of my class] all the time, throughout all my years. My mum was a teacher so I went to school with her early, first at St Ann’s Primary and then St Joseph Primary when they did the amalgamation of the three schools in St Joseph. I was well prepared for the exam, I did pretty well and I was pretty excited about it and went to Harrison College from there.
“”What prompted the book, when it really became something I was interested in doing was when I became 30. All through my 20s and 30s, this issue of being fatherless really affected me. I think that it made me press harder and be more focused on achieving. I became more of an achievement junkie. So, working really, really hard for degrees, working really hard to excel at school, tried to do my best at everything I was attempting. There was a lot of pressure I placed on myself and for what reason I did not know.
“Before I turned 30 there were a lot of questions swirling around in my head, some of which were: Why did my dad not love me, why was he the way he was with me. Those are the kinds of questions I had. When I became 30, the questions switched and they became what was wrong with me and why couldn’t he love me. They turned pointing a finger back at me.
“It was a pretty tough time at that time and I became a dad at 32 and there were things that came to me naturally that shouldn’t and there were things that didn’t come to me naturally that should and I wanted to explore more the issue of fatherless men fathering boys. It seems like a complex issue …in my teenage years I didn’t try to get answers. What I tried to do then was cope with the issue, pushing it aside,” said David who spent more than 15 years in the high-tech industry.
He said that was the way the “thousands of us” from his generation and “hundreds of my friends” dealt with fatherless issues.
From the foreword to the final chapter which focuses on closure, the book which is available on Amazon is poignant. In Chapter 13, he tells his father that he loves him and that he forgave him for everything he did or didn’t do. That includes the horrific episode involving a knife with a nine-inch blade in Chapter one.
Some of the author’s friends only knew what was going on in his life when they read the book. He never told them tabout the difficulties with his father or anything that happened to him.
Read the book which offers “lifelong lessons for fathering after fatherlessness” or just read about David and the path he took via his website drinniss.com. It is an interesting read.
When he looks to the future, he sees another book, one which will focus on how women are affected by fatherlessness.
“I also see a future as a proud dad of two fantastic, well-rounded young men Jalen and Nico,” David said. (Green Bananas Media)
