Better Than My Father

Some fathers provide everything, except the one thing a child remembers most, presence. Better Than My Father is a memoir for anyone who learned to be strong before learning to be seen. It is for the person who became responsible early, who achieved, endured, and stayed quiet, yet still carried an ache that success could not name. This book gives language to a reality many people live but rarely talk about, love expressed through duty, discipline, and provision, but not always through emotional safety. With honesty and compassion, Kizito Mbaekwe tells a story shaped by two powerful forces, family inheritance and personal choice. He honors what his father sacrificed while naming what was missing. Not to blame. Not to shame. But to understand. To heal. To refine the legacy. Through childhood memories, hard lessons, and the slow realization that silence can become a tradition, he shows how emotional patterns are passed down, and how they can be changed. Threaded throughout the memoir is an immigrant journey defined by reinvention, leaving home, rebuilding life from the ground up, and navigating the cost of ambition. It is the story of striving to make it while still learning how to live, how to love, and how to stay present in the places that matter most. This book matters because it touches daily life. It speaks to the quiet tension inside many homes, the parent who works but cannot talk, the child who performs but does not feel known, the adult who carries childhood weight into relationships, parenting, and mental health. Better Than My Father helps readers name what shaped them, make peace with what they cannot change, and choose what they will not repeat. If you have ever loved a parent yet grieved what you did not receive, if you have ever confused strength with silence, if you have ever wanted to break generational cycles without betraying your family, this memoir is for you. It does not promise perfection. It offers something more honest, completion. The courage to finish what was unfinished, soften what was hardened by survival, and build a home inside yourself and for the people you love, where presence becomes the inheritance.