One of my daughters is very fair in complexion, the other unmistakably dark, both atypical in a way that breaks the family pattern. The dark one is not “blacky” by any harsh measure, yet she doesn’t fit the expected shade, so the siblings tease her as the only black person in the house while telling the fair one she doesn’t know whose blood she resembles. It sounds like harmless banter, but it is how families rehearse a much older story: that every home carries a deviation it cannot explain away.
In my community there is a sarcastic adage we pass around like folklore, that every family has its own “weird” side, its dark horse, its outlier. The saying is unscientific, yet sociology has long observed the same truth. Émile Durkheim wrote about the way groups create norms only to be unsettled by the individuals who refuse to fit them, and family systems theory reminds us that no household is a monoculture. A family is a system of different gifts, temperaments, and scripts running in parallel.
That is why the most decorated homes still surprise us. I look to my brother for initiative, strength, guidance, tradition, and the art of human connection, everything except books. And we all know the examples that circulate in public life: celebrated lawyers, surgeons, and engineers whose siblings never finished school, or whose parents themselves never held a degree or a title.
Research on achievement and sibling differentiation, from Alfred Adler’s early work on birth order to more recent studies in behavioral genetics, suggests that sameness is not inherited as a package. Children in the same house often diverge precisely to claim their own space. Life seems to insist on it. I call this life’s way of humbling us, its quiet refusal to let consistency become entitlement. It is the force that trains emotional maturity, because it forces us to live with variance instead of demanding uniformity.
We are rarely ready for that variance. A wealthy man assumes only wealth can court his daughter. A doctor assumes a doctor. Families with big names treat scandal like a classified file, sealed and never to be opened. We invent proverbs to cover the gap, “what God cannot do does not exist,” and then we doubt them the moment a life in front of us refuses to add up neatly. We assume, for instance, that poverty or the almajiri child is the likeliest path to drug abuse, and we perform public grief when someone or family we respected is linked to cocaine.Then the news turns: the children raised under us, in elite schools, with every privilege, begin accusing one another in public of the same thing. That is the humbling.
Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding two truths at once, the image we curated and the reality that contradicts it. The tragedy is not the contradiction itself. The tragedy is our refusal to tolerate it.
History teaches the same lesson at scale. The Babangidas, Atikus, Obasanjos, Jonathans, Buharis, no name in power is exempt from a stark side. If we believed divorce belonged only to the poor, or that public disgrace belonged only to ordinary families, then these houses that have become symbols of discipline and honor would have to be immune. They are not. Time will not sustain any era without a record being broken, a champion being beaten, a script being rewritten.
And now social media accelerates the humbling. Fame and pride once had private rooms to breathe in. Today they are staged for public validation, and the pressure to defend everything instantly turns a small crack into a collapse.
The strength, I have come to believe, is in embracing the other side. The uncle who is not polished. The sibling who chose a different path. The neighbor, the classmate, the nephew who will never fit the family brochure. Great biographies are full of this. Leaders, artists, and founders have all been humbled at some point by the need to live with a deviant, naughty, or simply different child, with a choice they did not make.
In my language we have a proverb: we give birth to children, we do not birth their character. That is not resignation. It is an invitation to empathy, sympathy, tolerance, and a forgiveness that starts with ourselves.
Life also humbles us in chemistry. We cannot match-make everything. Trust, fate, interest, and alliance do not obey a family plan. The same people we stood for yesterday, defended in public, marketed as friends, can become the ones who hunt us tomorrow. Isn’t that humbling?
Think of politics. El-Rufai once described Tinubu’s victory and Uba Sani’s in Kaduna as a great relief. He is only human. And yet the same currents that shift between Abba Yusuf and Kwankwaso, between Uba Sani and El-Rufai, remind us that interest is rarely a straight line. We have to be inside another person’s situation to understand that survival and self-preservation will reorder their loyalties before ideology does. Why do we assume we can transfer hate, enmity, and the inheritance of values without resistance, and expect time not to humble us for it?
In the end, life writes us a different script than the one we drafted for our earned identity. It disappoints, not to break us, but to teach us. The test of any family, any generation, is not to escape the possible dark side. It is to be humbled by the possibility, and to grow strong enough to meet it without erasing the people who carry it.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
