“Wow! Jamaica. How did you hear about Bates?” is the second most popular question I received as a college student. The usually rhetorical “Hey, how’s it going?!” is the first.

“The college prep programme I attended,” I would tell people, explaining that the head of the programme thought Bates would be a good fit for my interests in languages, music, and science. That was a true-but-scrubbed answer. The people who I grew close to knew that I was standing on the grounds of St Andrew High School for Girls one morning after an SAT II test, when a Bates brochure blew up to my college counsellor’s leg. I had heard him praise this school before, always adding that a Jamaican-born professor taught there.

He picked up the brochure. “You should apply to this school, likkle sista.”

“OK.”

Close college friends also knew that, as a high schooler, I would have done almost anything my college counsellor recommended. He was more of a father to me than a counsellor — accepting me into the programme though I could not afford the full cost, and jumping through hoops like dropping me home after class, because he believed my “fine mind” would best grow in the eclectic environment of a top-ranked US college.

Fatherly advice was a rare resource in my life: My father was present until I was seven, but my mother raised me — with the assistance of my grandparents and her siblings — in my earliest years. It was during graduate school when I realised that this had made me (despite being diagnosed an over-thinker or having an INTJ-introversion, intuition, thinking, judgement-personality type and labelled stubborn by young men who want to simultaneously eat and keep their cake) accept fatherly recommendations with little resistance.

This epiphany came to me in International House – New York. Near the end of my three-year limit living in this oasis, during an interview for the house website, someone asked me why I had decided to live there. The dean in charge of international students at Bates had advised me to live there when he found out I would be moving to the city, I explained; so, I did. I never researched any other housing option.

Though we once had a huge disagreement, by the end of Bates I had come to see the dean of international students as a father figure. It happened somewhere between him driving me and other international students to and from Portland airport in the weest of hours in the morning, telling me my first-semester GPA before I could pay my student contribution and see the grades, and remaining calm when an adventurous friend of mine ruined his tyre one afternoon.

He was also the only person to ask me “What do you want to do?” when one of my senior theses advisors pressed me to discontinue work I had been doing for over a year because the reality I found upon visiting the country I was writing about contradicted the lousily researched text book I had based the thesis on.

The day I dropped that thesis I returned to my dorm room and uncontrollably vomited over its months- old floor. I fell asleep leaving the mess, and thinking that the dean had been the only person to acknowledge that what I wanted to do was just as important as what my professor wanted me to do. I thought: Providing that validation is something a father would do.

Since my teenage years, I had been guessing at how fathers father. It started after my first boyfriend told me that by virtue of having grown up without a father, there were important things I did not know. His normally sexy, sound reasoning was suddenly repulsive — no, I was not deficient in any way! Moreover, there was nothing that my father would have done that my mother did not do, I argued.

But his seed of doubt had been planted.

Father figures in my life, and the things that they had done or were doing, took on new importance. By examining both, I could understand what fathers did and prove ‘Mr Mention’ wrong.

• My grandfather, who I had heard bought me ice mints that no one else was allowed to touch — fathers let others know that you are treasured.

• My uncle, who hoisted my little limbs above water during Hurricane Gilbert — fathers protect and physically carry you.

• That same uncle had often fetched me and my sister from school when my mother could not — fathers lighten your mother’s burdens.

• My other uncle, who is considered tough, but always bought me ice cream from the fudge man when I asked — fathers tell you yes, even if they are stiff and unfriendly to other people.

• My priest, who allowed me to be an altar server though girls were not traditionally permitted to do this — fathers remake the rules if the rules hurt you.

• That same priest came to my home during different moments of crises, and things were always better when he left — fathers come to the rescue at a moment’s notice.

• The neighbour who came to my gate the night someone pried open a bathroom window and peeked at me while I showered, and my screams rendered my mother into a state of motionless fright — fathers are who your mother leans on when she, strong as she is, is terrified.

The night of the bathroom window incident was the first time I realised that perhaps the most important role a father plays in a child’s life is being present for their mother.

I stayed on the lookout in college:

• My first-year advisor, a vice-president of the college who told me on my first day “Don’t ever sit in your room wringing your hands, I am here.” — fathers make themselves available to help you.

• That same advisor convinced the college to financially support a college access conference I had planned with friends; introduced me to a possible mentor every time I decided on a new career; assured me that “Maybe the career you want has not been invented yet,” and wrote me a graduate scholarship recommendation that I still read whenever I need to feel better about myself or that I am right to pursue my passions — fathers stand for your goals.

• One of the mentors my first-year advisor introduced me to, who recommended me for a summer internship and allowed me to live with his family so I could complete it without going broke — fathers give you the tools you need to stand on your feet.

• The Bates Christian Fellowship advisor who patiently answered my questions about faith, even after I had completed graduate school! — fathers never stop fathering.

I concluded that fathers do some of the things mothers do, but boyfriend had been right, fathers also did things mothers cannot — support your mother, convince men (who are only swayed by the opinions of other men) that you are worth paying attention to, and remind people who don’t take a mother’s protection seriously that you are also protected by a man.

Each of the father figures I had observed also taught me things my mother could not have, simply because they were different people. They had a different set of life experiences from which to teach me and add value to my life.

The area in which this was most salient was in what men taught me about men and intimate relationships. My education in this area from my mother can be summarised in one of her most expressed sentiments, “There are five per cent of good men.” However, through example, the father figures in my life showed me that there are indeed many solid men in the world (I can’t get the exact percentage though!) — men who love their partners, father their children with all their effort, and allow other children, like me, to steal a little of their parenting.

The most profound father figure in my life in this regard is someone named Rev Vivian Panton.

I have no pictures with Rev Panton, and I have spent relatively few days in his presence. When my parents separated, he met and counselled our family, and he remained my mother’s close friend until 2012. He called me “my daughter”, and almost every time we spoke he retold me the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and that, in his eyes, I was Jonathan. Both those things, I later realised, were integral to building my self-esteem as a child.

One day, in 2011, I contacted him. I felt panicked about responsibilities that were coming my way more quickly than I could handle, one, and I loved someone who lived far away from Jamaica and was wondering if I should continue our relationship, two.

“I need to talk with you.” He picked me up and we sat in his dizzying library for a counselling session. He looked at me warmly through his glasses and cleared a couch to the left of both our chairs. He listened to what was wrong, then informed me about how I would figure out what to do about it: Ask each question you have from your chair, then move to the couch and answer it.

So, there I was, switching seats and talking to myself about myself. I could not have thought of anything more useless, and I completed the exercise only because I could not bring myself to tell him I thought it was a profoundly lazy way for him to shy away from giving me advice.

I understood the importance of the exercise a year later. As we spoke on the phone, him advocating for a young man I had taken to meet him, and me asking him about his prostate cancer treatments, I understood that he cared tremendously that whomever I love be worthy of my sacrifices.

I often regret that I took so long to be vulnerable with Rev Panton in my adult years. He was filled with more insight, openness and non-judgmental love than I had imagined when I risked having our first honest conversation.

He taught me about men’s typical vulnerabilities and needs, and how to purposely build healthy families and marriages. He emphasised “Marriage is daily work”, and “Resentment in one area festers and spreads all across a marriage. Never allow resentment to enter your marriage.” He was willing to share all the knowledge I wanted, but he had done that counselling exercise to show me that anytime I was unsure of what to do, I could speak honestly with myself and find the answer. He ensured that I understood that I was in charge of deciding and designing the way forward, regardless of what life sends my way. Fathers love you into loving and demanding the best for yourself.

Thank you to my many fathers, and all the other men who honour the beautiful opportunity of fatherhood. In doing this, you are raising future solid fathers. You are also teaching children who grew up without fathers worth modelling how to become, or demand that their partner be, a father as life-shaping as you.