I was listening to Yame.
Young, French, Cameroonian. Tender voice. Sharp mind. A musical talent walking with destiny’s ease.
He was on Clique, speaking of his father — a man who sang before him, dreamed before him, tried before him. A Cameroonian artist whose voice never made it past the walls of struggle. A father whose success never caught the spotlight, but who carried music anyway, like inheritance stitched into the soul.
And I felt a familiar ache.
Not sadness.
Reverence.
Because what if his father’s failure wasn’t a failure?
What if it was a laying down of bricks?
A rehearsal of breath?
A planting, not for himself, but for the son?
We love to say — don’t live through your children.
Let them choose their own path.
Let them be.
And yes, control and ego are dangerous dances for a parent.
But there is something sacred we forget when we speak too sharply of separation.
What if the path the child chooses is the one the parent longed for?
And not by force, but by frequency.
What if it is not projection — but prophecy?
In family soul constellations, we speak of soul groups.
Spirits who return together, again and again, to walk each other home.
Maybe a parent’s dream isn’t their dream alone.
Maybe it's a story that needs more than one lifetime to be fulfilled.
Yame’s father, voice roughened by life, might have carried the melody that would only fully bloom in his son.
Not as an echo, but as a continuation.
Not as living through, but as living with.
The father struggled.
The son soared.
But they were always in the same song. Different verses. Same chorus.
This is not about romanticizing pain or painting poverty in soft hues.
This is about spirit.
About agreements made in the space before birth.
About a father who may have mistaken his child’s mission for his own —
not out of ego,
but because the dream lived in his blood and whispered its name in his sleep.
Maybe the child who walks faster, who achieves with ease, isn’t bypassing the parent.
He is lifting the weight.
Redeeming the offering. Completing the sentence his parent began in stammered hope.
And maybe this is what ancestral healing looks like.
Not always rituals and tears.
Sometimes it’s a song on French television.
Sometimes it’s a son saying “thank you” to the man who couldn’t make it — but made him.
We must expand our understanding of purpose.
We must stop measuring impact in single lives.
Legacy is not always personal.
Sometimes it's collective. Sometimes it skips a generation.
Sometimes it hides in failure, waiting for a voice that can carry it home.
So no, not every parent lives through their child.
Sometimes, they live for them.
Sometimes, they are the rough draft of a symphony that only the next generation can complete.
Yame’s father sang. And because he did, his son could sing louder.
Clearer. Freer.
As if the melody was waiting for the right lungs.
And that… that is not failure.
That is grace in motion.