You always made your bed. You kept time. You did the things you promised to do. “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail,” Diana’s dad always told them. They grew up in a house where love also came with instructions.

Her mother was a police officer. Her father was in the DCI. Between them, there was little room for creative interpretation. If the family was leaving at 7:30, everyone was leaving at 7:30. Not 7:31. Not “I’m almost ready.”

“I hate ironing clothes to this date because we were always the ones washing and ironing their police uniforms which were of that very hard material. And you had to iron that sharp line down the trousers.”

They were three sisters. Daddy’s girls. 

She recalls spotting her mother at a roundabout on Thika road directing heavy traffic. Only this was not the mother she knew at home. “She was standing in the middle of the traffic, shouting at matatu drivers.” Diana was stunned. Her mom was unrecognisable. At home, her mother was “the chilled one.” Her father was different. Sometimes he disappeared for a month because he was working undercover. He’d show up and continue normally. He never explained where he had been. He was, in other words, both the policeman and the father.

That was childhood: a strange mixture of discipline, surveillance and absolute protection.

Diana became a banker because her parents never wanted any of them to get into the forces. Ten years of numbers eventually exhausted her. She wanted something that would challenge her differently.

So she joined Securex.

Now she works in customer experience, is studying for a diploma in security operations, and eventually wants to become a CEO. “Any CEO.”

She has her mother’s ambition. What can I study next? What comes next? How do I get higher?

Maybe we do become our parents.