I used to have this problem with my father.

Every February, when his birthday rolled around, and he’d already got the obligatory Christmas socks (and I was saving the mandatory ties for Fathers Day), I was myself in a monkey pants.

My father wanted only two things he did not have: food security for Trinidad and Tobago; and West Indian integration. All his life, my father dreamed of the region feeding itself and looking inwards to itself, rather than outwards to the big cold countries that ran the world.

With Trinidad’s oil, Jamaica’s bauxite and Guyana’s mineral wealth and hydroelectric capacity, he said, we had all we needed to make it on our own. We could smelt our own aluminium and forge our own path.

Had my father got those two practical, foundational – and impossible to attain – things, he might have found on his own the gifts I always wanted him to have: enough time to relax and soothe a mind I only now realise was deeply troubled (by our species’ avoidable mistakes); and the space, within that relaxed time, to create the most important form of wealth our species can make: love.

All my life, I’ve felt an inescapable inner sadness, mostly of my own making, but some due to him: unlike most people, I never had the conviction (but rather a doubt) that my father loved me.

Only now do I realise how great my father’s own inner sadness must have been if he did not have the conviction (but rather a doubt) that his son loved him.

But the one unequivocal lesson my father taught me in the life we shared was that, no matter how good or how bad things got, no matter who did or did not care about us, I – he – had to be able to get by on my – his, our – own.

As Trinidad and Tobago approaches age 60, she seems to me to be very like my father, (though not nearly as independent).

Her children take from Trinidad and Tobago with presumption. We do not so much receive gifts thankfully as demand our entitlements from her. No matter how much or how selflessly she gives, we expect more. Her udders or her Treasury may have run dry but still we suck. At the age of 60, we throw a tantrum if our maturity is not respected.

My father was just two years older than the country when he died. I’d like to think he found more contentment than distress in his lifetime but, if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the wounds he started out with remaining raw all his life, troubling him to the very end.

The last time I saw my father alive, the nurses told me he was heavily sedated; but, even in that deep drug-induced sleep, he gripped the handrails of his ICU bed so tightly, the veins and arteries stood out on his forearms. The last time I saw my father before he died, I knew without a doubt he was fighting for his life.

Would that I could say that about his country.

Pushing 60, we’re still pushing a “doh care” head, happy-like-pappy to pay $5K for a short pants Carnival “costume”; as long as we have what we want, we don’t care what we need.

Should I, then, for our 60th birthday, give us another long uninterrupted stream of unearned income, like the ones we got from OPEC and the energy multinationals?

Or should I pull the plug and see if we have it in us to come out of the ICU-monkey pants we’ve forced ourselves into?

Thinking about Trinidad and Tobago’s Independence is like pondering the meaning of life: either there is none at all or you have no hope of figuring it out; but, if you do it very well for a long time at a huge personal cost, it rewards you with fleeting moments of gratitude for being alive in-between long bouts of sorrow about having to die forever.

But at least, after all this brain-ache, I’ve figured out what to give the country for Independence next week.

A steelpan ashtray.

So at least we would have a true sense of our national self even as all our money goes up in smoke.

And, push come to shove, we can play ourselves to the very end.