My Dad is not a hero.

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, I would want to dedicate the time of the day to my father.

I think, in many ways, my father has been molded by what he didn’t like about the world. It was sordid and forlorn to him, and he sought peace in religious practices. The more he found himself in societies filled with his identity, the more alienated he felt.

As a woman, I have molded my understanding of men by looking at my father. He consistently chose honor but would betray his loved ones when they needed him the most. The contradictions of his thoughts and choices were hard for me to accept and often led me to single him and men like him out as the sole perpetrator of all the women’s troubles.

I can hear my mother’s voice in the back of my head, asking me to be kind in my memory of him, warning me against regretting my words later. I want to honor her request, as she has been his direct partner. I may or may not agree with her views, but she has the power to mold her understanding as per her lived experience.

My father is not just my father, and my mother is not just my mother. I have had a hard time accepting that. My father is a man of few words, yet as old age approaches him, he wants to babble over videocalls. He wants to ask what kind of food I’ve eaten, visualize my thought process when I gossip about my work, and berate me for being immature about my health.

Today, I want to talk about my father. He has had a woman inside him, who he has quietly shown through rare moments of vulnerability. I think he has been at his most vulnerable when he has realized how much control he has lost of his own body.

I can picture him sitting inside his room, just like his father, with a grumpy look of anguish and despair of the world. Nowadays, he talks a lot about Hell and Heaven and fights less with me. I feel, angrily so, that he gets along better with my siblings. But I know I am at a different place in my life, and he is just like my grandfather.

He often comes to me in my dreams, when I am beginning to feel anxious about how my decisions will affect his health. He reassures me constantly, as a figure in stark contrast to reality. He is quiet and beckoning me towards myself. I think…he has been my first teacher.

I remember one day when he came up to my room and as a father, told me he expected me to work for a few hours in the garden. My fear of disrespecting him triumphed over my teenage anger of his constant absence, and so I angrily trudged downstairs, picked up a shovel, and started heaving dirt out of the earth. I poured out as much of my frustration as I could. Behind me, my sister watched me with mixed emotions of worry and amusement. She went up to my father and said, “Why are you troubling her?”

From the periphery of my eye, I could see his eyes furrowed in emotions that I didn’t quite understand at that time. “She needs someone to be tough on her,” he said. “She needs to learn. Otherwise, the world will break her.”

I now realize that emotion. It was his instinct as a father. An instinct that he constantly and unapologetically showed to me, to mold me into the woman I am today.

I think over time, we have berated the culture of being strict on ourselves, and have allowed each other to slip into cold comfort, even though we inherently know how fatal it can be. Dear reader, please understand. This post is not a celebration of values that silence women but acknowledges the battle of emotions a father must feel when he sees his daughter on the path of becoming one.

My mother deserves her own story, many times which I’ve proudly narrated to strangers. She is a lighthouse that emits confidence and humility, both of which I lack.

But I am very sure that my father has had an equal hand in preparing me for the world that wishes me a Happy Women’s Day. If I call him today and scold him for his flawed response as a husband and partner to my mother, it wouldn’t change the fact that his ethics, however human, have shielded me from the consequences of discrimination.

Perhaps, this has been his way of apologizing to all the women of the world, including my mother.

Happy Women’s Day.

Related posts:

Features. We have implemented support for all types of lab tests in the application: MRI, CT, ultrasound, and more. Modified the start screens in the application. Bug fixes. Fixed a number of…

With the global economy slipping towards what analysts are speculating to be the worst meltdown of the human history, every business has started looking for ways to minimize its expenses. While some…

Building components in isolation allows you to capture all their variations as stories. You can instantly jump to any variant during development and verify its look and feel. But it gets trickier to…