do you want to be a father?
a letter to my kids if they want to know what i wished to be for them
do you want to be a father? my friend asked out of the blue. a dart was thrown without heading, and yet it pierced into my heart. do i want to be a father? there have been many times when i have asked myself this question. and my answers have never been consistent. there have been days when i have been so overwhelmed about handling my own life that taking care of another one seemed beyond my hands. there have been days, especially nights, when all cries, wallows, and tears have dried up when i have thought about it. when everything wrong happening to me didn’t seem wrong, i realized that one day, a small cry or shake of a head will diminish it all.
when people ask me if i want to be a father, i don’t know where that question is coming from. and i don’t know how to answer it. i have thought about it many times. i started dreaming about becoming a father from a very young age. not out of love, but out of hurt. becoming a father was an act of repentance. an act of correction. i want to be a father, and a good father too, because i want to correct everything that i felt my own father did wrong.
it's a quiet pain. as a child, knowing the wrongs that your parents have done. perhaps no one can pick out the problems in a parent better than their own children. but as a child, you can’t say much. you have barely learned enough to say how your day went, let alone express what you feel. you feel the pain, you feel the weight of it, and you know for certain that this is not how you’d like to be treated. that this is not what you’d like to see every day when you come back from school or hear before going to sleep. but you can’t say anything. you were too young to say anything then, and now you’re too old to enter these spaces. where pillars of conflict and rage rise up to the ceiling, and it feels as if the entire house is breaking and coming down. every house is built on these pillars. every family lives under them. once you start speaking about it, the pillars start to crack, the cracks spread across the ceilings and the walls. and you’re left with a broken home.
when i become a father, i won’t let it happen. when i become a father, i will build a house with a ceiling so high, made of love, care, freedom, and respect, that the pillars may never reach it. when i become a father, conflict won’t be a daily war but a necessary conversation. when i become a father, i don’t want my kids to lock themselves inside their rooms and cry on their pillows as their parents are at war. when i become a father, i won’t let the walls crack. when i become a father, i won’t let the house break.
no, my father isn’t a bad person. he is probably the most innocent, simple, and sweet-hearted man i know. he’s not the biggest man in the room. he’s not someone who will charm you with his words, crack jokes, or be the center of attention. he likes the corner. his corner. watching everything from a distance. i don’t know what he thinks of me. i really don’t, and i never gathered the courage to ask him about it. i am his only child. and i know that adds an edge to our relationship. but maybe i remind him of his childhood. when he didn’t have to worry about so much. back when he could sneak out of his house, play games with his neighborhood friends, race the streets, and sleep with an empty head.
at times he can be cruel, rude, ignorant, egoistic, and selfish. but at the end of the day, when i see him from my own little corner, i don’t see the man that he has become. i see a kid. a kid who had dreams like any other kid. a kid who grew up in an ordinary home, with ordinary parents and siblings, had an ordinary childhood and had dreams. and as every day passes, the more i realize that he is still a kid but only grown up. that this is his first time living life just like me and everyone else. he is not a special person. it is immoral to put your father on a pedestal. he is an ordinary person. he has lived an ordinary life and has done quite well for a person like him. and he is my father. that makes him special enough to me.
i am 20 years old. he is 50. we don’t see eye to eye on everything. he is the personification of his age. steadfast and sturdy. works 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, even today, because those extra hours can fetch a few more than what the family needs. he has lost his childhood, his youth, and his prime. now he is slowly sinking into the dimming twilight years. he knows it’s happening. he might not say it. even today when i ask him why he does it, why he travels 500 miles away from home on an insufferable bus ride to an unknown city for work when his office orders him, the man has nothing to say except, “well, i can’t say no.” that’s him. that’s my father. never said no in his life to anything.
will i end up being like my father? i don’t know. maybe. i can’t deny the things that i have taken from him. i can’t throw them away. but i know that he is not perfect. i know that he is not the best father in the world. but he tried his best. and that is enough for me. if anything, that’s what i can and do take from him. to be the best possible father i can be.
maybe becoming a father is my biggest hope. my only hope. maybe becoming a father is the only thing i look forward to. i have met many wonderful people and lost many on the road. i know i am probably too young to think like this, but whenever the day goes tough, the nights feel longer than usual and the eyes get heavy. when you’re scared to sleep because you might lose yourself and the cracks start appearing on the walls. whenever that happens, i imagine a cry. an innocent shriek of a voice, not even comprehensible, but filled with nothing but unconditional affection. whenever i hear that cry, i tell myself that all of this is worth it. all of it for that distant cry.
so, do i want to be a father? i believe so. i want to be a father, and i say this with utmost passion. nothing matters to me more than being a father. i have no idea how a 20-year-old who has barely seen life is thinking along these lines. but i really do. i really want to be a good father. i suppose part of it is making the kid inside me proud also. the kid inside me that never found a perfect father in his own childhood. the kid who always wondered what it meant to be a perfect father—who later on grew up and realized that a perfect father is one who never stops trying his best. that is who i want to be. that is fatherhood for me.
(post img: pinterest)