The Father Daughter Dance of the Decade
Embarrassingly, it has taken me nearly two decades for me to come close to be forgiving and genuinely grateful for my father.
I have reflected upon the main events that occurred throughout the first decade of my life - ones where I had locked deep in my soul with so much vindication that I could easily shelf away with contempt and complain why I had a harder childhood than 'most'.
It takes two to dance the annual father daughter dance
On the surface, he may have given me plain jane pain, but I am going to look deeper
till
I
get
one
However, this Father's Day, I am going look deeper into all the memories that once contributed to the downfall into my self-destruction.
"Life gives you so much pain, but here you are, making gold out of it."
I will use these stories as the stardust under my eyes as a craft my new uphill path to self-reclamation
When I was five years old,
He forced me to learn how to halt my emotional expression, like how the world demands us to professionally.
I spent my days in kindergarten trying to figure out why I had these silent weeks at home. I was perplexed and afraid because I could not allow my father to detect that I had cried. Instead of typical mother daughter braids and dress-up, my mom had whipped me into shape, training me up for my black belt in emotional concealment for as long as I could remember. She shoved me into the bathroom every time I had any reddened cheeks and teary eyes, akin to mulan getting ready for the matchmaker to be an "honor to us all". By five years old, I was forced to accelerate the acquirement of the fine magic of draining the redness from my face with water in 5 minutes or less. After all, it had to be done so that my father would not flare up from seeing my black face and be upset that I was being sensitive again (for that was the greatest sin of all apparently).
It was this repeated routine that enabled me to develop my bank of abilities to stifle my emotions in situations where people would ridicule, criticise or punish me for having emotions. I never understood how important this was until I started working because the world can be far from understanding when it comes to our vulnerabilities.
Also...
He taught me that the world's demons will get scarier and scarier and that I will have to adapt whether I am ready or not
I used to dread him coming back every night because I knew his "how-to lessons" on coping with his flare-ups would commence at unscheduled times. He knew I was afraid of him - so his strategy was to act angry more frequently to teach me how to stop being afraid of him. Some kind of over-exposure-numbness effect he was going after here? However, that did nothing for my psyche and courage in dealing with his fortitude.
When I was six years old,
He taught me to absorb my pain and suck it up because that was the way the world was going to work
I had flung off my scooter as it hit a bump on a hill, he scolded me that it was chicken feet as I yelped in pain from the antiseptic spray he applied onto my open wound. I could not understand why as I asked my mom, in between sobs, "why can't daddy be more sympathetic? It's really very painful for me. I'm only six."
When I was seven,
he taught me to apologize even when I am afraid
When I was growing up, I always thought that I was the trigger finger, I labelled myself as the troublemaker at this stage because my father always accumulated all his rage and it was my tiny mistake that set him off on rampage. My mother and sister would usually stage a all-girls meeting as we banded together to brainstorm of ways to diffuse his bomb-fire. They would send me out as tribute (aka the sacrificial lamb), convincing me "you're the youngest, daddy will never get angry with you." As such, I said a prayer every time I was tasked to do the group appeasement and apology on behalf of everyone in the family. I remember quaking in my shoes as I contemplated in the hallway of how to approach someone to apologise when I was completely afraid of being hollered at.
Today, this probably explains my fearlessness in opening up about taboo topics as if it was nothing to me because he taught me to go forth even when the rest may be hiding in the bedroom, waiting for me to make the first step into the lion's den.
When I was eight years old,
He taught me that society will gnaw at you and still blame you for being sensitive
It was a sunday tea break after church service and we had choped our usual seats at Ya Kun @ Parkway Parade. I can't remember the exact context of the conversation that preceded this but he bit my arm (to him, jokingly). I felt really hurt and upset and started crying as any weak-hearted eight-year-old would. He was not sympathetic, rather he was the opposite - he scolded me for being too sensitive when he was simply joking and did not mean it. I recall it as if it was just yesterday, the sights before me are still as clear as day today. I recall glimpsing into the little train playground structures as I saw other little children peep in and out of the peepholes, beaming without a care in the world. I could not comprehend what he was saying about how "if you continue to stay this sensitive, you will be too weak to survive in this world." I swallowed those harsh words along with the cool sips of my ice milo and cried as I could not understand why my father could not see me as human and ever accept the validity of my hurt/feelings without dismissing them as "hypersensitivity".
I was perplexed as to why this initial semblance of gaslighting struck me at this time in my life as I saw my friends' fathers run to baby their fallen children with gentle soothes of comfort - why was mine like this.
It was when I was afflicted with a prong of online hate across approximately 3 years did I see the true value of his approach in bringing me up, hardened to weakness and sympathy. I found that these anons who threw shade at me bore no guilt but rather believing that they were helping me (just like he felt he was), they were throwing me blades that I manipulated to carve lines into my skin. I was not even angry at them because I absorbed all the negative views others had of me as validations to motivate my downward spiral into self-induced death. I just could not understand why the world was just unjust and why they were just doing this to me. What have I done that was so terribly wrong that people would tell me that they wouldn't be bothered if i wanted to kill myself? They would say on their blogs: "we got that bad meh?" as they jeered at my weak response to their supposedly superficial attacks at me (that I was supposed to take with a pinch of salt).
Perhaps I got through that plethora of painful phrases because my father had taught me from a young age that the world does not care about your feelings as much as you would want them to.
When I was nine years old,
he taught me how to transform painful drama into dramatic comedies that would help make my life easier
With the frequent family drama - the outrageously emotional reactions that were exchanged, I built up my immunity to demolish potential threats that may shatter my other friends. As the observer of the unfolding of scary family dynamics, the repetition of emotionally damaging statements, weeks of cold war etc all equipped me to form an armour of resistance against scarier statements that I had to face as I inched closer to more unforgiving demons who hollered self-condemnation in my ear every day in the depths of my mental illnesses. Had I not faced such an upbringing, how could I still be alive today as the statements increased in harshness by (I would say), one thousand percent). He increased my threshold for pain that I soon had to face on my own every moment in the next phase of my life.
I managed to be laugh off my pain and not take it so solemnly sometimes. I used to tell my best friend: "omg I swear my family life is like some channel 8 drama."
When I was ten years old,
He taught me that though life seems like something I cannot handle, my bold response to all of this can reflect a reservoir of strength I never knew I had
I used to love reading books. I genuinely did - relinquishing my past pretense of being a bookworm where I would trick my optometrist in an eyesight test that I earned my badge of honour (aka membership into the #coolglassesclub) because my eyesight had deteriorated from reading too many books.
One night, I was lying on my bed reading a book with that innocent heart of inquisitiveness yet coupled with this ironic lazy posture. I was jostled out of my nest of safety as my dad burst in with a disgruntled air about him. My ten year old body could not respond in time as I was too wrapped up in my book to hear the signature cue of approaching shuffles towards my door (characteristic of my father's entry). In short, he exploded as I was yet again not following the guidelines he had set for me (to him, though labelled as advice, was instead dead set rules that I should never dream of disobeying). I had committed the cardinal sin of reading while lying down and for that I had to "pay". I understand his excessively protective and loving ways upon hindsight, however, in that ten year old frame of mine, I was absolutely traumatised from what unfolded next as my punishment was dished out to me. Apart from the usual reprimand which had words so curt, leaving me helplessly in tears. He stormed out to grab a hammer and a nail and the handyman works were off at 9pm. I watched with so much pain locked in my soul, yet too paralysed to comprehend the reason why he was doing something so drastic to literally "hammer home the message". There it hung - Judy Blume's superfudge stayed on my wall with the sturdiness of a steel nail, spinning images of crucifixion surfaced every night before my eyes shut for the slumber for the next two weeks.
Up to this day, sometimes I am grateful for the times when I feel absolutely like trash because the aftermath of rising from the ashen heap is simply the most self-empowering action I could ever do for myself. I thank God for every breakdown he has caused me to have, every night I cried into my pillow to the lyrics of Simple Plan's Perfect because everything he placed in my life to endure, no matter what anyone has on me, they will never have the my own way of making home out of hell and reconstruction from home.
"we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars"