This is a serious question, mostly addressed to the adult women among us but also to anyone else who has a stake in the matter.
What did your father do for you/not do for you, that you needed?
Context: I have recently become a father to a daughter, with a mother whose father was not around when she was growing up. I won’t bore you all with the details but our daughter is here now and I am realising that I’m the only one in our little family who has really had a father before. But I have never been a girl. And I know that as a boy, my relationships with my mother and father were massively influential and powerful but at the same time radically different to each other. People say that daughters and fathers have a unique relationship too.
Question: What was your father to you? What matters the most when it comes to a father making his daughter loved, safe, confident and free? To live a good life as an adult?
I’d like this to be a mature, personal and real discussion about daughters and fathers, rather than a political thing, so I humbly ask to please speak from the heart and not the head on this one :)
Thank you
P.S Apologies if this question is badly written or conceived; I haven’t been getting enough sleep! It is what it is!
When I was young, my dad would do cheesy magic tricks and let me walk on his feet. He’d let me and my sister dress him up and put clips in his hair. Growing up he helped with my homework and cultured my love for learning and writing. This all fostered really wonderful memories.
As an adult, the one thing that I would change about my relationship with him is that I’d wish he could better express his emotions. He’s very emotionally shut-in and we recently went through the deaths of his brother and his mom and that man has cried once. I know he feels sad but he just acts like everything’s okay and that’s hard for me to watch and hard for me to know how to be there for him. My mom, on the other hand, is very emotionally open and I always know that she needs me to talk or to just be there with her. I guess more so than expressing his emotions, I just wish he’d tell me what he needs, but we come from a culture of machismo where he learned he’s not supposed to need things, especially from women.
Anyways, just be there for your baby girl. Enjoy your time together, and she’ll have plenty of great memories with her dad.
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I mean, I don’t think it’s that he’s not feeling things, my mom definitely heard him crying at night and stuff. He just does his best to hide it from us.
I know what you mean though about depression shutting you down, and I don’t doubt there’s plenty of trauma in his past so it’s probably just a bit of everything.
I hope you’re well <3