For Every Father and Daughter Carrying Each Other’s Stories

I’ve never understood people who favour winter over summer. Maybe it’s bias, but summer has always felt like freedom to me. As a kid, I hated school so much that most of my energy went into trying to skip it. If I had channelled that effort into something useful, I might have become president. Instead, I discovered the loophole in my family system: my father.

Every time my mom refused, I wore her down until she finally surrendered me to my father. I can still remember the vicious smile that placed itself on my face when she did that, because I knew my father would say yes.

He would never say no to me, not ever.

For a man who always wished to have a son, my father is just too much of the kind who should have daughters.

I remember how much I favoured him over my mother as a kid. There was a time at the beach when my sister asked me to spill a bucket of water on his head, and my response was,

“But he’ll get cold.”

When she changed the target to our mother, all I said in return was,

“Okay,” with no hesitation

Out of three sisters I think I bonded with him the most. Our go to father-daughter activity was as simple as buying me a toy then renting a DVD to watch, every Sunday. That was my favourite day of the week, despite the frustration of knowing there was school the next day.

My father was my first blueprint of love, even if I didn’t realise it. He became the first “other man” in my life, the one who set the stage.

If I’m being honest, I can’t say my stage was built as clear as the sky. I was born knowing that I failed to fulfil the destiny that was assigned to me through my father by being born as a girl.

Even though he didn’t have the intention, the womb was boring and it didn’t have much to do, so while floating in the amniotic sea with my tiny ears and nervous system, I began to sense the world outside. That’s why before I was born, I carried the sense that I was not the child they hoped for.

The story was written in my bones, in my breath, in the tiny pulse of my nervous system. That’s when an eternal quest of proving my worth to my father possessed me over. I walked with both, the comfort of his steady hand and the haunting of a wound he never meant to give.

Still, what I know today, I wasn’t aware of as a kid but, the way I tried to shape myself carried the signs.

My father was never a man who was hard to figure out. You could tell every emotion through his face, just like me, and he cannot lie, same as I am. Even so, owing to his perfectionist nature he always wanted us to be the best in everything we did.

I remember a time in first grade when I asked him to help me with my math homework. In the end he made me cry so hard that my mother banned him from ever helping me again.

He had ambition growing up. He started with nothing, but he built a life that could give him everything, all through his hard work. My sisters and I were lucky by birth to have the life he created. As a man who knew hard work up close, he wanted us to work hard too.

In second grade, I grew a big passion for playing the piano so my father bought me one and arranged lessons. Yet when it came the time to practice, he would turn into a gestapo. What began as joy, a child’s passion for music, turned into a ritual of proving myself.

We had a rule for practicing every day for an hour. It didn’t take long before those practice hours turned into torture hours. I found solace in waking an hour early before school to practice while he slept, moving my fingers silently over the keys without pressing them. This was not about music anymore. It was my first apprenticeship in perfectionism.

My father simply passed on his own hunger for excellence, the drive that had built his life from nothing. Yet it grew into a restless engine in me: the belief that love and pride must be earned through flawless performance.

As we grew up, my sisters disappointed him. They grew too comfortable in the resources given to them, never working beyond what they already had. The day I saw disappointment in his eyes and heard it in his voice was the day I made an oath.

I would be the one to make him proud.

I didn’t realise what I was promising. To make him proud also meant I would measure myself against an impossible scale, chasing an approval I already had but could never quite feel.

It took me growing up to see the truth: my father’s love carried both a gift and a wound. He gave me a love carved from devotion and steadiness, a love that made every other man feel like an echo. But he also handed me the script of perfection, the hunger to always be more.

If fathers are daughters’ first love, then mine showed me how love can be both shelter and shadow. He gave me the steadiness I crave, and the perfectionism I bleed for.

My father is the voice that reminds me I can do anything, and the shadow that makes me question if I’ve done enough. He is both my biggest supporter and my biggest challenge.

So I write this not only for him, but for all the fathers who stand as both anchor and storm.

For the fathers who try to give their daughters the world, and for the daughters who spend their lives learning to hold on.

For the fathers who are imperfect but present, and for the daughters who grow into women carrying both their love and their ghosts.

This post is for my father, who is the biggest supporter of my growth, the one who holds my hand through all the darkness and storm.

For every father and daughter who carry each other’s stories, belonging to one another all along.

For every daughter who has ever looked at her father as her first love, steady, complicated, unforgettable, and as her biggest love, her first heartbreak, and her lifelong mirror.