Happy Birthday Daddy

I grew up as the first child to my parents. My mother is very kind and loving and my father was very kind and loving and strong headed. You never said no to my father. He had a particularly strong mental composition and had an opinion about everything. These things, I now realize, are are neither good not bad, but are just things that define a man just as my father's kindness, wisdom and his loving and forgiving nature also defined him.

True to the norm of the day, my relationship with my father was based on fear and respect. That also meant that I was never really close to my father (in the modern sense), although I was closer to him than he himself ever was to his father.

It was only very late in my life (and his) that I was able to look at our relationship with any level of objectivity. It was then that I realized that the fabric of our relationship actually put the onus of defining our relationship on me. I realized that I had to turn it around and go back to basics. So I started expressing. I would drive him around, share my inner fears and ambitions with him, and I would hug him a lot. In the corporate language; I basically started "communicating actively" with him.

That was the good thing. The bad things was that when I finally started bridging years of this communication divide, it was too late. My father passed away a couple of years later leaving me with so much that I still wanted to tell him.

I sit here today on his would-be 67th birthday thinking what can I do now that he is gone. The answer thankfully is very clear and quick to come. I can stop this from propagating further through our generations. I have to start "sharing" with my son who is now 19 and is quite a strong headed young man himself. I have to start expressing, share my inner fears and ambitions and hug him a lot. Oh I would do better to leave the driving around to him now that he has earned his driving license.

We live through our children; our sons and daughters, and I hope that my son will not be sitting thinking the same thoughts when I am gone because that will make me very sad. So my present to my father for his birthday today is a special email that I sent to my children.

Happy Birthday Daddy! May you live for ever.