I remember
I was at my dad’s office for a design training the whole day today – mine and his are closely linked since the company where he works produces poly-cellonium which is used medicine packaging and I work in a pharmaceutical company, who produces the medicine.
I hadn’t been there for ages, and the last time I could remember was when I was little and my dad would bring me around and everyone would coo and say how much we looked alike. I used to enjoy being ‘paraded’ around the office because what child wouldn’t? There was the attention and the rare occasion that my dad felt proud of having me with him – the kind of pride a father feels about his own daughter, looking so much like him yet so different, and when people looked really carefully they would soon realize that we did look very much alike.
Now that I’m much older, it seemed weird and surreal, because as soon as I stepped in, the traces of my childhood memory about the place were completely replaced by the reality that took in really fast. As like any other huge factories, the place smelled heavily of chemical stuff, but it was the kind of smell you would tolerate just because it brought you a certain pleasant memory, especially because I remembered that my dad’s friends were really friendly and always laughing and threw jokes to each other, and how comfortable and neat my dad’s personal office was, with the little gimmicks he received from his clients at the pharmaceutical companies.
We came early, so he showed me around the factory to see how the stuff was being produced – something he’d never done before. I didn’t ask for it, he just did it. But I sensed it was the closed-connected feeling that he was trying to reach out to me, trying to make me feel comfortable because perhaps he didn’t want me to be sitting at the guest room being unattended and bored.
After a long day of dealing with Macs computers and getting enough poly-pitch measuring in my mind and overburdened with having to alter our usual ways of designing, I had enough and I wanted to leave. I searched for my dad because I wanted to go home at five on the dot-the privilege I rarely deserved compared to my own working hours-and my dad told me to come upstairs and wait for him because we had ten minutes to go.
I didn’t know my way around the place that well since it had undergone a lot of massive changes ever since, but I managed to figure it out and as soon as I got there I was in for a big shock. How different the place looked now – my dad was placed in an open-plan area where everyone’s desks were adjacent to each others’, papers stacked messily on his desk, an old computer with a “Windows 98″ wallpaper on his monitor. The people that I remembered were always so friendly and jokable were now wearing glasses, each in their own desks with the same resigned state as my dad, no longer encompassing the same reaction I used to get whenever I had the fun occasion to visit.
I felt like my heart was just about ready to break.
I don’t know. Perhaps it was just them getting old. The state of the office. How much everything had changed. How my dad had worked there for over two decades and instead of getting more appreciated he was now being ‘demoted’ into a sad state that made me want to cry. My dad’s retiring in two years – imagine leaving a place where you’ve worked for over twenty years in the condition that pretty much states, “you’re just here because we’re waiting for you to retire so we can replace you with someone younger who doesn’t waste as much money on health insurance as you do”. And it wasn’t just him – it was his work colleagues who’d been there for as long as he was, with that kind of defeated and tired look on their faces, like they really didn’t like what was going on but they couldn’t do anything about it.
Maybe a part of me feels a cold blanket of fear surrounding me because that’s how I’d probably end up to be if I chose to go through the same path that he did. Maybe I worry as much as he does for what’s going to happen when he retires-and to think that it had never been such an important issue to me before. Maybe it was a part of another happy childhood memory taking off its rose-colored glasses-what was once remembered as something sweet had turned into something heartbreakingly sad. Maybe it was the remaining love of a daughter to her father. Maybe I wasn’t prepared to see another side of my dad I never really knew; that he was a human being too, with the problems I could identify with, with the frustration to something that was out of his league, that he was not as powerful as I – or any other little girls would – thought, no matter how negative or positive the statement would seem.
I could identify to the desperation that suddenly he’s that age and he’s about to retire soon and all his life flashed before his eyes, and now what? Where does life go after twenty years of hard work and suddenly the looming thought of being unemployed entered the mind and it doesn’t really go by the expectation of how life should be? I’m twenty four and the thought that I should make my own course in life scares the bejesus out of me, because I felt like I haven’t achieved anything and that I haven’t worked hard enough.
But my dad.
I mean, he’s fifty two. It kills me to want to know how he must have felt to be that age and still having the same fear that I feel, whenever I think about life.
I feel like I’ve aged several more years today, now that I know what he knows and I feel what he feels.
When he drove us home, he complained about the motorbike riders, how they pissed him off so badly but how he didn’t mind anymore about those assholes who drove their cars so recklessly, as if they owned the road. I tried to cheer him up by telling him about what I’d learned that day and how funny it was that his work colleagues didn’t seem to realize that we were related until we told them so. I snuck a look at him and felt a growing admiration to his patience of trying to deal with his abrupt change of mood knowing that he had high blood pressure and being in that kind of working condition didn’t back him down.
At that moment he was exactly who he was – my dad.
I had always liked the way the sun looked around that time because when you were in a car those little rays of lights got you more in the eyes but you didn’t really mind it because it was warm and soft and after being trapped in an air-conditioned room the warmth was enough to make you feel better.
I felt safe with my dad. Safe to know he was taking home – that we were going home.
I remember these days how much more worried I became, whenever he came home later than usual. How quiet the house felt when he wasn’t home, even though I usually got home after eight and he was already in bed, the lights of the TV flickered through the lattices on top of his bedroom door.
I remember even further back when he used to carry me on his shoulder and I would spread my arms and he would pretend we were aero planes. I remember when I was little we would go out in the evening looking for herbal drink and he’d get me the one with the raw eggs and honey. I remember just two weeks ago he and I went to have dinner, just the two of us, and I was telling him about my senior who was giving me a hard time and that we were actually having a father-daughter conversation. I remember how I couldn’t stop crying for three hours straight today – something I haven’t done in a very, very long time.
I know that none of what I’m writing is making any sense whatsoever, because it’s jumping all over the place, from one thing to another. I remember so much in so little time, and I oversee the things that had disappointed me in the past, because I choose to.
I’m writing this because I want to remember, what I felt and realized today, and how, even though I have ten more bricks on my back, I have never felt so light before. Because I remember, and I decide, right there and then, that I would do anything to make it work so that my parents wouldn’t feel like they have been living in vain.
This piece was written on Tuesday, August 8th 2006 at 08:00 pm
6 comments
I felt like crying.. don’t know what to feel.. i feel so very happy for you.. because u knew before its too late.. and yet again.. i sort of felt a cringe coz i just had a big big fight with my dad today.. and have been thinking negatively about them the whole day.. i guess that’s life huh..
Maybe you were meant to read this then and re-think about the whole fight again
It’s just a phase, Syl..soon you’ll know that it doesn’t really matter. Your parents only want the best of you, nothing less.
Dads are always a touchy touchy issue isn’t it? You can hate them so much sometimes but when you really think about it, you cannot really hate them, no matter what they’ve done.
The thing is though, we keep expecting our parents to love us no matter what and we don’t really see them as ‘human-human’, if you know what i mean? yet they never expect the same from us. It might not be the best way to love children but you can’t say they didn’t try.
That is such a beautiful post, Therry. Im not a very emotional person … and this made me cry, thank you.
Thanks Elyani, I was crying too when I wrote it