Photo: Rene Rauschenberger / Pixabay

By Jagdesh Singh | Opinion |

I still remember it like it was only last week. She was 2 years old. There was always a stern look, you could feel the gears in her mind grinding away some analysis of her surroundings. She allowed the light breeze to brush away her hair from her forehead. She sat in this bucket seat somehow strapped behind me as I cycled my bicycle along the neighborhood park right in front of our home. She herself was strapped tightly, our paranoia of her being unsafe was almost at its peak at that time. She was, after all, our first experience of caring for our very own child. If I think about it today, those passenger bucket seats were more of a safety hazard than anything else.

“Are you ok back there?”

There wasn’t an audible answer, so I did a quick turn to take a glimpse of her face to see if there was any reaction. That stern look was still there, her eyes a little steely. She nodded as her gaze was afar, her deep thoughts unknown to me, she was clearly enjoying the wind.

This is one of my many memories of her that is still so fresh. Of my little baby girl, when she was still all our attention could be on. Every laugh and every smile of hers, that time, was all we would live for.

Then came her two younger sisters, and our attention, our love, was to be balanced fairly between the three of them. Of course, the way we exhibit our attention differed. She was now to assume the big sister role, so she was to learn things the harder way. She had to learn about responsibility, more than her younger siblings. Whether unfairly or not, we just assumed she had no choice but to be the grown up to help us with the younger girls. And she also had to assume the role model, being the template for her sisters.

She outgrew her fears steadily, unlike her sisters who were more foolhardy from the beginning. From being afraid of the water, she found fun playing at the beach and in the sea, to the point where she jumped into the deep without any floats or life jacket as a young teenager. Her will is still strong today, and we would think that this was partly by design of our upbringing. She overcomes her fears in a very steady manner, but she’s also grown resolute in many ways as well. She grew into a person that shied away from being in the spotlight while her younger sisters got more attention, especially the youngest one.

We wanted her to become a champion of her own voice, and inherently understand that she would be an equal with her peers, sex and race notwithstanding. She would challenge herself, mentally and physically to keep proving this because such is our environment where the glass ceiling would encroach her as she matures into a lady soon.

We moulded her into this strong-willed alpha, alright. But I wasn’t ready for the other side of the coin. In finding her own voice, she naturally became a rebel, many times without a cause. Like any double edged sword, being a strong character made her stubborn and argumentative. She used this weapon to fight the other more vital part of the intended design of her, which was being a responsible role model to her younger siblings. I’ve had many arguments with her, to the point where the silent treatment sometimes goes beyond the expiry date. Hey, nobody said raising princess warriors was easy.

As parents, we are learning as well. And I’ve made mistakes along the way, many times because of my egotistical attitude that father knows best. I must learn from these mistakes, and iterate on them so as to not make the same mistakes with the younger sisters. While she has relented and learned from our arguments, I, too, am doing the same. But I’m pretty sure there will be more arguments as our worldviews begin to differ, and I’m going to make more mistakes because I’m equally stubborn. After all, she got that trait from me, so says my wife.

I’m lucky that I have some common ground to engage with her at this point of her growth, as she’s beginning to appreciate one of my passions. I find her sitting next to me to enjoy a good game of football more often these days, and she has become a far better player at the beautiful game than I ever was. This sharing of common ground probably won’t last long as she evolves. For now, it offers us both respite to call for a truce. I’ll have to look for other common grounds, to keep our conversations from just being lectures for her to be a responsible adult.

I still find myself asking her “Are you ok back there?”, and I still get that stern look, but now I can guess what her thoughts are because she’s learning to be vocal about them. But to me, she’s still that young baby strapped tightly to the bucket seat and I still want to protect her dearly with my life.

Jagdesh Singh, a Kuala Lumpur-based executive with a US multinational company, is a father of three girls who are as opinionated as their mother

* This is the opinion of the writer, organisation or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Asia Samachar.

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