you start writing when you cannot acknowledge to others things you really feel that you can't even believe you are feeling. truths that are easier to ink or type than to hear out loud, ringing like black molten tar in your ears.

things like, i never thought my father would become the person he did. that i could never beleive i would see him for how he is now. the man who was my role model and my pride and joy, who is now embarrassing to me only because of the actions he takes. no wife-beating, cursing, angry, aggressive, violent man is a father of mine.
i keep telling myself it is his disease, but he has been this way for a while, and my heart is almost afraid to ask how much of this is him, and how much of it is his illness? i do remember inclinations in him of this, but not all, of how he is now; but i could have never imagined this is how it would become.

i refuse to believe that this is how it ends. there is more to his life than this.

tomorrow is father's day and i do not know what to say. this man has closed his ears, heart and every pore of him away from anything good we shower him with. no amount of love, attention or praise seeps through. he is bitter, broken, convinced he is a failure, convinced we are all out to belittle him and disrespect him.
he is agonizingly trying o protect his respect with aggressively defending anything he believes to be an attack on him, which could be almost any conversation with him nowadays. something as simple as please do not curse my grandparents out in front of me and especially in front of them becomes how dare you disrespect my decision to speak how i like?

so what do you say to that?

i will never say my mom is a saint, but i have never seen such a mismatched couple in my life. their marriage speaks to me of everything wrong with an 'arranged' marriage. his education and intelligence and career matched with her fair skin, beautiful laugh. They're both great people, in their own right. both kind, caring, funny, but a bigger personality clash i have never witnessed.

ammi is a mystery i cannot even begin to unravel. there is no rationalizing with her. she is stubborn down to the very core, nothing you can do or say to change her from her decision when her mind is set, even it means destroying heart, hope, love. she will never admit it either. so things she naively beleives are love, you cannot sway her from doing the very same thing in a different way if they can cause less pain, because she knows her way is the right way.

it is this stubborn, childish insistence versus abbu's broken down esteem and aggression that has caused utter chaos and mayhem in our house. maybe it is time to starting pointing fingers at people and not location. it is not canada that made my parents the way they are, it is their childhoods, their stories. one suffered in war and a fatherless upbringing that tormented one's soul, versus a loveless, military discplinarian childhood that kept the other thirsting for love their entire life.

you can't fix almost 50 years of story. through what? psychiatrists? drugs? re-locations? therapy?

there is no long term cure. and i because i am afraid to say it out loud to admit it, even to myself, have i finally started to write. atleast on this blank white page i can call a spade a spade.

-eeda