Growing up in a broken family, I think I have seen things that have made a bigger impact than I actually realize. A lot of times, our personality makes major twists without us realizing it and it is not until we stop and turn around to see how far we have come, that we realize the distance we have covered. For me, I see a completely different person inside me that is excited but numb, thinking but blank, moving but still, talking but silent, breathing but suffocating…. I don’t know if that’s how everyone with a broken family feels and I sometimes do think that maybe I have taken it too hard on myself. However, it was after a long, long time that I started realizing how my personality was changing, how I was becoming a very under the confident person, how I was developing split personalities and how I never respected myself.
I fell for wrong people, gave my all too wrong people, spent time with wrong people and shared secrets with wrong people. I would cry at the smallest things and think a bit too much! The irony is that I would even know what was wrong with me yet I wouldn’t be able to do much about it. That’s the kind of suffocated feeling you feel like coming out of the shell you are trapped in but each time you feel you have forced it open, it shuts down with a louder snap than before. It just happens… and you slowly start losing hope and choose to stay in your shell with no regrets. I am not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
So anyway, I have been living with my mother ever since my parents split up and I do talk to my father and I had been close to him in my childhood but I don’t feel any connection with him anymore. My siblings and I have made it big in our lives and that is all because of our mother. However, I have been thinking lately about everything I have missed growing up, above all, that father figure and because I don’t have one, I don’t know how it affects you but what I do know is how not having a dad can affect you.
They say that your relationship with father determines your dynamics of every other relationship in life. How your father treats you becomes a standard for you and you are not ready to accept anything less than that. This especially goes for girls. The way their father treats them makes them realize their worth and they look for the similar kind of love and care in men to spend their lives with. The absence of father leaves them confused between their needs and worth. They wouldn’t know what they should be expecting and they wouldn’t know their own worth.
Likewise, Boys fall for the good qualities in their father and that makes him a role model for them. Growing up with their father makes him their first best friend and later in life, that friend becomes a role model for them and they grow up with the same kind of sense of love, respect and care that they see in their fathers.
Growing up with a father also assures you that there is someone who has always got your back. This person will be there standing outside your school making sure nobody bullies you and if anybody does, he is the guy who would know how to fight it! You learn to be independent with a safety net that your father is. It gives you confidence in life and you know that you can be wrong too. A lot of times, we hide our own faults from our elders but deep inside, we just want them to know so that they can pull us out of it. That is the level of trust we have with our parents.
Between both the parents, the mother is the figure that prepares you to deal with emotional breakdowns in life and your father, on the other hand, teaches you to be tough and fight your enemies! Of course, every father has a different way of teaching you life principles, but being on the masculine side, that’s what a father can’t miss out on!
I don’t complain about my life anymore. I used to but I started counting my blessings and it made so much sense to me. I have become me after situation I have been through in life and there's not a thing I want to change about it now. Everybody has problems in their lives, only the faces of these problems are different. The beautiful part about life is that everybody learns to get over the problems and continue living the life with a smile on their faces.