A family’s story of love, hope and courage

http://www.weekendnotes.com/what-my-daughters-taught-me-book-review/

1 December 2015

A family’s story of love, hope and courage

Amy Basha

Joseph Wakim‘s book, “What My Daughters Taught Me” is a moving memoir about raising his three young daughters alone in Sydney, after his beloved wife Nadia passed away from cancer in 2003. I was captivated from the moment I started reading the book, Wakim’s language is very vivid and I began to get lost in his world, always a sign that I’ve started a compelling read.

While reading this book I gained the perspective of a father who had three young girls to raise on his own. He faced judgement from others, many people telling him to remarry, that he wouldn’t be able to raise his girls on by himself.

He pushed these comments aside and stayed true to his heart, raising his daughters with love, strength and courage and lots of humour thrown in for a father raising three girls. Wakim does not sugar coat the experience, going into the details of the sometimes exasperating event of getting three girls ready for school on time, working full time, even making runs to the store to buy sanitary napkins for his daughters.

As a female reader, I really respected his viewpoint that after observing his three daughters as they grew up and seeing them communicate as teens, “uninhibited in sharing their fears and hopes, their likes and dislikes… always swapping seats to view life from different angles. Their definition of strength was based on honesty, not victory.”

Wakim was able to see the strength of women’s ability to talk and communicate, where he found the male mentors in his life saw it as a sign of weakness to talk about feelings or to talk too much.

He saw how much he could learn from the way women communicate. One of the best things about reading is seeing life from the author’s viewpoint, and reading this memoir taught me about seeing life from a father’s view raising his daughters, a window we don’t often get to see into. What My Daughters Taught Me is an eloquently written honest memoir about love, resilience, compassion and courage in one family’s life.

It is a great read for the holidays and helps us to appreciate the time we do have with our loved ones.

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