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Speech at Book Launch: More Precious Than Birds

Book Launch: More Precious Than Birds
Author: Chadia Elhage
Date: 7 May 2023

Mabrouk Chadia.

Our friendship goes back to 1989 in Melbourne, when you first arrived in Australia.

Your fearless trilingual prose and poetry made heads turn. But beyond your intellect, I have grown to admire your compassionate heart.

Your short stories pick at a scab that yearns to heal. Our human scabs ooze a putrid pus, but a cedar tree scab oozes a precious liquid amber.

Perhaps all these scabs have another name: Trauma.

If you Google the most over-used word this decade, you will find Trauma.

But not in the 1970’s and 1980’s when this book is set.

The Lebanese who fled the war and arrived in Australia were given various labels and called all sorts of names – but not Trauma.

And because they arrived under the ‘Lebanon Concession’ program, not the refugee program, they became the sole responsibility of their sponsoring relatives.

As a social worker at that time, trauma and mental health were still taboo in our community. If I asked about PTSD, my clients were almost offended: shoo bti’sud?Anna majnoun! (what are you implying? Am I deranged?)

But if you apply today’s broader definition of Trauma to those Lebanese survivors, many would have ticked the boxes for complex PTSD.

Chadia’s short stories and personal memories testify to this:
Page 45: The state of Lebanon was fragmented into pieces;
Page 47: Mass displacement of half a million Lebanese;
Page 48: Who sold and who brought the souls of the martyrs?
Page 49: The ghosts multiplied around us;
Page 86: Each time she heard a missile, she cowered and covered both ears with her palms … children would wake up terrified

Those children are now adults. Some may be in this room right now, with callouses covering their own untold true stories.

Rich in metaphors, Chadia refers to this callous on page 56:
Being in a foreign land, wrapped him in a veil alien to him, leading to his … severing the umbilical cord.

For the last 5 years, I have been interviewing survivors of the Beirut bunkers for a new book: how did they survive without trauma therapy?

Many recount what still triggers their flashbacks today, more than 40 years later:
the smell of kerosene, the sound of a kettle whistling, the sight of canned food, the flash of lightning, cars backfiring, electricity blackouts.

Many have developed chronic stomach cramps because eating was futile without a toilet, and this morphed into eating disorders such as anorexia in later life.

In the 1980’s, I remember trying to be romantic with my wife by lighting candles, and she would say with her hand on her palpitating heart: dakheelak la! Bi-zakarooni bi iyam al harab! (I beg you – no! they remind me of the war years!)

Others lament the good old days when people prayed together and shared what they have: a sense of we not me.

But there is a twist to this story and Chadia’s resilience is a living testimony to this:
Perhaps we as social workers and therapists were asking the wrong questions.

Instead of asking survivors about their trauma and suggesting that they ‘let it out’, perhaps the right question was a humble question:

Instead of ‘please let me teach you some strategies to survive trauma’, perhaps we should now be asking ‘please teach us so we can learn – how did you survive all those years?’

And not just survived, but many of you actually thrived.

In one interview, I was told: ‘what’s the point of asking me to sit on a couch to talk, talk, talk? I don’t want to talk about it. That’s not my way.’

So how did some survivors of trauma, like those in Chadia’s stories, live to tell their tale?

Many of you would know more than anyone: just like the triggers of trauma may be multi-sensory, so is the healing: the fresh aroma of home-made coffee, the fragrance of a favourite meal, music from happier memories, flicking through old photo albums, praying rosaries together, telling jokes, heartfelt affection, reciting poetry.

These are sensory experiences that take you back to the bosom of safety.

Chadia writes as she speaks: rich with similes that connect events with nature:
Just from Page 20: like a vanishing dream … like dust … like a cloud … like a lonely arrow.

Chadia experienced this trauma first hand. But her callous oozes liquid amber that is indeed more precious than golden ink on pages.

More precious than birds in flight.

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Joseph Wakim on widowhood and manhood

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/29/it-took-the-death-of-my-wife-to-realise-how-much-i-missed-out-on-as-a-dad

29 July 2015

It took the death of my wife to realise how much I missed out on as a dad

When my wife died, men suggested I find a new wife, women offered to help. But in becoming a single parent to my three daughters, I found my best self

‘I took my hat off to so many women raising their children alone, many with admirable grace. Why can’t men do the same?’

When cancer claimed the life of my wife 12 years ago, leaving me staring into the eyes of our three young daughters, my gender prism had to change. Nurtured in a culture where boys’ and girls’ roles were clearly defined, I was grossly ill-prepared for my widowed fate.

I suffered survivor guilt, struggling to understand why bad things happen to good people, struggling to understand why my life was spared when my daughters surely needed their mother more than me.

Men suggested that I reach out for a new woman, for single parenting manuals, for cookbooks, for dating websites, for hired help, even for sleeping tablets and psychologists.

Women offered to “give me a break” and care for my children.

“Thank you, but no thank you. They’ve already been robbed of their mum. I can’t do this to them.”

Instead of outsourcing, I reached deep within. I took my hat off to so many women raising their children alone, adapting to their new reality, many with admirable grace. Their children seemed well adapted. Why can’t men do the same?

Whoever gave women the capacity to perform full parental roles must have given the same to men. This was a fork in the road. But there was no way I was going to avoid the painful path to get closer to my daughters, and inadvertently closer to myself.

So I began my emancipation. I used be minister of foreign affairs (garden, garbage, garage). Now my portfolio expanded to home affairs, ironically sometimes “foreign” to me. I burnt the wok, ruined “hand wash only” garments, and bought the wrong sanitary pads. I felt like I was now jogging on one leg, from home to car to shop and kept telling myself: “Just do it!”

Paradoxically, when I failed, when I felt weakest, I actually became my strongest. Something dormant within had awoken: the capacity to do anything and the plasticity of the brain to adapt.

Like Uncle Martin (from US sitcom My Favourite Martian), I raised my antenna to full length to tune in to the rhythms and language of my daughters. For every “but you don’t understand …,” I responded “then make me understand!”

Fast forward 12 years, and I realise that they made me understand my capacity to embrace full parenthood – not just fatherhood or motherhood.

I swung my metaphoric sledge hammer to the rusty shackles around my ankles that defined masculinity – shackles that were more than a gender prism. They were a gender prison.

Nine months ago, I penned a frivolous column on my emancipation, egging on my “fellow man” to embrace his inner self (not his feminine self). Today, my book What My Daughters Taught Me is born to tell the tale in all its gory glory.

Some women I know vow to pass this book to their husbands “in case anything should happen to me, and he needs to look after our children”. But why wait until a tragedy dictates a steep learning curve? Why not enjoy the full fruits of parenting today?

When we talk about the crisis of masculinity that defines many of our debates around domestic violence or marriage equality, we ought look beyond gender to the bigger picture: the crisis of personality.

Boys need to be raised in a culture that expands their social vocabulary, where emotions are expressed rather than suppressed.

In their book Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What it Means to be Male, Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe explore the “modern meltdown of manhood” which they attribute to absent fathers and the male addiction to screen gadgets. They argue that this trend towards “extreme escapism” has led to socially stunted males who glean fulfilment from the virtual world rather than the real one.

My children’s development wasn’t determined by the gender of their single parent, but by the quality of our love. Deep within, we’re soft-wired by nurture, not hard-wired by nature, to be affectionate, to tell bedtime stories, to help with school assignments, to hold our children’s hands when they are sleepless and sick.

Men need not be relegated to the one with the wallet and car keys. Their definition of manhood and strength need not be a stubborn word that will not be broken, and a similarly stubborn reluctance to say sorry.

On the contrary, such “strengths” are often the cracks of fear. True strength is the capacity to adapt, to flex rather than break in the face of a cyclone like cancer. True strength is the capacity to speak and listen to the many languages of silence, of touch, of facial expression.

When I was a social worker, many male clients would tell me, “I love my children, but it comes out all wrong!” Their fear and over-protectiveness comes out as anger and distrust.

Many females believe their father is a benchmark for their future partner, for better or worse. My daughters remind me of little things I have said or done that are etched in their memory but erased from mine. What they chose to internalise may be different to what we amplify or repeat.

While my choices resulted from circumstance, now I wish I’d made the choice to remove my shackles long before.

Joseph Wakim is the author of What My Daughters Taught Me, published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $32.99, on sale now.

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Joseph Wakim’s emotional journey

https://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/news/emotional-journey-book-review/2754941/
Emotional journey: Widowed father tells his story
30th Aug 2015 12:00 PM

John Grey Guy who created couriermail.com.au. Editor, geek, actor, playwright

THIS is not a how-to book about raising daughters – though there is much to be learned here. What My Daughters Taught Me is a deeply-felt, emotional family journey told by a single father.

Author Joe Wakim’s soulmate Nadia was killed by cancer in 2003, leaving him with three girls to raise.
With honesty, courage, imagination, self-deprecation and humour, Wakim tells of his efforts to be mother and father to the girls, while remaining their friend and keeping their family culture strong.

Fighting against gender and cultural stereotypes all the way, he deals with grief, community expectations and guilt, while encountering a daily slew of challenges which will be familiar to many parents.

He deals with the tyranny of the television (which he dubs “His Majesty”), the distraction of devices (“serial text offenders”), the dance lessons, the sanitary pad shopping experience, the medical dramas, the parties, the fashions and the formals, the first jobs and the driving lessons.

Nadia’s memory is always there with him, manifesting several times in Wakim’s occasionally filmic storytelling to help him sort through issues. These are moving moments, as are those when he recalls her last days.

The wonderful friendship that Wakim engenders with his daughters reaches a timely and mutually frank maturity when the girls begin dating.

Dad expresses his fears about other drivers at night, and strangers trying to spike their drinks. His middle daughter archly responds: “You think we’re that naive? I’ve raised you better than that, Joe Wakim.”

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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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My Child Magazine: What my daughters taught me

 http://www.mychildmagazine.com.au/blog/what-my-daughters-taught-me

http://bit.ly/1PWitpa

My Child Magazine

What my daughters taught me

No tea leaves could have predicted that Joseph Wakim would raise his daughters alone.

August 26, 2015

Once upon a time I lived in my hometown of Melbourne with my young family: my beautiful wife Nadia and our three little girls, Grace, Michelle and Joy. Ours was a house of music, dancing and laughter. And, as Lebanese Christians of the Maronite Church, ours was a house of faith. I was the hardworking king of the Dad-pun, and Nadia the ever-calm domestic queen. After all, we were ‘crowned’ during our marriage ceremony to have authority over our mini-heavenly kingdom of home and family.

After a career in psychology and social work, I was completing a Master of Business degree in the hope of becoming a better breadwinner. Nadia, a graphic designer, was studying to become a teacher and she taught at the Arabic Saturday school. We were both changing professions and pursuing our dreams. We loved and were loved. We were happy.

We dreamed of travelling together, making music together, even having more children.

But Nadia’s worst fear found its way into her bosom. She privately applied positive thinking that the small lump was normal during breast-feeding. In our culture, the C-word was unmentionable. It was as if by merely evoking the name cancer, we were stepping on the tail of this sleeping monster. By the time Nadia was diagnosed with this ‘death sentence’, it had reached her womb and our dreams crumbled. We clung to what we had and who we had like a life-boat in a stormy sea. My arms became my children’s life jacket.

From singing and dancing on our timber floors, our children learned to whisper and tip-toe as mummy’s medication meant that she needed silence. From going to mummy for their everyday wants and needs, I ushered them to my bosom, turning on the valves in my heart to make up for their mother’s heart that slowly stopped beating.

It was suddnely time to progress as a parent from an L-plater to a P-plater, but without an experienced driver by my side. I pretended to know exactly what I was doing.

As I rushed the children to school (and myself to work) every morning, Grace and Michelle quickly learnt to be self-sufficient. I only helped them with their school ties, but like most men I could only do this while standing behind them as if it were around my own neck, not while facing them.

Little Joy needed more help. Grace taught me how to tie Joy’s hair in a ponytail and secure it with a hair tie. It took me a while to realise that this morning routine was faster if I put the elastic around my wrist in preparation, rather than trying to reach for it with one hand while holding Joy’s hair in place with the other.

To my surprise and relief, this did not cut off my circulation and my hand did not turn purple as my mother had once warned. In time, I also learnt that the ponytail looked smarter if I tied it high on her crown; too low and it seemed to sag with gravity as the day progressed.

This was not information I could glean from textbooks. It was more like rock climbing up a cliff face on the Discovery channel—there was no time to look down and I was scared of heights.

‘Dad!’ echoed Joy from the valley below. ‘It’s not straight!’

I pulled on her ponytail as if it was my climbing rope.

‘Ouch!’ she cried. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Straightening it?’ I guessed.

I stood behind her, with my head above hers, and looked into the bathroom mirror—which she was too short to look into without standing on tiptoe. Sure enough, this morning’s ponytail was slightly off-centre. Rather than redo the entire routine from scratch, I tried to wriggle it to the middle by fiddling with the hair tie.

‘Ouch! You’re hurting me!’ Joy reached back, undid the ponytail and handed me the hair tie to start again.

I tried to defuse her mood and cover my confusion by neighing and imitating a flustered horse, having trouble with a ponytail, see? But she was in no mood to laugh. How was I supposed to know that you cannot drag a ponytail like a desktop icon without torturing the child?

The solution was staring at me: the water taps. I remembered that Grace and Michelle usually splashed some water on their hair when they were tying it into ponytails or plaits. Water was the gel that gave the hair a defined shape. So that’s why Joy’s silky blonde curls always ended up making a golden halo!

But I didn’t quite get the water thing. I pumped some liquid soap into one hand and added some cold running water, then tried to turn it into a game. ‘Have you washed your face, Zuzu?’

No answer meant no, so I gave her a face scrub, also splashing some water on her hair.

‘Aagh! It’s cold!’ she shuddered.

I tempered the water to warm. ‘The cold was to make sure you’re awake!’ I explained, pretending it was deliberate. Then I asked her to blow her nose into my hand, cupping her mucus so it would not squirt all over the washbasin, just like my mother used to do with each of us, lovingly, each morning. She used to say it would unblock our ears so that we would be able to hear the teacher. Now Joy would hear the teacher too.

‘Yum! Organic hair gel,’ I mused.

‘Eeuw!’ she protested, grossed out. ‘Don’t you dare!’

I washed it away with another dollop of liquid soap and now made sure that the sleep was removed from her eyes.

‘Aah, Dad!’ she cried, pushing my hand away. ‘It stings!’

But the more I added warm water, the more the soap bubbled up around her long eyelashes. She squinted in irritation and I kept splashing and rubbing in frustration. Her eyes tightened, her mouth opened and her cries for help echoed throughout our home.

Maternal Grace came charging in. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh, just some soap in her eyes,’ I shrugged.

‘Haram (poor thing). Use the towel, Dad!’

Despite the tears and drama, in the end the soapy water did give Joy’s hair a crisper contour and removed the halo. On special occasions, I graduated to plaits and braids, but only once I’d qualified for my hairdressing P-plates. When we shopped together next, Joy and I looked for blue hair ties to match her eyes and her uniform.

On weekends, we used her fancier selection, which included ties decorated with butterflies.

When Joy’s long hair became knotted, I knew it was time to untangle it with a nice hard brush. I ran a warm bath and added some bubbles, hoping to make it a pleasurable rather than painful experience.

‘Turn around, Zuzu, and close your eyes,’ I instructed. ‘First, we crack the eggs!’ I squeezed some shampoo onto her head and lathered it into her scalp with both hands. ‘Second, the waterfall.’ I poured bucket after bucket of water over her head (warm this time) to wash away the soap.

Then I held her head up with my left hand and brushed her hair down with my right hand. I had expected the shampoo to make the brushing easy, but if anything the knots seemed worse. The only solution, then, was to apply force. But the firmer I held her head, the more she screamed. I gritted my teeth and brushed harder and faster, all the way down, so that her pain—and mine—would be brief.

‘Ouch, Dad!’ she cried. ‘You’re killing me!

I added more shampoo and rinsed thoroughly but it made no difference.

At this point, Michelle rushed in and gasped, ‘Grace, have a look at this!’

As Joy heard her rescuers arrive, her cries became hysterical.

‘Stop, Dad!’ Grace exclaimed. ‘Can’t you see the red lines down her back?’

I lifted her hair and indeed there were scratches on her back from my vigorous brushing. Luckily, her skin was not bleeding, or I could have been arrested! Maybe our neighbours had heard her screams and already called the police. That’s all I needed in my situation!

‘But I used heaps of shampoo to make it smooth!’ I pleaded innocently, shaking the now nearly empty bottle.

‘No! You need conditioner to make it smooth!’

How was I supposed to know this silky-smooth secret? From that day on, Joy’s hair would forever be an effortless pleasure to brush.

Whenever I washed it, I cracked emu eggs of conditioner on her head.

Was I too paranoid, too protective or too private to take ‘driving lessons’ from experienced mothers? I could have asked my extended family or many others in the mothers’ club who were always obliging.

But at the time, I did not want to give anyone any ammunition to gossip about my family. I would imagine them chattering as soon as I walked away, or hung up the phone .

‘Oh, Joe phoned me the other day. You wouldn’t believe what he asked me. He said, “Sorry for the stupid question, but do I use

shampoo or conditioner to remove tangles?” So cute, but those poor girls. How will they turn out with only a man to bring them up?’ . . . Blah, blah, blah.”

Yes, I was probably too paranoid and too private, but I soon learnt not to underestimate the wisdom to be gleaned from the treasures under my own roof—my daughters.

It took some time for me to progress from a P-plater, proving myself, to a B-plater, being myself. My car became a mini-bus for picking up and dropping off their friends.

My daughters and I all resisted the offers for someone else to step in and ask me to step aside. They knew that a man suddenly hopping on one leg was going to fall and fail more often. But they were there to pick me up, with their silent smiles that spoke a thousand words.

It was not me stepping up to the sacred stage of their mother, fearing failure. It was my daughters stepping up to the mother roles, trusting me with their lives, trusting that I had it deep and dormant within me to paddle our life boat to safety.

I used to whisper bed-time stories in their ears to lull them (and myself!) to sleep. Now they whisper reassurances to me, or is that Nadia speaking through them?

My inflated fears have been conquered by their piercing love.

When my eldest two daughters were overseas, I asked my youngest child Joy why she missed them so much.

‘Because we are much more than sisters, Dad. We are best friends.’

This is an edited extract from WHAT MY DAUGHTERS TAUGHT ME by Joseph Wakim, published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $32.99, on sale now

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Book review: Emotional journey – Widowed father tells his story

http://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/news/emotional-journey-book-review/2754941/

Emotional journey: Widowed father tells his story

John Grey | 30th Aug 2015 12:00 PM

THIS is not a how-to book about raising daughters – though there is much to be learned here. What My Daughters Taught Me is a deeply-felt, emotional family journey told by a single father.

Author Joe Wakim’s soulmate Nadia was killed by cancer in 2003, leaving him with three girls to raise.

With honesty, courage, imagination, self-deprecation and humour, Wakim tells of his efforts to be mother and father to the girls, while remaining their friend and keeping their family culture strong.

Fighting against gender and cultural stereotypes all the way, he deals with grief, community expectations and guilt, while encountering a daily slew of challenges which will be familiar to many parents.

He deals with the tyranny of the television (which he dubs “His Majesty”), the distraction of devices (“serial text offenders”), the dance lessons, the sanitary pad shopping experience, the medical dramas, the parties, the fashions and the formals, the first jobs and the driving lessons.

Nadia’s memory is always there with him, manifesting several times in Wakim’s occasionally filmic storytelling to help him sort through issues. These are moving moments, as are those when he recalls her last days.

The wonderful friendship that Wakim engenders with his daughters reaches a timely and mutually frank maturity when the girls begin dating.

Dad expresses his fears about other drivers at night, and strangers trying to spike their drinks. His middle daughter archly responds: “You think we’re that naive? I’ve raised you better than that, Joe Wakim.”

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Raising daughters as a single dad

http://www.hillsnews.com.au/story/3307118/humour-helped-in-dads-great-challenge/?cs=1454

Hills News, 27 August 2015

 

Baulkham Hills author publishes autobiography about raising three daughters as a single dad

By Flora Cauchi

Aug. 27, 2015

For the past 12 years, Joseph Wakim has laughed, cried and learnt a lot from his daughters.

Exemplary dad: Father-of-three Joseph Wakim said in his family he wears the pants. “But my daughters choose them,” he said and laughed. Here he is with his personal stylists Grace, Joy (front) and Michelle.

FOR the past 12 years, Joseph Wakim has laughed, cried and learnt a lot from his daughters in what he says has been an eye-opening experience.

The Baulkham Hills author recently published an autobiography, What My Daughters Taught Me, based on the “massive task” of raising three daughters who were 4, 9 and 11 when his wife Nadia died of cancer in 2003.

“It was very easy to feel overwhelmed about being a single parent,” he said.

“I was increasingly aware that the answer was in spending more time with them.

“Perhaps not enough men have been able to tell their stories and with the book I feel like I raised the sledgehammer and smashed the rusty shackles”

“But it was a massive learning curve; I didn’t know how to cook, look after their hair or do other domestic things.”

Mr Wakim, 52, a logistics manager, learnt the most important thing was to keep a sense of humour and laugh at moments like the washing gone wrong or taking their pet rabbit out for a walk on a dog leash.

The idea for the book stemmed from an article written for The Hoopla website.

“I wrote about what it’s like for a man to buy sanitary pads for his daughter and it went viral,” he said. “Perhaps not enough men have been able to tell their stories and with the book I feel like I raised the sledgehammer and smashed the rusty shackles.

“There’s a lot of talk about what it means to be a man but we need to have an open mind about it.”

“There’s a lot of talk about what it means to be a man but we need to have an open mind about it”

He admits his perception of what it means to be a strong father has changed.

“Now I know that being strong really means to be able to say sorry when you make a mistake or to be adaptable.

“When we get together, we have an honest laugh and humour’s a very big part of the book.”

Where to catch Mr Wakim talking about What My Daughters Taught Me:

■ Glenhaven Clinic: Book signing at the Father’s Day Forum on September 1, 6pm (corner of Glenhaven Road and Jerrawa Place). Details: Christine Hanna, 0433 655 555.

■ Dymocks Castle Towers: Book signing on Father’s Day eve, September 5.

■ Castle Hill Library: November 27.

 

Joseph Wakim’s top three tips for single parents:

■ Remembering that parents are the first teachers — therefore we have a massive head-start in terms of moulding and shaping our children. No point blaming school or technology later on.

■ Have an agreement that you’re always approachable. I think the opposite of love is fear. You don’t want the kids to be scared of making mistakes.

■ Sense of humour. Especially during puberty and adolescence. If you’re going to correct your children at everything they do, you’ll exhaust yourself. The only way to calm the seas is with the humour hormones. Smile, let it go and move on.

■ The Hills-based non-profit social group called Single with Children offers an opportunity for single parents to meet and support each other.

 

 

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Parenting in the face of grief

http://www.essentialkids.com.au/family-life/family-home/parenting-in-the-face-of-grief-20150821-gj4l72.html

Parenting in the face of grief

August 21, 2015

Joseph Wakim

The chapter headings in my book all begin with ‘How to …’ There is even a chapter titled ‘How to grieve’, as if there was such a ‘recipe’.

Of course, these headings are all tongue in cheek, as I clamoured for a ‘DIY Manual’ when I first became widowed. In my disorientation, I yearned for a lighthouse, somewhere on the dark horizon.

After a two year nightmare with breast cancer, we hoped and prayed that this monster would go away. But it was my wife Nadia who was taken away from me and our three young children who were all aged under twelve years at the time.

Unlike fatal accidents, terminal illnesses may trigger anticipatory grief. While my beloved was melting away like a candle before my very eyes, the shadows on the wall painted a picture of things to come: that day, the silence, the stillness, the darkness, the emptiness. I squeezed my eyes shut but this only accentuated the images of coffins, churches and cemeteries.

These flashes of anticipatory grief can also be a wake-up call to prepare the children for this life-changing experience. In my case, our faith helped me set the ‘stage’. When we recited the rosary, I referred to their holy mother (Mary) Mary in heaven. I referred to the rosary chain as a ‘hotline to heaven’ and the wooden cross as a bridge between this life and the next. I referred to the Creed and all that ‘We believe …’ as if all this would help my children to say goodbye to their mother. My bed-time stories took on themes and characters that subtly prepared them for this bitter pill.

But children’s antennas are sharper than we think and mine already noticed the gradual changes: tip-toeing around the house, more candles and incense burning, whispering instead of talking, mum becoming more bed-ridden. As their dependence on mum decreased, their dependence on me increased. Paradoxically, this was a blessing because their dependence kept me anchored to the here and now.

Then the dress rehearsals are over and the final curtain is drawn. I kissed my wife goodbye then rushed to my children to explain that their mother had now crossed that bridge.

Grief takes its hold on different people at different times. In some cultures, collective wailing is seen as helpful – better out than in, better now than later, better altogether than separately.

But we preferred to keep it in our family. Tears were triggered unexpectedly – from movie scenes, when they could not sleep, from school report cards, when we had bad days and their lips would quiver: ‘I miss mummy …’

As a father, there was no point burying my grief in my pillow. It was expressed rather than suppressed right in front of my children: ‘I miss your mummy too …’

Nadia died the day we moved into our new home, which may have saved us more painful memories. Her shadows never danced on these walls and her voice never echoed in these rooms.

I hung all her clothes in our shared wardrobe. To conceal my own denial, I rationalised this to my frowning children: ‘you never know, one day you may grow into them! You know how fashion goes in circles!’ The truth is that I knew nothing about fashion until they taught me in their teenage years, when I wore the pants but they chose them!

We created our own sacred space – a backyard water fountain crowned with her photo, smiling at us from every angle like the omnipresent Mona Lisa. ‘Mum’ remained an everyday word, not something taboo. It made no sense to hide her wall hangings, as we wanted death to be a part of life, not the opposite of life. Fortunately, we had a great collection of family videos that captured my wife in full flight – singing, laughing, dancing – and my children kept laughing with her.

Anniversaries, birthdays and Mothers Days became dreaded dates on our calendar. To lock ourselves away from the ‘cruel world’ and hold our breath would have been cruel on my children. They did not want to spend the whole day meditating on who they were missing. My children taught me that sometimes they grieve best by doing mundane things with mundane people, perhaps to remove the intensity.

Even our trips to the cemetery could have been guilt-ridden, so I asked my children how they felt.

‘I don’t feel that she’s there … is that a bad thing, dad?’

‘Your mum is already inside you and knows what’s in your heart.’

When they had to make Mother’s Day cards at school, we would place their cards in plastic sleeves and wedge them behind a vase.

There is a paradox with widowed parenting. On one hand, you feel like you are hopping around on one leg, falling more often, running out of breath more often, taking twice as long to do things because there is no adult for you to lean on. On the other hand, what you least accept is someone offering to ‘take the kids off your hands’.

Why? Because you learn that your children are afraid of losing you, for obvious reasons. God knows how many times I prayed ‘please take me instead – my daughters need their mother!’ But at a time of tumultuous changes in our family, I now had to be that constant, that lighthouse for them.

For us, the opposite of life was not death, but wasting this life. For us, the opposite of love was not hate, but fear. It was fear of the unmentionable C-word that delayed my wife from an earlier diagnosis. And it was fear that my children snapped out of me. Every time I nearly drowned in fearing the future, their immediate needs became my life jacket: Dad, I need help with my homework, I can’t sleep, I’m hungry, the printer is not working, I need a lift …

They didn’t care about my gender, they just needed the deed done.

Perhaps a dying parent’s candle is never really snuffed. Their remaining flame just flicks across to the surviving parent who needs to turn it up. Perhaps the lighthouse is not on some dark horizon, but glowing within us.

When we lose a key family member, we are still a family. In fact, we become best friends.

Joseph Wakim is the author of What My Daughters Taught Me, published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $32.99, on sale now