https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N58ZFB8umm4
Speech at Castle Hill Library, 14/12/2015
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.
TV Interview – Good Morning NZ
TV Interview in Auckland, on ‘Good Morning’ program
29 September 2015
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bh0ba8n7ih5ukdk/gm%20ARD%20joseph%20wakim%20sep%2029.mp4?oref=e
http://tvnz.co.nz/good-morning/tuesday-29-september-6394519
My Child Magazine: What my daughters taught me
http://www.mychildmagazine.com.au/blog/what-my-daughters-taught-me
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
Father who raised his three young girls alone after their mother died of breast cancer shares the lessons he’s learned
DAILY MAIL, 29 July 2015
From learning to cook, tying ponytails, and buying sanitary pads: Father who raised his three young girls alone after their mother died of breast cancer shares the lessons he’s learned
- Joseph Wakim has raised three daughters after his wife died of cancer
- Grace, Michelle and Joy were all under 11 when their mum died in 2003
- Mr Wakim raised them solo despite pushes to get help to cook and clean
- The three sisters taught Mr Wakim to be a mother and a father
- He’s written a memoir of life lessons titled: What My Daughters Taught Me
By Emily Crane for Daily Mail Australia
From tying his daughter’s hair in a ponytail to buying the right brand of sanitary pads – Joseph Wakim has learned some valuable life lessons in the past 12 years.
Mr Wakim has been raising his three daughters on his own in their Sydney home since his beloved wife Nadia passed away from breast cancer back in 2003.
He was inundated with friends, family and strangers telling him he would need help to raise his daughters – aged 11, nine and four – but Mr Wakim says he decided to do the job single-handedly and trust he would know what to do.
Joseph Wakim has been raising his three daughters – (L-R) Grace, Joy and Michelle – on his own in their Sydney home since his beloved wife Nadia passed away from breast cancer back in 2003
What followed was years of emotional and hilarious events that helped Mr Wakim become both a mother and father to Grace, Michelle and Joy.
‘I’ve made every mistake you can think of,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘I’d pick up the phone and ask people how do you make rice or I’ve just ruined someone’s dress in the washing machine.
‘But I had to just trust my instincts.’
The family moved from Melbourne to Sydney before Nadia’s cancer took hold and there was little family nearby when she passed away.
‘People were suggesting to get help to cook, do the laundry, clean. I wanted to give it a go on my own. I was reluctant to have my children surrounded by strangers,’ he said.
Joseph Wakim’s wife Nadia died in 2003 from breast cancer when their daughters Grace, Michelle and Joy were aged just 11, nine and four respectively
Joseph and Nadia Wakim moved from Melbourne to Sydney with their children before her cancer took hold and there was little family nearby when she passed away
Mr was inundated with friends, family and strangers telling him he would need help to raise his daughters Grace, Joy and Michelle but says he decided to do the job single-handedly and trust he would know what to do
‘They already lost their mum, I didn’t want them to lose their dad.’
Mr Wakim, who has detailed his family’s journey in a memoir titled: What My Daughters Taught Me, has shared stories of how they learned to cope in Nadia’s absence.
‘Grace taught me how to tie Joy’s hair in a ponytail and secure if with a hair tie. In time, I also learnt that the ponytail looked smarter if I tied to high on her crown,’ he wrote.
On one occasion, Joy’s ponytail wasn’t straight and Mr Wakim used his instincts to fix it.
‘Rather than redo the entire routine from scratch, I tired to wriggle it to the middle by fiddling with the hair tie. How was I suppose to know that you cannot drag a ponytail like a desktop icon without torturing the child?’ he said.
Mr Wakim, who has detailed his family’s journey in a memoir titled: What My Daughters Taught Me, has shared stories of how he and his daughters learned to cope in Nadia’s absence
The past 12 years have been filled with emotional and hilarious events that helped Mr Wakim become both a mother and father to Michelle, Joy and Grace
He even opened up on having to step up when his three daughter’s eventually started menstruating.
‘As the Minister of Foreign Affairs it was my responsibility to bring home a sufficient supply of sanitary pads,’ Mr Wakim said.
‘If someone was in the pad section, I would park my trolley near the men’s toiletries and pretend to be browsing at the razors. When the coast was clear, I would pounce and exit.
‘Times have changed. Now I am a familiar face in the sanitary napkins aisle. I spin the pads into the trolley from a distance and wave to the security cameras in case anyone watching wants a laugh.’
What My Daughters Taught Me by Joseph Wakim is available on Wednesday, July 29.
It took the death of my wife to realise how much I missed out on as a dad
Wednesday 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.
Widowed dad Joseph Wakim opens up about raising three daughters on his own
29 July 2015
Widowed dad Joseph Wakim opens up about raising three daughters on his own
- The Sunday Telegraph
- July 29, 20159:38AM
Men should be nurtured to be nurturers writes Joseph Wakim, author of the book What My Daughters Taught Me. Picture: Supplied Source: News Corp Australia
“WITHOUT a word spoken, mothers effortlessly read a room, gauging its temperature, scanning their children’s faces and measuring their heartbeats … This is the language of love, a language that should not be the monopoly of mothers. It is a language that we men can reclaim and relearn, as it lies dormant within us, waiting to be brought back to life. I was sure that whoever gave women this gift would not have bypassed fathers, in case they ended up like me.”
Joseph Wakim was left to raise his three young daughters Grace, Michelle, and Joy, after his wife Nadia died of cancer.
Widowed after his wife Nadia died of breast cancer 12 years ago, Joseph Wakim was left to raise his three young daughters, Grace, 11, Michelle, nine and Joy, four, on his own.
He has written a book called What My Daughters Taught Me — where he speaks candidly about ignoring the well-meaning advice from family, friends and strangers — to follow his own heart and instinct and do what is best for himself and more importantly his three girls.
Here he reflects on male stereotypes and why men need to be nurtured to be nurturers.
“What is required here is a change of heart by men”.
So said the PM when confronted with a survey that revealed that a quarter of the men thought some circumstances justified violence against women.
The PM has indeed hit the heart of the matter as the continuum from boys bottling up emotions to adult anger management to ugly violence is not new.
Too many males are socialised to act on their emotions, often with fists, rather than express their emotions through words or faces.
In my many years as a social worker, some males feared that “talking about how I feel” would be perceived as “what women do”.
Their hearts were heavy with fears and their valves were steaming. Add alcohol to the mix and you have a lethal cocktail.
These valves should never have been closed in the first place.
My own heart was forced to open up to dual parenting roles more than 10 years ago when I became widowed and had to raise my three young daughters alone.
I learned how they handled emotions, how they listened to each other, how they readily said “sorry”, how they talked about their fears, how they saw strength as adaptability, not as stubbornness, how they did not need to have the last word.
I was raised in a culture that had clear gender boundaries and we thought we were normal. Now I realise that boys need to nurtured to be nurturers, and that this notion that the genders are different by nature is greatly exaggerated. It closes the valves to the heart which are rusty to turn later in life.
* Joseph Wakim is author of What my daughters taught me (Allen & Unwin), out now.