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.