“I AM SOMEONE’S DAUGHTER TOO.” A. O-C

 

 

I wasn’t planning to write about this as I generally try to stay away from politics but reading the sentence above, as a father of three daughters, those words went straight through my heart piercing it, and I knew I just had to.

 

It is almost a part of the job description of a psychiatrist to be able to look into people’s minds, to be able to see the world through THEIR eyes. When I pictured the sentence above, I didn’t see a public representative of a country with enough power to potentially destroy planet earth a few times. I saw a small, insecure girl, who has managed to achieve an amazing lot despite all odds, standing scared in front of a bully and an abuser, and saying, “Please do not hurt me. Think of your own daughter(s). I am someone’s daughter too.” And this image broke my heart and I knew I had to add my very weak voice to all the voices being raised against such behaviour. 

 

We all see the world through our own eyes, through the lens of our own life experiences, our own world view, so I will first share mine. I feel privileged to come from the family of highly educated women. My mother did her bachelors in the 1950s when very few Muslim women in the very recently freed from the slavery of British Raj Indo-Pakistan subcontinent did it. 

 

After I had recently moved to NZ, once I was flying to Australia for a conference. One pharmaceutical company senior manager, who was going for the same conference, asked me where I was from. I told him I had just moved to NZ from Pakistan. Somehow, it hadn’t come up that we had lived in London for 7 years previously. He said to me, “Your wife must feel so liberated having moved to NZ.” I just smiled and said, “First let me tell you something about family. Then I will answer your question. My eldest sister first trained as a dermatologist. Then she changed fields and did a PhD in pharmacology. My second sister has done bachelors. The third one is a child psychiatrist. The fourth one is a professor of Anatomy. The youngest one is a computer engineer. And my wife is a doctor too. Sorry what was your question again?” 

 

My companion went all red in the face and said, “Sorry. We make assumptions about people based on what we see on TV or read in newspapers, which usually only mention Pakistan when there are bombs going off there. I am really sorry.”

 

When my eldest daughter was still in high school, once we were talking about her future education in one of our usual post-dinner family conferences. She asked me if I wanted her to become a doctor too, considering we come from a very long of doctors, spanning over at least 3 generations. I said to her that it was ‘non-negotiable’ that she gets a university degree. What she wanted to study there was entirely up to her. She asked me why it was non-negotiable that she gets a uni degree. I told her the story of a very, very, close female family member whose husband had passed away when she was very young. But because she had good educational qualifications, she had studied further and supported herself and her children completely independently. Her children were confident and proud because they had been raised solely by their mother, and not on handouts by other family members as happened in so many other similar cases in Pakistan. I told her I wanted her, and my other daughters too, to be like that woman. 

 

So, may be this explains why I feel such incredible rage and sadness reading that one simple sentence. I wish all men could say to all women that, “You do not need to worry. We may not always agree with you, we may not even always approve of everything you say or do, but as our daughter, as our sister, as every other relationship that exists between men and women, you do not need to feel scared of any man. We have got your back.”