One month ago, right here in this column, I expressed my bewilderment at the subtle but swift passing of time. One of my bigger regrets was not spending enough time with my dad, along with the fact that I sought the thrill of faraway things before I tried to achieve and experience some of life’s simple pleasures and the experiences that were provided to me by my own backyard.
So I combined my bigger regrets into one achievement that could be ticked off the shortlist: climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge with the superhero dad of my childhood who was getting old right before very eyes.
I’ve never had one of those perfect father-daughter relationships. When I was a little girl, things were fantastic: I’d get ever doll I ever wanted, taken to picnics, the Easter Show, and trips to the Zoo, and the photos of me in pink frilly dresses hugging my dad with all my might were plentiful. As I grew older, growing up into a country and lifestyle that was so far removed from my father’s own experience of childhood and therefore what he thought it should be like, made our relationship difficult and terse. It was difficult to get his permission to go to high school parties and sleepovers with my friends, because, such actions were not typical of good Lebanese-girl behaviour. And considering he was a lot like a Mafia boss (something my husband turned my attention to) with his big gold ring emblazoned with the Cedar Tree and his place of pride at the ‘big couch’ in the living room or at the head of the table, where mum would fuss around him constantly, I never really wanted to overstep the boundary.
Needless to say our relationship never really blossomed from the one we had before I turned adolescent, and it was made worse when I bought an Anglo-Australian home, and my father realised there was no hope I’d be the Lebanese wife in the Lebanese nuclear unit he’d always imagined for me.
Fast-forward to the day of my wedding in December 2010, and his speech has gone down in Ayoub history as the best Father of the Bride speech people had ever heard. Right from the heart, complete with tears, it expressed how his reluctance to let me live my own way was just an expression of his selfish love, and his desire to keep me close by. If I’d married a Lebanese guy, he’d reasoned, I’d be more likely to stay around in the family fold and partake in all the cultural events that were a source of comfort for him.
Needless to say, I didn’t need that speech to reconnect with him. But I did an avenue to do so. I’d always wondered about the things that I could do overseas, and bored myself out of my brain when I couldn’t afford an overseas holiday. Unfortunately, I failed to look at what I could do in Oz to keep my excitement levels at a reasonable high (which in turn peaks my creativity and writing ability) until one day, driving to Mosman for a visit with the Mother-in-Law, that I saw the people climbing Sydney’s most iconic symbol: the Harbour Bridge.
Built during the depression, it was still holding up hundreds of people a day as they journey half way across it on either side (to get a glimpse of the view on both sides). Knowing my father’s love of architecture and engineering, and my own love of ticking experiences off my list, I knew it had to be done, and soon we found ourselves descending from our climb on a high, talking about the view like we were old pals.
I realised a lot of things that day, things that I never knew about my father. When you took him out of his Mafia’s seat at the head of the table, he was funny. He cracked jokes with so many people that day, which made me see a side to him that I’d never seen before. Moreover, I noticed where my short attention span comes from, as I busted him many a time not listening to instructions. As I explained to him something that he’d missed, I’d missed something even more vital in the process, and as we were sent to change into our climbing gear, Dad and I were the only ones that came out wearing our jumpsuits the wrong way!
But the most beautiful aspect of the day was reconnecting with someone who was a big, strong and amazing force in my life, in a manner that took out the things we disagreed on. In society and culture and politics, we call this ‘building bridges’.
Sometimes, a father walks his little girl down the aisle and says goodbye to her, recognising the difficulties that relationships face in the modern day. People move away, start their own families, reserve get-togethers for thrice-a-year public holidays.
My dad walked me down the aisle, and I came across a bridge to show him I was not going anywhere. And in the process, I reminded myself that I too didn’t have to travel far and wide to tick another thing off my life experience to do-list. And with that, my short list got a teeny bit shorter.
