06 08 21- Alif Shafak

Monday - ISTANBUL 15:56- e-mail:e.safak@zaman.com.tr ZAMAN
Authoritarian Fathers, Sweet Grandfathers

I come across them in the parks, playing fields, and public transportation vehicles. They are side by side, eye by eye, hearth by hearth. There is such a pure flow of love between them, pure and almost concrete, as if you can touch that love it you try to reach with your hands, it is intense and unadulterated. I watch them with semi surprise and semi admiration.

They have achieved a wonderful harmony; despite all the difference of age. I see them in every corner of the daily life: sweet grandfathers and their pupil grandchildren.

A foreigner observing the soft relation between the grandfathers and the grandchildren might assume that the men in these lands are not shy to display their affections and feelings. The grandfathers in their 60s, 70s or 80s are greatly affectionate by their little grandchildren as if they regained life with them. They are absolutely natural and spontaneous, tolerating all kinds of child caprice. Who believes that they were behaving very differently, even strictly towards their own children in the past? Who believes that the grandfathers, being such affectionate and emotional by their grandchildren, always suppressed their feelings in the relations with their own sons for years?

Do you wonder how many men have experienced the same kind of thing in these lands? “Don’t be mislead by the current sweet-grandfather appearance of my father. He was a very harsh man, and always authoritarian. He used to love us, but he never made his love apparent. I don’t remember he kissed his children, took them out for a joy ride, or embraced them for a single time. He was always unreachable, harsh. Even his shadow and name was a source of fear…”The sweet grandfathers of today were authoritarians fathers in the past. The fathers who thought that displaying their feelings, regarding being child with their children as an irreparable weakness…The fathers who want to teach this intangible strictness that they regard as fit to themselves to their children. They ban their children from crying, for the very reason that they banned themselves from crying. It is forbidden for their children to cry, to be touched, to display their pains, fears, anxieties, and desires even when they are small. In accordance with this doctrine that they learnt from their fathers, the core of being a “man” is not to display the feelings under any circumstances, no matter how deeply you are moved and affected. But what happens and at which point does this familiar picture changes? How come the fathers who could not hug their own children with yearning, become such ready to display all their suppressed feelings towards their grandchildren when they are aged? If they don’t see any harm in being affectionate and emotional towards their grandchildren, why don’t they dare to do so before?

The meaning of being mother and father is not just loving one’s kid. It requires to display the affection you feel for them. If you can not show how much you love your kids, communicate your feelings to them, refrain yourself for the sake for stock-still moral values or indoctrinated codes of masculinity and touch your kid, then it means that your affection is imperfect and like a bird who can’t fly with a single wing. The sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve fail mostly in not loving their kids, but in displaying and wording their affections for them directly. Perhaps they wound their kids mostly at that point, and be wounded mostly by the same point…
August 15, 2006
08.17.2006

e-mail:e.safak@zaman.com.tr

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