The Father's Day Gift

I was born just days before Father’s Day, and maybe in some poetic way, I was supposed to be a gift for him. As his only daughter, I was close to him, but not in the way people expect when they think of a father-daughter bond. Ours was a connection made up of tension, the kind that binds just as much as it bruises. Our relationship was a constant struggle—both of us stubborn, unyielding, and headstrong, mirrors of each other’s rough edges. I wonder, in those moments he called me kurang ajar, biadap, tak dengar kata, did he realize just how much of those traits I’d learned from him? Or did he see my defiance as something foreign, something he had to criticize in me, even though he was the one who shaped it?

When he called me stubborn, it was like he was naming a piece of himself that I’d inherited. I’d seen him be keras kepala my whole life, watched him stand his ground, refusing to bend or compromise. He wore his hard-headedness with pride, yet when it showed up in me, he seemed to resent it. His criticisms felt like a strange double standard: he valued these traits in himself but couldn’t accept them in his own daughter. It left me wondering if he knew he was condemning his own reflection, that I was simply mirroring back the resilience he’d taught me, even if he didn’t mean to.

He’d often accuse me of not listening, of being too independent and unwilling to follow his lead. But that independence was something I picked up from watching him. I learned to go my own way, to trust my own instincts, because I’d seen him do it over and over again. He raised me to be self-sufficient, but only to a point, only when my independence didn’t challenge his authority. Our arguments felt like a constant clash of two people who were equally unyielding, two stubborn minds fighting to hold their ground. He criticized my strength and independence, but I couldn’t have become that way without his example. And each time he called me disrespectful, I wondered if he recognized his own defiance staring back at him.

Then, after every argument, he would come to apologize. His apologies were quiet, reluctant, as if he struggled with saying the words. I could never tell if he was genuinely sorry for what he’d said or if he was coming to terms with the fact that he’d molded me into this person he now found so difficult to control. Did he realize that every trait he scorned in me was a reflection of himself? Or was he only apologizing because he felt he had to, without fully understanding that I had become who I was largely because of him?

note: this article was cut short mostly because i realized how too personal this article was but alas enjoy