{"id":445,"date":"2024-06-29T17:58:18","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T17:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/?p=445"},"modified":"2025-05-14T17:37:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T17:37:06","slug":"story-of-pride-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/story-of-pride-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Story of Pride – Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
\u201cYour daughter is the best thing that ever happened to my son.\u201d Mark\u2019s dad said as he shook my father\u2019s hand. \u201cShe is just marvelous. You must be so proud of her.\u201d he added. My father looked surprised, confused, mystified. He appeared to be at a loss of words; my father is never at a loss of words. One thing he didn\u2019t appear was proud.

We were in England visiting Mark\u2019s family. As we were planning our trip from America, I had come to know that my father was traveling at the same time from India to Amsterdam. Mark and I had been together 6 years. My father had met Mark twice when we had traveled to India, but so far he had not met Mark\u2019s family. I leaned in to the universe \u2013 it was the right time for our two families \u2013 Mark\u2019s dad, mom, sister, brother-in-law, nephew to meet my family \u2013 my father. My mother had passed away from a stroke when I was a teenager, my sister had succumbed to cancer 6 years prior. Our every loss had estranged us further; my father withdrawing from the world to nurse his wounds, I opening up to the world trusting it to heal my heart.

When I met Mark\u2019s father for the first time, my entire idea of fathers was challenged. I grew up with a father who was demanding, critical, a hard task-master. He was reserved and hard to please. He had accomplished great things in life \u2013 a son of a clerk he had built himself from the ground up \u2013 becoming a top engineer in All India Radio, traveling the world, his name was in the \u201cInternational who\u2019s who\u201d book in the 1990s \u2013 something he mentioned often. My father was so well-educated; he was not just a Dr. but a Dr. Dr. due to the double PHDs he had earned. My father had earned his station in life. You had to earn his love.

Mark\u2019s dad – on the contrary – seemed easygoing, understanding, demonstrative of his love. A WWII Polish refuge who spent the formative years of his life moving from a gulag in Siberia to the British refugee camp in Kenya, he had learnt his lessons from the book of life. When he arrived at the age of 16 as an immigrant in the UK, there was neither time nor opportunity for him to pursue higher education. Instead he became a craftsman, a machinist, a lathe operator, making parts for aircrafts and mining equipment with such precision & skill that an error a hundredth of millimeter (less than a thousand of an inch; it\u2019s called a \u201cthou\u201d) was unacceptable. He didn\u2019t do a doctorate, he didn\u2019t travel the world \u2013 although he did go back to Kenya to visit the home of his childhood – he too excelled in his work. But his legacy was his children. He adored his children. He adored Mark.

I was a young teenager when my mother passed away from a stroke. My father \u2013 who was not a homemaker \u2013 that was my mother\u2019s thankless job \u2013 at a complete loss with what to do with two teenage daughters, got remarried within a year. He abhorred loneliness and he desperately wanted his daughters to have another mother-figure. He was a world-renowned engineer so naturally he missed reading any of the numerous step-mother fairytales. Our step-mother was so kind to us that the day she arrived in our lives, we magically turned into Cinderellas. The ensuing years were painful both for my sister & I, and for him, as we grew more & more estranged, neither able to listen to the other.

My sister and I decided to move to America to follow our dreams \u2013 something our father had inculcated in us since we were children, something he could have been proud of. But he was not proud. You are not proud of strangers or of people you are estranged with. Pride requires a sense of \u201cownership\u201d \u2013 it says, \u201cyou are my person – and you are cool – so I am proud of you\u201d. My father and I were not each other\u2019s person anymore.

Before I met Mark, he was married to another woman, who suffered from mental illness & had an uncompromising personality. Over time their marriage became a shell. Mark stayed, she had nowhere to go, she was self-absorbed and had difficulty keeping a job, how would she survive? So he continued in a loveless non-marriage for over 16 years. It aged him. And it aged his dad. Mark finally found a way to end his marriage without abandoning her. Then I showed up in his life and 16 years of winter turned into spring.

Mark\u2019s dad saw his son having a true partner for the first time. Every time we visited England in those days, his dad would tear up & say to me \u201cyou rescued my son. I will be forever grateful.\u201d

So when he said those words to my father about his daughter being the best thing that ever happened to his son, he meant them. My father at a loss \u2013 both at the story behind the words; I had never told him about Mark\u2019s past – and of his own connection with me; through our years of estrangement our lives had taken us far from each other, he barely knew who I was, who I had become. He smiled \u2013 a bit uncomfortably and followed with a non-sequitur.

I looked at my two dads \u2013 one who had brung me in this world, raised me, taught me so much of what I know, instilled in me the high-minded ambition that brought me to America & that is part of my cellular structure. The man who didn\u2019t know how to be proud of me anymore.

And my other dad, who had met me barely 6 years ago, didn\u2019t have anything in common with me, but who somehow had the capacity to see me for who I was, who I am. And who had permitted himself to fall in love with me, a total stranger, such that I was now \u2018his person\u201d. The man who was proud of me.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Swati Srivastava is an immigrant and a multi award-winning writer, director, and voiceover artist.<\/em>\u00a0A filmmaker & storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and lives in a Net Zero Energy home.<\/em>\u00a0She can be reached via\u00a0Linkedin<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0swati@TiredAndBeatup.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYour daughter is the best thing that ever happened to my son.\u201d Mark\u2019s dad said as he shook my father\u2019s hand. \u201cShe is just marvelous. You must be so proud of her.\u201d he added. My father looked surprised, confused, mystified. He appeared to be at a loss of words; my father is never at a loss of words. One thing he didn\u2019t appear was proud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"chat","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-chat","hentry","category-reflections","post_format-post-format-chat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tiredandbeatup.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}