Dedication: To M and S
I don’t want my father to love me.
As far as I can remembrer, my father was always a family man. He was more a family person when it came to his family, not to his wife and children. He would often make us do sacrifices if it meant pleasing to my dad’s side of the family.
Although, he didn’t particularly hate us, in contrary, despite of showing no interest in my mom, he liked his children, only if they would project a perfect image to the world. According to his mindset, a perfect child should have good grades, play a sport, little to no contact with the opposite gender and always follow religion. I guess that’s why for most of my brother’s, Lounes, teenage years, our father wasn’t so keen on him.
Lounes acted as any troubled teenager that succumbed to bad influence. For some reason, my dad would still laugh with him and call him his son. As for his three daughters, rules were tighter. My sisters and I knew full well that it was all because of our culture. We knew that father didn’t want to project a bad image of us to his family. We knew that in our culture, women’s rights weren’t respected as our religion wanted. We knew that we weren’t our culture’s favorite. We also knew that, even though they never told us, our parents would have preferred boys.
We would often badmouth and compare ourselves with others. Our religion sets rules, that I find fair, that I obey. Our culture modifies those rules, to let women with less privilege and men more. My father cares about the culture and the judgements of his family. He wants his daughters to obey the culture and not the religion.
Where is my mother in the middle of this? She always sides with him. Like everyone in our household, mom tries to live up to the standards of her husband. The husband that gives her little to no attention. She believes that siding with him will make her more appreciated.
I promised myself, I would never obey the culture.
Like I said before, my father likes us, he always expects the most of us. Now, I know that I will represent everything he hates when I will not accept the culture.
I would prefer him to dislike me before I deceive him.