My Father And I — We Felt Pain
Pain insists upon being attended to.
I am going to be 31 soon. My dad turned 54 this year. He had me when he was just 23 years old. I was born in Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, and he belonged to a small village in Punjab.
He is a self-made man who struggled all his life to give his children a better future. No one from our village ever went to school. He was the first to get a decent education, and that too on his own.
He was the eldest of eight siblings. All during his childhood and adulthood, he was busy raising his father’s kids, and when they grew up, he got married at a young age. Since then, he has been raising his kids.
He was busy all his life just to make ends meet. We are five siblings and he was responsible for getting all of us educated, feeding us, and managing the household with a limited income and no family support at all.
My father was a strict father from the start.
He had told me to do a lot more hard work than any other kids of my age, just with a thought that otherwise, I might end up getting married at an early age like all other girls in the family, if I couldn’t be independent enough.
