Happy Father’s Day to me. It feels surreal to say that to myself. It’s been more than two decades since I lost my father. Actually, I have lost count. Hence, “decade” is a safe term. For all obvious reasons, every Father’s Day since April 2021, that’s when my daughter was born, it has been a day filled with eclectic emotions. The spectrum of emotions ranges from recollection of vivid yet precise moments spent with my father to the fun, thrill, and pride of being called Buwa (meaning father in Nepali) by my daughter. My father’s day usually begins with going to the temple to offer sida, a sacred offering made to a priest in memory of my deceased father. But I cannot wait to get back home to have our small, cute, delightful ceremony where my daughter hands me some gifts. This juxtaposition of two raw emotions— a deep sense of loss and abundance of love showered on me courtesy of my daughter— is exhausting, but that is where I feel most alive.
Over the past five years, I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery, learning to be a father. But guess what? It’s not just about me shaping my child’s learning and thinking. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite! My daughter has been my biggest influence, guiding me and shaping my actions and thoughts.
Reframing vulnerability
Perhaps the most profound impact my daughter has had on me is this: it’s okay to be vulnerable.
In the first nine days after her birth, she had to be admitted to the intensive care unit because doctors noticed she was having difficulty breathing. Standing outside the unit’s door each morning, waiting to speak with the doctor, I found myself wishing I could trade places with her. That helplessness was my first brutal encounter with vulnerability.
I hate it when she sees me angry, exhausted, or stressed. What unsettles me even more is knowing that she’s absorbing everything—my tone of voice, my body language, even my silence. While that realization instinctively stirs remorse, the point where I feel vulnerable is the awareness that my fateful imperfect moment might end up leaving a lasting mark on her.
During festivities, there are moments when I want to simplify rituals for my daughter—but worry it might be seen as neglecting heritage. I believe many young fathers will resonate with this dilemma. My vulnerability lies in walking that fine line between cultural preservation and conscious modernization.
I sometimes feel my deepest vulnerability surface in the most ordinary of moments — like playtime.
It happens when she suddenly uses a word that never belonged to our family’s vocabulary or speaks in a tone that brushes against disrespect. A flicker of worry runs through me: Where did that come from? Who is shaping this little voice when I’m not looking? Of course, my wife or I will gently sit her down and explain why that word or tone was hurtful. But in doing so, I’m reminded of an important truth: as her father, I am not in total control. I cannot shield her from every negative influence in the world. What I can do — and what I choose to do — is take the time to help her understand why her words matter, and how they can shape the way others feel.
For years, I mistook vulnerability for a public declaration of weakness, helplessness, or paralysis—a confession that I had no answers and no clear way forward. Why I thought that way is a top-notch self-reflection question, though I suspect the answer isn’t all that surprising. In much of Nepali society, men are often socialized from a young age to project strength, self-reliance, and emotional restraint. This expectation only gets reinforced through family upbringing — being told to “be strong” or “not cry” in moments of pain or fear; peer influence — teasing or shaming boys for showing emotions perceived as “soft”; media and role models — celebrating stoic heroes while rarely portray men openly expressing vulnerability; workplace and social roles — equating leadership or masculinity with decisiveness and control, not openness about struggles.
Unfortunately, unintended cost of some of these perceived or imposed expectations and reinforcements creates men like me who grow up equating vulnerability with weakness, which made it harder to seek help, build deeper emotional intimacy, or model openness for the next generation. But the beautiful irony is this: it took my baby girl to undo decades of conditioning.
The silent activism
Fortunately, this slow act of reconditioning has freed me from the inherited mental models that dictate what a father is “allowed” — or not allowed — to do. Every evening after work, unless the skies open with a downpour, I make it a point to take my daughter for a walk. We often find ourselves in nearby parks where most children her age, or older, are accompanied by their mothers. To me, my presence beside her feels utterly normal; to some onlookers, however, it seems almost like a visual anomaly disrupting the expected scene.
Just last month, I attended her parent–teacher meeting at school. At the end, I was asked to sign my name and note my relationship to the student. I was probably the ninth name on the sheet — and realized that all nine before me were mothers or grandmothers. In that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if the warm enthusiasm from the teachers had as much to do with my involvement as it did with my daughter’s progress. In retrospect, these are my quiet acts of activism — no slogans, no speeches, just a steady refusal to pass down the same restrictions I once inherited.
Generational lens
Talking about inheritance, my father was my best friend. Despite belonging to completely different generations, I always felt comfortable chatting with him about a wide range of topics. Every time I came home from boarding school, I looked forward to meeting him and showing him the prizes I had won. The memory of the excitement on his face in those moments keeps him alive for me to this day.
But among all those memories, I can’t recall a single moment, at the peak of his life, when I saw him fearful, vulnerable, or simply not in control. He was a bureaucrat — a chief district officer — and I assume that the weight and dignity of that position did not permit him to show his vulnerabilities. Maybe he wanted to. Maybe he didn’t know how. In his generation, men carried the responsibility of provision and protection like an unspoken oath, and admitting uncertainty might have felt like a crack in the foundation.
Unfortunately, after he retired, something in him seemed to give way. Retirement is marked on a calendar the day one joins government service, but the real reckoning begins when the mornings arrive without duty or deadline. The long, unstructured hours, the slow erosion of health under the weight of chronic diabetes, the quiet drain on his retirement savings, and the growing need for help in the simplest of tasks — all of it seemed to close in at once. Together, they stripped away the armour he had worn for decades, exposing a rawness and fragility I believe he hadn’t felt in many, many years.
Sometimes I wonder — if my father had felt safe enough to express his vulnerabilities, how might it have shaped the man I became? It’s only now, as a father myself, that I understand what he might have been carrying alone. And in breaking my own silences with my daughter — telling her why I am angry or worried, why I don’t feel like playing, or why I don’t have the answer to one of her questions — I’m not just shaping her world. I’m also speaking back through time to my father, giving him, in memory, the permission he may never have had.
The gift I want
This year, the gift I’m most excited about is not wrapped in a box or a paper — it is the life we’re weaving together. A life where a father can be a shelter in one storm and the storm itself in another; where strength and uncertainty can stand side by side; where I am as much a student as I am a guide.
Someday, she might look back and realise that her greatest gift to me was never in a box or a ribbon. It was the quiet permission to be fully human — to show her that my stumbles, my doubts, and my lack of knowledge are not cracks in fatherhood, but the proof of it.
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