What it means to be a father

June 19, 2022 60 Views No Comment

June 19 is Father’s Day

Vishü Rita Krocha
Kohima | June 19

For Senjano Sharon Putsure, who lost her father when she was only two years old, Father’s day always reminds her “to be appreciative of all the fathers we have and the ones we consider as a father.” Growing up, she relates to The Morung Express, “Honestly, I don’t think I ever felt like I didn’t have a father because my mother made sure that we never had to go through any of that.”

However, she also confesses that “there was always a void of not having someone to call a father.” As a young girl, she looked up to her maternal grandfather as a father figure even as she recollects, “he was always there.”

Paraphrasing that father’s day comes as a reminder to be appreciative of fathers, she expresses that there are a lot of fathers who are trying really hard and working really hard to provide for the family. “A father, being the head of the family comes with responsibility and there is some respect in it”, she says.

Now a mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Senjano is also more appreciative of the role that fathers play. Describing her husband, Lezo Putsure as an amazing father to their daughter Sarah, she says, “from changing her diapers to sacrificing his work just to look after her…he is definitely the best father that Sarah could ever have.”

“He is an amazing human being! He would always go ahead to do something good, to help somebody, even when he does not have it. He is very selfless that way,” she says. As a father, she adds, “I am so grateful that my daughter has a father like him and I have a husband like him.”

Especially as a working woman, whose work timings stretch from 8:30 AM to 7:30 PM, Senjano is grateful to have a supportive husband. “A lot of people tell me to quit my job and be a stay-at-home mother but Lezo insists that financial freedom is so important and tells me that ‘I am sure your daughter would like to look up to you’ and really encourages me to carry on.”

‘Father never made us feel he was absent from our lives’
“Father’s Day, for us, was always over phone calls because when we were growing up, my father was always away because of work. But he never made us feel he was absent from our lives,” Chichanbeni Humtsoe says of her dad Dr KT Lotha, who retired in April 2018 having worked under the Directorate of Health & Family Welfare for several years.

“I never got to spend Father’s Day with him as a child. Growing up, we never saw him because he was either posted in Mon or Tuensang or some other place. He dedicated himself to work”, she recalls.

This year, it will be yet another Father’s Day apart even as she says, “it’s either his work or our work.” But his work, she elucidates, “was for his family, to provide for us. He never felt obligated, but it was something he wanted to do.”

However, despite all the physical distances, Chichanbeni deeply values all the life lessons she learned from her father.

“My father was never the restrictive type, never imposing, always supportive of our dreams, and never forceful in anything as he would say, ‘it is your life, you know what is best for you!’”

“He trusted us enough to make our own decisions”, she goes on to say even while expressing that this “very trusting’ nature has enabled her and her siblings to become more responsible in life. “Instead of it making me feel like I can take advantage of him not questioning every move of my life, it makes me feel more responsible and that I should not break that trust,” she puts across.

Source: https://www.morungexpress.com/what-it-means-to-be-a-father