By Tejal Thakur
It’s a silly phrase.
It’s often contextualised with the belief that mothers prefer sons while fathers dote on daughters. True it may be, for most healthy families. Unhealthy too. Daddy’s girl, daddy’s princess. Who exactly grew up calling their fathers daddy?
How do those girls feel, knowing the word is so sexualised? How must those girls feel, to be the ones who made the word sexual in the first place? Because the girls with daddy issues are also daddy’s girls, and the girls who aren’t, still have daddy issues. The sons who have loving mothers still have disconnected relationships with women who aren’t their mothers, and the sons who don’t, have toxic ones.
Where is the line between a parent’s love and a child’s ruin?
What is a parental bond? It knows no bounds, because they would kill for you, but they could kill you. Because a parent’s love knows no ends, it knows no boundaries, restrains, or limits. This, unfortunately, includes their unconditional support; as well as abuse. A relationship that knows no bounds. They view you as their proprietary, like a share in a company, and your good behaviour is high dividends, like an investment property they can evict tenants out of anytime they see fit. An investment is what you are, but the market is a tricky place, and it too knows no bounds with its highs and lows.
Daddy’s girls stop getting princess treatment when they grow into womanhood. It’s strange. I envy the girls who didn’t stop feeling the warmth of a father’s love for his
fear it may be misunderstood. I wish there wasn’t a good reason why people questioned a mother and son, a father and daughter, but there are good parents and then there are sick monsters; maybe our parents never wanted to take the chance of their love being misconstrued.
The Elektra and Oedipus complex, I think, underlines this phenomenon in another perspective. Because now you see the inexplicable desire of a child towards their parent, perhaps through no advance or encouragement made by the adult. It is evident from the times fathers bedded their daughters, sons married their widowed mothers; unsettling, taboo, disgusting. It should be. But why is it so? We deny, but it’s in the back of everyone’s minds. Not even the desire to do so, but the fear of this desire, or the fear of it being perceived as being the case.
So, there you have it, two sides of the same redenominated coin. But why was it ever natural for a parent’s love to be anything more than lustless? Why is it even a question for interpretation? And why the fuck can I not blame it on some contemporary culture where the #1 Pornhub search is ‘stepdad fucks stepdaughter,’ where the ‘step’ is added to absolve of accountability? I can’t because it is evident, I can trace it back to the times fathers bedded their daughters, sons married their widowed mothers. I can trace it to Elektra and Oedipus.
But such a relationship can never be positive, can it? I will be daddy’s girl. Or, as people will tell me with a sigh, I am my father’s daughter.
kalā
Tejal, also known as kalakaar or kalakaar.au in the art world, is an emerging artist who believes that if a picture is worth a thousand words – a painting is worth a picture, a thousandfold. With her semi-abstract pieces, she aims to tell a colourful story through brushstrokes that explore human emotion and mythology.
