Monday, June 2, 2025
Father's Day!
A picture of my father.
Our father is the most important person in our life. At the beginning of life when we look up from the cradle our father's face is the face that we see. Our father's hand is the hand that carries us. The person whose fingers we can hold on to as we make our first steps. The voice that our ears hear first. A mother is just as important. As father's day approaches I feel like writing something encouraging in my blog about father's day.
That was because yesterday I read an old post that I had written about father's day. What I wrote many years ago encouraged me yesterday. I wrote that our heavenly father's love for us is very deep. Our heavenly father thinks about the details of our lives. Our heavenly Father knows and cares about every detail of our lives. What are the ways in which my heavenly father has blessed me recently.
The most recent blessing was when a WhatsApp group started whose members were all the girls in my class in 10th grade. The school I studied was St. Teresa's Convent Girls High School. There was St. Teresa's school and St. Teresa's college. Both were in the same compound. Grade 10 was the highest grade in school. It is the most crucial year in a student's life when I was studying. Your performance in that grade can make or break your life.The name of the board that provided the syllabus was SSLC or the secondary school leaving certificate. Parents and teachers equally feared the year a child faced the SSLC. There was so much to study. The environment was so competitive. If you don't study well you will not get admission to the college of your choice and you will not get to study the subjects of your choice. There was such a serious atmosphere in school. Teachers taught in such a way that it is geared towards getting high marks in the SSLC.
Our papers are not graded in our school by our teachers. Our answer papers are given to teachers who never taught us and are graded by teachers who don't know our name but who are proficient to grade papers in SSLC syllabus schools in the entire state of Kerala. We are to be trained to write answers which will get us good marks in the SSLC. Even teachers are worried and stressed about this. But through all the atmosphere of academics there was the feeling of this is the last year of school. After this we get to go to college. We don't have to wear our uniform of sky blue skirt, cream shirt, and tie every day. After 10th it is pre degree. In my school there was 10 A, 10 B, 10 C, 10 D and 10 E. I belonged to 10C.
The WhatsApp contained only the girls in 10C. It was this year that all of us 10C girls were in the same class. This interaction with these girls through this WhatsApp group might be a blessing from my heavenly father. Maybe that is what I needed socially. To relive old memories of the most crucial year in school; the final year in school and catch up with our old school friends.
Because there is nothing more basic in my life than my original school I studied. Where my parents put me. After my family and relatives, it is with them I spend the maximum amount of time especially in vulnerable teen years.
Years have passed and we have become more educated and made new friends but the shared experience of being in a class with the same teacher remains in our memories. My heavenly father wanted me to relive the memories of girlhood before we became wives and mother's, the chasm of years separating us yet the memories bringing us back together.
This connecting with my old school friends through Whatsapp exchanging pictures updating on what we have done with our lives and the great education we had in our school was something we needed.
Inside the classroom of st Teresa's school there are benches arranged in rows. Sitting in those benches we learned malayalam English Hindi social studies science and math. Nothing disturbed the tranquil flow of the days. If we watch a movie with our parents we will tell the story of it in class the next day. A girl would tell the story of a movie and a few other girls would sit around and listen. The art of story telling was surely being formed in us I guess through those informal story telling sessions.
A drawing trend was started. We would draw entire families with the mom wearing a saree and daughter in dress and brother in shorts and father in pants and shirt. We drew profiles of girls and eyes with long lashes. We just learned to draw this from each other and took great delight in showing our work to others. We became experts in shading. If we make the point of our pencil very sharp we get dark thin lines on paper. If we keep the protractor under the page it becomes really like it is drawn with carbon pencil. Then we could shade by folding a piece of paper and rubbing it over a area which we have blackened with pencil and we can get the ombre effect in black and white. These little hacks we made by ourselves.
Our drawing teacher did not teach us. Our drawing teacher taught us other things. When we reach school before classes started we would show our books to each other and admire the work of each other. Many a budding artist was found in our diagram books.
During interval sometimes we can lean on the hallway wall and look downstairs and in the path we would see college girls walking by.
St Teresa's school and college was in the same compound.
Lots of fashionable college girls would walk by toward punjiri for lime juice or puffs or cutlets to the science block which wasbuildings on the other side.
So many memories of school life.
I got lots of blessings from being in the group. Each interaction with each girl was a blessing. All this is to say our heavenly father gives us what we truly need.
I shared a bit of my writing in this WhatsApp group. Around the time this group was started in May I found this picture of a baby in a YouTube channel. The baby looked most heavenly in pink and white striped outfit, pink and white blanket and her soft blond hair framing her face. The video which had the picture of the baby has a song by the singer Jenna Raine. I did not know the singer. The song started with the word 2017 and continued on with the line "Honestly I hardly recognized." I did not know the song or the singer.
But one day while exchanging greetings in the group I checked the song and the singer. I saw this video where a girl is running traipsing through a meadow singing the song "the girl I used to be 2017, honestly I hardly recognized." The video made me happy. I get to know another talented singer songwriter. She challenged herself to write hundred songs a year. Some of her songs spoke to me such as "see you later. It is not a goodbye."
This father's day let us be grateful for our heavenly father who knows everything we need and gives us the things we need the most. In my case it was remembering, in the words of Jenna Raine "the girl I used to be." And the girls in my class. This WhatsApp group of girls from 10c in st. Teresa's school.
Let us be grateful for our earthly father's whose face we saw when we opened our eyes for the first time in the cradle. Our earthly father is a gift to us from our heavenly father.
We can never repay enough to our earthly father all that they did for us. No matter how rich we become we cannot pay them back for carrying us when we could not sit let alone walk. For all the times they comforted us when we were crying.
For the songs they sung to us.
Wrapped us in blankets to protect us from the cold. Gave us baths tenderly to make us clean from the odors we accumulate from living.
Feed us, clothe us teach us inspire us and encourage us.
Happy Father's Day!
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