Dear Khala jee, Hope you are fine, because I am not! I am a 16-year-old boy, and I just don’t know where to start from. There are just too many problems in my life. After my father married my mother (my father had a feeling that she was rich), she has been living a tough life. My father wanted to kill me before I was born; he made my mother do an abortion after some years and was even after my sister, who was thankfully somehow saved. He has cheated on my mother a dozen of times, even though he is a considered a respectable Colonel in the army, and has taken several oaths on the Quran regarding this, which were later proven to be lies. His mother too plays a hideous game and his brother lived off us, and is a fraud who stole money and then escaped from Karachi. My father, his mother and his brother killed my innocent grandfather for his wealth and now my grandmother, who once wore burqa (due to the strictness of my grandfather), goes burqa-less for shopping even in Iddat!

We don’t have a house, no savings, no car and my father is still cheating my mom. She gave up all her jewellery and everything she had, and even her mother and brother did all they could to save my father from the stupid situations he gets himself into. He once sold an army car for God knows what reason, and we paid the price! Right now my fee of Rs200,000 hasn’t been paid, my mother is near hospitalisation, our bills haven’t been paid and he plays the cool cat, talking to girls, flirting, laying on the couch and watching TV. I am fed up of his attitude! I think of committing suicide when I see other people. I am not jealous because they earn the same as us, but I wonder why are we deficient? We also have loans from more than three banks that were of no use to us, but went into financing my father’s brother’s disastrous business. Now we are paying the debt while he buys a car! I am a bright student striving to provide a better future for my family. I wanted to be a scientist but sometimes feel that maybe I should just join the army and show my father the error of his ways. There is no optimism in my situation.

An example of my father’s negligence is that when I asked him about my fee, he said that there is no need to go to school from tomorrow! Now my mother has all her hopes pinned on me as I give my exams to attain a scholarship, but I feel I might let her down, partly because I also have all the tension from my fee issue and other problems. I suffer from medicine resistant migraine and also depression. I know my situation feels like everything bad has happened to me, but it is all true. Either my father is too blind or too carefree but he truly doesn’t have the right to be called “DAD”. My mother is thinking about separation but I said no, not yet. I said, we will make my dad’s life horrible and then leave him when he needs help, like he always does to us. I don’t know if this is right but I hate him! Please tell me am I right?

Full of hate

Dear Son, To answer your question, it is almost never right to hate anything or anyone. But other than wanting a verdict from me, I suspect you are seeking some way to restore harmony in your relationship with your father. I deliberately haven’t said that you are seeking to ‘fix’ your father because the problem isn’t all about him. You speak disrespectfully of your paternal grandmother and your father’s brother — branding them villains — and you talk about things that happened before you were born or that you didn’t see as if you saw them with your eyes. I am compelled to think that you are being fed a lot of opinions. While some of what you say is probably true, you are also buying into some misinformation that is coming to you via another source, which is creating a lot of misunderstanding between you and your father.

The first step in resolving this issue is to swallow your pride and admit to yourself that you may be wrong on some fronts about your father. For instance, despite all the financial difficulties, your mother is managing to run the house with money that is coming from some source — most likely from your father. Also your father is a colonel in the army and must have worked hard to reach this position. He also helped his brother by taking loans for his business. That may not have been a very smart thing to do but he did it because he cared for his brother, which is not a bad thing. Also his child claims to hate him, and that cannot be an easy thing to live with.

I am not justifying the wrong things that your father did, all I am saying is that there is another side to this story and you need to focus on it in order to feel better about your father. Ask yourself if he actually did everything you have been told he did, cut him some slack, make a friendly gesture towards him and welcome any chance for reconciliation.

Remember, life is not a Marvel movie where people are either superheroes or all evil.

Dear Khala, I am 23-year-old boy; final year student of business administration. I love my parents a lot. We moved to a new house when I was in Matric. I got a separate room there along with a computer and an internet connection. I was very excited and glad to have a personal computer in my room. I used to spend eight to 10 hours a day surfing on the internet in my room without interacting with my parents and any of the family members.

That was 2008 and it is 2015 now, when I look back I see myself oblivious to the people around me. Those seven years of solitude put a negative impact on my personality, I become a chick in a shell that has bowed his head down forever and do not communicate with anyone.

My mother often try to talk to me but when she find me busy with my PC, she becomes upset and disgruntled to know that she’ll be ignored. Now even if I want I cannot communicate effectively with anyone at home, I act like a stranger in my own house.

Even though I love them, I cannot express my love to my parents anymore. I want my life back.

Hooked

Dear Wean- off, Admitting to the problem is the first step and most important step in dealing with it, so congratulations on overcoming the first big hurdle. You also need to enlist your family’s help for this. Tell them that you want to actively stop your dependence on the internet and need all the help you can. You inevitably need to use the internet if you are a student or working somewhere, so try and limit your interaction by timing yourself, allotting say 30 minutes, before logging off. Decide that you will take frequent breaks from the internet and do it. Also stop playing games online.

Set entire days — on the weekend — where you put all your devices, including your phone away. When you do this, find something else to do. Decide that you will help around the house, pursue a hobby, call people on your phone (instead of texting them!) and make plans to meet. It may seems weird in the beginning, but know that by doing this you are helping yourself. Also try and get out as often as possible, ideally somewhere close to nature, but even if it is a mall, at least you are not stuck to a device.

Auntie will not reply privately to any query. Please send concise queries to:auntieagni@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 26th, 2015

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