I am a Carpenter Daughter

I am a Carpenter Daughter

Comfort and warm in my father's back, a time that I always remind and almost two and half years that I didn't make again.

Rough hand and feet that I need to massage every night and making him a cup of coffee that I idle to do.

Memoirs of my father and I has been my treasure to keep until my entire life and to share to the people that cherished to me. From a family of a farmer, doing farming that he hated to do, he chose to be a driver and then traveled to manila and he became a furniture carpenter that he's uncle supposedly taught him. At my age of five my father always brought me and my older brother to his work shop that I always like, but mostly he brought me. The days that started the string that bonded for both of us were didn’t break even he work in Riyadh Saudi

Arabia

. When I saw that his turning his back toward the departure area of the airport I didn’t cry.  I communicate to him thru letters, we don’t have phone that time. I’m seven and I terribly miss him, a fiesta that we’re going to a carnival, riding in caterpillar and horror train, playing coins game and watching trick shows. For straight four years I didn’t saw him.  Big surprised when I’m playing outside an airport taxi parking near in our area and my neighbor shouting on me and tell it is your father. I ran towards him even he didn’t saw me I hug him very tight on his back and I tell “Papa”. 

He always tells me a story, during his years in

Riyadh

that I’m the only one who listened to him.  Even I’m growing up, he always treating me as his little girl and until college he still beating me by a hanger if I’m don’t like to eat. A story when I’m young that he taught that I will die because I was born when I’m seven months and very small. One day he got angry with me, and told “you have a very high principle in life, what will happen when you become educated?” I did not reply I keep in my mind the answers.

We shared the happiness and bitterness, this sourness teaches me how to plan my own destiny. I saw how much he suffered when we are sick. His children are most important to him than his work. I saw on his face the tiredness and his small eyes becoming blurred. I cannot see him in despair and it’s my turn to let him feel the comfort that he didn’t experience even before. 

My father was a carpenter and my brother and I was his great master pieces from his tree, which he cut in to pieces and nailed to became well-built through years. The loved that he gave to us was not enough to be paid even a thousand money or expensive things. Loved is to be paid by love, and he know how much I gave this to him, not he sip my nose when  I am a baby because I cannot breathed or chewed the peanuts and feed me.

I am proud to be a carpenter daughter, without him I will not be what I am now. I even didn’t tell to him these four words “I Love You Papa!”