My eldest daughter still talks about something that happened when she was 4 or 5 years old..
I had gotten angry at her..
I don't usually raise my voice, so when I did,
she got so startled that she wet her pants..
And she still brings it up to this day..
That her father got angry at her..
After that..
As far as I can remember, I never got angry at her again..
I dislike getting angry to begin with,
and I mostly resolve things through conversation..
On top of that, my eldest was such an easygoing child that there was rarely anything to get angry about..
About three years ago..
She was going through a lot of hormonal changes at the time
and my eldest daughter was getting very irritable..
She wouldn't answer when spoken to..
and just kept being moody..
I thought, if I just leave her alone, she'll come around when the time is right..
So when I got home, I deliberately wouldn't talk to her..and avoided making eye contact..
After about 3 days of that..
Young as she still was,
the man she had known her whole life was acting completely different from usual..
And doing it for 3 days straight on top of that,
she ended up coming to me on her own..
She smiled and spoke to me first..
From that point on, things went back to normal..
After that..
my eldest's irritability decreased enormously,
and we started talking as often as we used to..
A few days ago, my eldest suddenly brought up that story..
She mentioned the time she wet her pants as a little kid,
so I told her I had never gotten angry at her even once since then..
Well, you know what..
She brought up those 3 days I didn't talk to her..
And then she said..
'Dad.. I was so scared back then..'
I hadn't even gotten angry..
Just not talking and avoiding eye contact
must have felt like an enormous fear to her..
Hearing what she said and thinking back on it,
I realize she really might have been terrified..
You know what they say..
The opposite of love is not hatred,
but indifference..
