Inherited Light

The Eyes We Give Our Children

“Ba-ba” is among the first sounds many of us ever make.

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

What is the earliest memory you have of your father?

As I ask you that question, I find myself searching for an answer too.

I consider myself one of the lucky children who grew up with many memories of her father. Perhaps because childhood is where most of those memories are made. By the time a man learns how to be a father — how to be calmer, wiser, more patient — his child is often already growing into someone with a story of their own.

A child does not wait for a parent to become ready.

Life arrives with a pacifier in its mouth, tears on its cheeks, and tiny fingers wrapped around yours, demanding a place in the center of your world.

While fathers grow, heal, mature, and learn, children move on. They step into adolescence and begin writing their own stories. Once those pages are filled, a father standing there with an eraser in his hand can no longer rewrite them. He cannot recover missed opportunities or add memories to chapters that have already been lived.

Perhaps that is why the influence of our parents runs so deep.

Every child enters the world carrying an invisible backpack. Over the years, that backpack fills with what their family places inside it. For some, it contains life jackets to reach for when the waters get rough. For others, it carries stones that make every journey heavier.

My earliest memories of my father are filled with warmth and laughter.

He was never a wealthy man. Our family lived somewhere between comfort and uncertainty, with occasional falls that felt steeper than we expected. Throughout my childhood, I watched him work as a factory laborer, a produce vendor, a market seller, and eventually a driver. Because he often took us with him, I carry memories of nearly every job he ever had.

When my sister and I were four or five years old, we would wait impatiently for him to come home from work.

And I still remember what happened every evening when the door opened.

He would spread his arms wide.

Before he sat down, before he rested, before he thought about his own exhaustion, he would gather us into a hug. Then came the games — lifting us into the air, tickling us, spinning us around until we laughed so hard we could barely breathe.

My mother was often tired. Life was not always easy. There were disagreements, worries, disappointments, and struggles that I only came to understand years later.

But as a child, those things felt like distant background music.

Whatever else was happening in the world, my father always came through that door with open arms.

For me, that was enough.

Weekends rarely stayed indoors. My father was a man who felt most alive under an open sky. Mountains called to him. Trails called to him. Family picnics turned into gatherings filled with cousins, laughter, and stories.

Even when he spent time with his friends, he often brought me along.

Looking back, I realize he gave me something far more valuable than entertainment.

He gave me freedom.

He taught me that happiness could be found in simple things: stepping into a cold stream, throwing a snowball made from the season’s first snow, wandering down an unfamiliar path just to see where it led.

He lived with fewer fears than most people I know.

Not recklessly, but openly.

As if joy itself were something worth chasing.

Was he perfect?

Of course not.

Every member of our family would probably tell a slightly different story about him. There were moments when he got angry. Moments when disappointment darkened his face.

I remember those moments too.

But they were rare enough that they never became the lens through which I saw him.

Years later, I came across a line from Marcel Proust:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

You can show someone new landscapes later in life.

You can offer opportunities, gifts, experiences, and second chances.

But you cannot give them a second childhood.

And because of that, you cannot completely replace the eyes through which they first learned to see the world.

By the time we are adults, those eyes have already been shaped — by joy or anxiety, by safety or fear, by warmth or distance.

Today, I am the mother of two daughters.

I witnessed their first steps. I ran beside their first bicycle rides. The gifts my father unknowingly gave me became my guide as I learned how to raise them.

I may not take them across mountains and valleys the way he once did with me, but I am still searching for ways to be happy with them, not merely for them.

Because perhaps that is what children remember most.

Not the expensive gifts.

Not the perfect vacations.

Not the things we buy.

But the feeling of being welcomed.

The feeling of being seen.

The feeling of belonging.

And maybe, years from now, when my daughters return to their earliest memories, they will find our smiling faces there.

Perhaps they will discover that we were quietly living inside the eyes through which they learned to see the world.

Copyright © 2026 Zeliha Türk. All Rights Reserved.