Sheila Sim opens up about relationship with father and took 10 years to accept step-mum

Singapore — Prior to joining the local showbiz scene, Sheila Sim established her modelling career by working in fashion capitals like Hong Kong, Tokyo, Milan and Paris.

The 37-year-old opened up on her family background and modelling experiences as a guest on the latest episode of Quan Yi Fong’s talk show, Hear U Out. 

The discussion included how Sheila Sim’s relationship with her father has developed over the years. After her elder brother died of leukaemia, Sim’s parents divorced when she was twelve and she went to live with her father.

Sheila Sim shared that major problems happened between them as she is closer to her mother and distant from her father who was often not at home. An awkward incident happened when Sim had her first period. She felt embarrassed about the idea of buying sanitary pads. “I didn’t dare to buy it on my own and didn’t dare to tell my father,” she said, adding that she didn’t know what to do.

She decided to tell her father, who also was not sure of what to do, as reported by Mothership.sg. Sim said that her father eventually went to buy sanitary pads for her and acknowledged that he really dotes on her. In the beginning, the parent-child relationship was poor but they managed to develop a good relationship, later on, shared Sim. “He’s a softie at heart but he expresses himself by shouting,” the model said.

At first, Sim found it awkward living with her father as they struggled to find topics to talk about which she believed her father had also noticed. The model realised that her father may have been under a lot of pressure at that time as he had to fulfil the roles of both the father and mother while doing shift work at a hotel and was concerned about leaving Sim alone at home. Nevertheless her father noticed that both of them tend to chat during their walks to eat out and decided to use that as a way to bridge the gap between them.

“Since then, we’d take long walks whenever we ate out. We’d walk for an hour,” she added, “That’s how we started improving our relationship with each other.”

If you’re wondering how a girl who was undergoing puberty at that time could be so co-operative, she wasn’t.

“I didn’t have a choice, we had to eat. He would say, ‘Come on, let’s go for dinner,'” Sim explained how she protested against this arrangement by asking why can’t they take a bus, which would trigger another argument.

However, his insistence that she go on these walks with him and his deliberate choice to pick eateries that were far in order to improve communication with his daughter paid off.

“It was only much later that I understood his intentions,” Sim said.

Since her parents’ divorce, they both have remarried. Sim revealed that she was very angry for a long time when her father first started seeing his girlfriend. Besides disliking the sudden arrival of a stranger when it had always just been the two of them, Sim had even retorted, “I will not call her ‘Mum’!” in classic soap drama style.

Sim said that her father’s then-girlfriend was living abroad and her father was also not in Singapore very often. She was tolerant of the circumstances as she did not have to see her. Nevertheless, when her father came home or if his partner came to visit, the father and daughter will quarrel. Their quarrels worsened when his partner officially moved to Singapore.

Sim accepted that she was very selfish then and was convinced that he should not remarry since his first marriage had failed.

It took Sim a decade to finally accept her stepmother, after being persistently skeptical of her intentions.

Ultimately, Sim was moved by her step-mum’s sincerity, when she noticed that the latter was constantly supporting and taking care of her father./TISG