Oct 08, 2019
Meeting My Third Family
Briefly, I was part of that mysterious organism, a biological family; no one cared about my virtues or my bad behavior.
Briefly, I was part of that mysterious organism, a biological family; no one cared about my virtues or my bad behavior.
There are times I envy art’s effectiveness in a bilingual context, its ability to transcend language.
I’m coming apart like the first cigarette I ever rolled. Loose, slobbering, and burning too fast.
The story is no longer me and my vehicles but my mother and hers. We called it an accident, but it wasn’t.
A part of me, the part trained to put my father first, thought I should allow him into my home, regardless of his threats.
A new period in my life started when Abu could no longer fast for Ramadan.
Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.
The slight din of the television on TVLand from her room made its way toward the kitchen where Curtis and I sat, trying to figure out how this was all going to go. How everything had changed.
Before I visited the Partition Museum, I had a sense that all the years of self-erasure could be undone if I just heard, watched, read enough. Now I’m beginning to rethink that strategy.
“I realized I had to change or I was going to lose you,” my mother told me. “So I did.”
My father was missing. How could I put him back in the picture?
When my grandfather threatened to kill himself, I began to wonder if, as he sees it, he has effectively stopped living.
When fighting on behalf of the father you love, who do you become?
If cancer and trauma are hereditary, is it not my responsibility to do everything in my power to ensure neither my children nor I have to suffer?
With words, spelled correctly or not, I could say exactly how I felt: like my head was a ball of snakes, like something extraordinary for once.
My family isn’t religious, but we have a saying that we do believe in my grandfather. And an essay he wrote about me reminds me to believe in myself.
There’s a distinct kind of relationship that privileged first-generation children have with their immigrant parents.
“Not thinking about these things doesn’t make them go away. So, instead, I choose to look. It is staring into a dim room and letting my eyes adjust to the dark.”
