My mom always kept a quart of Ben and Jerry’s in the garage for when we needed to hide out.
Our first house was really more of a chessboard than a home. Two Queens: each ruled their own territory, and the rest of us - four uncles, one cousin, my brother, my dad, and me - we were pawns on the table. My mom ruled the second floor from behind a desk teeming with stacks of quitclaim deeds and country music CDs. The dark office smelled like Grand Marnier and printer ink, a combination I came to recognize as solace. Even now, it is where I go in the evenings to sit, talk, and decompress.
The first floor was an entirely different country. To this day I know there’s nothing more deep-seated than the tenacity of a Syrian Grandmother. Tata’s rein covered the kitchen, living room, dining room, and her five sons. Fighting …show more content…
I admired her grit, the resilience of a woman who’d lost her homeland and was thus determined to establish her place in my life.
It’s not that my dad wasn’t part of the picture, rather he was pulled in opposite directions by the two women he loved. We simply weren’t your Norman Rockwell-painting nuclear family. Syrian life centered around the extended family, and Bader family life centered around an unspoken and unacknowledged conflict - more than just of two women, but of two very different sets of cultural expectations.
To my mother, my grandmother was the woman who raised her children while she worked, usurping her place in the family. My mother was terrified, so she took me with her wherever she could. On the weekends, I’d pull records-books at every county courthouse in the volunteer state. And on the days when work was long and demanding, when everyone was calling her name, when we couldn’t get away, mom and I would slip into the garage, shut out the lights, and open up the ice
Our first house was really more of a chessboard than a home. Two Queens: each ruled their own territory, and the rest of us - four uncles, one cousin, my brother, my dad, and me - we were pawns on the table. My mom ruled the second floor from behind a desk teeming with stacks of quitclaim deeds and country music CDs. The dark office smelled like Grand Marnier and printer ink, a combination I came to recognize as solace. Even now, it is where I go in the evenings to sit, talk, and decompress.
The first floor was an entirely different country. To this day I know there’s nothing more deep-seated than the tenacity of a Syrian Grandmother. Tata’s rein covered the kitchen, living room, dining room, and her five sons. Fighting …show more content…
I admired her grit, the resilience of a woman who’d lost her homeland and was thus determined to establish her place in my life.
It’s not that my dad wasn’t part of the picture, rather he was pulled in opposite directions by the two women he loved. We simply weren’t your Norman Rockwell-painting nuclear family. Syrian life centered around the extended family, and Bader family life centered around an unspoken and unacknowledged conflict - more than just of two women, but of two very different sets of cultural expectations.
To my mother, my grandmother was the woman who raised her children while she worked, usurping her place in the family. My mother was terrified, so she took me with her wherever she could. On the weekends, I’d pull records-books at every county courthouse in the volunteer state. And on the days when work was long and demanding, when everyone was calling her name, when we couldn’t get away, mom and I would slip into the garage, shut out the lights, and open up the ice