I have spent many years judging my dadâs performance as a father. I have spent much less time considering what it took for him to keep going, and to give me what he did. He knows Iâm writing about him, and about the things that went wrong and the places where we both fell short. Opening up in the way that he has a radical act of generosity.
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He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeenâs face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.
âGood girl,â heâd whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughtersâ eyes.
Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.
The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really makeâthe second and third times aroundâwhich comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on âknowing.
Word got out and what people said was that Dad had been a person of such saintly character that his body had to remain uncorrupted. I was just a kid when he died and nearly my whole life Iâve been hearing everyone say what a good person he was. But to see him emerge that day shifted my thinking. It was as if his early death had been a metaphysical error. It was as if his body was refusing the fate that befell him, as if this whole time he had been awaiting a fairer judgment.
I think that my parents would like me to know how they contributed to our freedom. My professional skill and proximity to the primary sources should make telling their story an achievable task. But all my elders were trained in forgetting. Some of this was struggle discipline. Some of it was survival. And then there is the passage of time, decades in which some memories were lost entirely and others faded to the point that they can barely be seen.
But from where I stood, it didnât seem that my dad really enjoyed having me around. Like most children, I assumed the behaviour of the adults in my life was motivated by how they felt about me, rather than their own despair or distress. I know now that the pain of the breakdown of the family he had made sat on top of the wound of being torn from the family of his birth. And to that the brutal aloneness of exile, and it all felt unbearable.