Detachment

There is no solid memory in my mind of my parents' relationship. I was a year old when they finally married, and it was a year later that they were filing for divorce. I do remember the weekend that we left him, the plane ride back to the U.S. with my mother sobbing over the Atlantic ocean as I cuddled with a new stuffed animal that I had come to adore. To cheer her, I would repeatedly hand her my companion and try to get her to hug him, but she would only sob harder. It is one of my earliest memories. Only when I was older did I realize that the bottom of one foot was marked "With love, Nora." She was the woman my father had been having an affair with, the woman who was pregnant with his son, the one who would marry my father exactly a month after the divorce would be finalized.

My father and Nora felt like a solid family to me. She was from a Middle Eastern family with deep-rooted family values and exotic traditions. I spent most of my very early years with them, and even came to call her Mom. While her family followed the tradition Arabic tradition by gushing over my baby brother, Nora never let me feel set aside. I never felt less important than my brother, and I never felt as though her love for us was different. It wasn't. Even when I did wrong, she never yelled at me, but instead took an intellectual approach. She was somewhat of a feminist, though she still took great pride in her culture. Our house was always filled with the smells of fresh tabouli and baklava, made for us with love. We spoke fluent Arabic, a language the kids around me couldn't understand, and it made me feel as though we had our own secret family language for just us. We were our own unit, a happy home, and I was loved.

Shortly after I started school, my cozy home was torn apart. Abruptly, my father was taking me back to my mother, saying only that his job had decided to send him back to Europe and that it would be better if I was with my mother during this time. It was not long afterward that he and Nora divorced, and I would only see him two more times before I was an adult, each just briefly. It was obvious when I returned to her that my mother resented what Nora had done--I had left a Cherokee daughter and returned an Arab child. Or that was what I believed the issue to be. It's amazing how children relate small issues like that.

In reality, Nora and my father had been trying to win custody of me, and my father had tried to convince my mother to let Nora adopt me. It wasn't sensitive of him, but in his young mind, it was the right thing to do. The fact that my mother had given birth to a second child, only to have a court remove him permanently from her, only validated my father's point. The problem was that, at some point during their marriage, my father had secretly become a violent alcoholic. The person who had been my safe haven from a negligent, mentally unstable addict had himself become an abusive addict. It was at that time that I began to understand that the only stability I had in this life was me. It's a heavy cross for a six year old to carry.