I am not what you’d expect me to be. Perhaps that is obvious given the trajectory of my life. Many people living out their ordinary lives, bound to their native parts, are in fact what you’d expect them to be. The normal people, or “normies,” as I call them, accept dogmatic principles and reach for attainable goals. They are the ones who graduate from prep schools in New Hampshire and become lawyers in New England. They send holiday cards every Christmas and shop L.L Bean catalogs. Or maybe they were born in a small fishing village in Pulau Ketang, Malaysia, and grew up to become fishermen on the same shores their families have worked for generations. They think in prawns and crabs. There’s nothing wrong with that. I used to envy that. I envied the normies because, for them, life seemed so simple.
Of course, life isn’t really simple for anyone. We all age, grow old and eventually die. We are all defenseless against cancerous growths and broken hearts. I’ve always known that, but when I was younger, my troubles seemed larger than life itself. The pulverizing weight of my life pushed down on me, forcing the air from my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I was fifteen years old. I think that is when my life path took a detour, twisting and crashing down the mountain side.
My Syrian family immigrated to Canada before I was born. My father, Kamal, opened an Arabic sweets store in Toronto. He named it Basboussa after his favorite item, a sweet cake soaked in syrup and rose water. My mother Neyera, stayed home and raised me. My parents were hard working people and did well. They were happy – I tell myself that. I was happy too, daddy’s little girl. My father would come home after closing shop each evening and I would greet him at the door. As soon as it opened, I would tilt my head up, and he would kneel way down, giving me a kiss on the cheek. He spoke to me only in Arabic because he wanted me to learn. We would all have dinner together each night and watch TV. We were almost normies.
Maybe they missed home, maybe they felt alone in Canada, but my family moved back to the Middle East right before my twelfth birthday. First, we went to Damascus, then to Cairo. My father settled down in Egypt and opened another Basboussa with the money he had saved. His store was a success and he opened a second store. My mother let Kamal make the big life decisions. She was a smart, independent and private person. She had figured out life in Canada easily and her English was impressive for a non-native speaker. Moving back to the Middle East for her was a simple decision. As a wife, she was respectful and loyal. She stood behind her man.
I remember my mother loved telling me about her childhood. She told me about the games she played with her siblings in the garden of their villa back in Syria. She laughed as she spoke about the scars she earned climbing trees, and the time she returned home to her mother soaked in mud from head to toe. “The only part of me you could see was my eyes!”
My parents met in school. They met each other’s families and won their quick approval. Kamal and Neyera were both respectively deemed by the other’s camp to be from “good families.” A year later, they were married in the same garden my mother told me stories about.
Kamal and Neyera lived in Damascus for two years before travelling to Canada. My mother would reminisce about those years, “the romantic years,” she called them. My father worked in a sweet shop, and my mother was a secretary for a local merchant. They both wanted children.
There was a miscarriage. I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I don’t know how my mother felt about it; she was private with her emotions in that way. I do know that they tried to have children, but could not for two more years. They moved to Canada. I arrived one year later.
