askdrannak: unasked for parenting advice for those who love.
First of all, I want to thank Ray andMary Chin for becoming my first yearly subscribers. This is exciting for me and an encoruagement ot keep going. My thnak yous ot you both. Also thank you to Judy Higgins, who also is a paid subscriber and who is also a writer. Thank you all. I am planning to have a book out on Amazon shortly so please keep an eye out for my new adventures in writing. Now on to today’s article.
A Matter of Perspective
It always fascinates me to see how two people can have the same experience but from very different perspectives. I recently met two women about my age who grew up near my hometown in Pennsylvania. They both spoke of how much they loved it there. When I shared my own, darker experience of living there – they were both shocked.
I went to school in the 1950s and graduated in the early 1960s. It was a time of McCarthyism and a time when foreigners feared their neighbors. I remember sitting in my third-grade classroom while the teacher told us how Americans were superior to everyone else on Earth. She spoke of how we were intellectually and morally superior in every way. So, I raised my hand, smart little thing that I was, and asked, “My parents were born in Lebanon and I was born here. Does that mean I am superior to my parents?” I wish I could report she gave an answer that was different – but no. She said, “Yes. You are superior to your parents.” When I later told my mother, "The teacher said I am superior to you and Daddy," she was not impressed. She basically said, “Just like an American… What else can you expect from them?”
She had little respect for Americans. She often repeated how, when she was asked to speak to a group of people about Lebanon, the first question that was asked was whether the people ate with their hands or used utensils. The Lebanese are a proud people, and Lebanon was, at one time, known as the “Paris of the Middle East.’ A very small but incredibly proud country.
My parents were afraid of this country, dubbed the land of freedom, the land of opportunity. But for them, and especially my mother, it was anything but. Leaving your homeland, your family, knowing you may never see any of them again, has to be one of the hardest things in the world to do. My mother never recovered. My father, as he tried to explain to me, had his work. He was in contact with the outside world, and my mother stayed at home and had only her home and her children. She isolated herself within a community of church and people who spoke only Arabic. I learned the language out of self-defense. I knew, as a child, that when adults spoke Arabic, I needed to understand, and I did, far more than I could speak. It wasn’t until years later that I came to understand that my mother had been sent to boarding school at age seven, where she was only allowed to speak French, so she had limited understanding for reading and writing Arabic.
As I sit here writing, I wonder why I am writing this piece about immigration. After all, this was well over 50 years ago now. But then, I realize little has changed. I carry within me the feelings of my mother and my father – the homesickness, the longing for what they lost and a realization of what they feared would never be regained. Even though I was born here, a part of me always lived in the dream land of the Lebanon my mother left. She was very angry and under that anger was sadness. My memories of her are primarily of her sitting on the couch staring out at the rain and crying, crying, crying for what she did not have and felt she lost. By doing this, she became the victim of her past and never came to love what she had in the present: her children and her husband.
I write this to ask that the next time you see immigrants, think of where they are and what they must be feeling. If a mother places her four-year-old on the top of a train in the hopes the child will travel safely to America, she does it in mortal fear for the safety of the child. They go in the hopes of creating a better future. What if they stayed, and we all said, "ENOUGH! Let's allow you to create your future here and now."
In a very real way, this is the same for all adults. If we want our children to be healthy and to live their magic, it is important we say, "ENOUGH! I will live my present. I embrace my past with compassion and love. I know there is much that I did not like, but I will no longer remain the victim to this past. AND I will not make my children the victims of my past. I will create, with them and for them, a place where they are able to run and fly. I will join them in their world, and together we will create a world where we are all safe."