My father was born on December 7, 1944 in Cairo, Egypt. He used to tell me that he had been born on Pearl Harbor Day, but when I was in my sophomore year of high school, I came home one day and told him that they dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor in 1941, not 1944. Each time I would ask him how old he was, he would say "Well, I was born on December 7, 1944..." and then think about it for a while. I used to think he was faking. How could anyone forget how old they are? Was he trying to test my subtraction skills? Nevertheless, it fit in with the dad I knew as someone who liked to forget things.
Because he was forever forgetting the things he was supposed to do
for me. Forgetting to call, forgetting to show up to silly school meetings, forgetting to pick me up. Forgetting where he'd put his keys and me spending fifteen minutes in the morning helping him find them. Forgetting how much money he had in his pocket, which was good for me 'cause I could swipe a little and he wouldn't be any the wiser. I lamented because the forgetting seemed to be genetic: I'd forget my swimsuit at home on swimming day, I'd forget to take back my library books, I'd forget my homework at home, even though I'd done it. Trying to get my dad to remind me wasn't much of a strategy; I couldn't necessarily be sure he'd even wake me up in the morning.
Let's back up. In 1972, my father met an American woman from California who was staying with a friend of his family. My father had been conscripted into the Army, as all Egyptian men were (and continue to be). You could only get an exception if you were the oldest male in your family or the only male; my dad was neither (their brood was 5 boys and 3 girls). He had no health problems. Even though he was technically in the Army, he had a strong relationship with his commanding officer where he could basically do whatever he wanted as long as there wasn't a war on. So he took a few days off to show this young woman around town. She knew no Arabic to speak of and his English was mediocre at the time, so they spoke in French, a language she had learned in college and he in Jesuit grammar school. My father said he wanted to show her the hidden secrets of Cairo. On one day that was memorable for them both, they went deep into a Cairo slum to find the glass-blowers, men who blow hot liquid sand into colored bottles and bowl. There, among the dirt and grime and raw sewage and garbage, was the glittering glass art coming out of the mouths of mysterious craftsmen. Their shared wonder at what they saw was the first moment my dad reported that he thought he was falling in love.
She left town, and they wrote each other letters, hers in a teacher's neat cursive and his a whimsical mass of delicate flourishes. Each letter was more earnest than the next, more pulsating with undercurrents of romantic feeling. Nothing was made explicit. That would be improper.
The following summer, she returned to Cairo for a longer visit. And in the late summer, he proposed to her in the
Andalusian Gardens and she said yes. But they couldn't get married right away--she had to go back to Provo, Utah for another school year. And on October 6, 1973, Egypt attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. My father's days of lollygagging around and doing side jobs while ostensibly being in the army were over. He was trained as an artist, and for the past several years his army duties had mostly involved making maps and models of Israeli tanks and weapons so commanders could teach the conscripts how to recognize them. Not so now--they sent him out into the desert.
And of course, in accordance with law, he wasn't the only boy in the family who was called to serve the Egyptian government. Only one other out of the five of them served; one got the "oldest" exception, and two others had epilepsy and asthma, respectively, that exempted them from service.
When the six days of the October surprise were over, my dad's brother didn't come home. In fact, the brother never came home. His death left his wife and infant daughter and his whole huge expectant family waiting. They never found his body, or any confirmation of his death, and everyone's lives were put on hold. Meanwhile, my father was trying to plan a wedding, and the family fought. According to custom, there is a mourning period during which you can't do anything like have a big festive celebration. But how would they know when the mourning period was over? They didn't even know when he had died. And there were other objections, too. The young woman my father had asked to marry him had already, at the tender age of 27, had a bout with skin cancer. One brother advised him to find someone healthier.
The concerns turned out not to be so far-fetched. The wedding went ahead in September of 1974, and fifteen years and three children later, she died. My mother was an extraordinarily strong woman who tens of doctors agreed should have been dead by 1985, but she held on. But this story isn't about her—it's about my father.
On July 2, 1989, mourning the death of his beloved wife, my father packed up his three children and left the house in Utah where they had all been staying, where my mother fought the last siege in her battle against bone cancer. He took them back to Cairo, back to the warmth of his big family, back to their carefully-furnished apartment in a tree-lined suburb they had bought the year I was born. While they had been gone trying to save my mother in the hospitals of central Utah, another of my father's brothers, the one with epilepsy, had died. The family was in mourning, again.
I don't want to fall into the trap of overpraising my father for doing what millions of women do every day, that is: raising his children alone. But it's important to remember that was he was doing was strongly culturally contraindicated. I understood that only years later when my best friend's mother died, and her father spent the rest of her teenage years foisting her off on female family members who shouldered the burden of raising her. I saw other widowers who got immediately remarried and then went back to being cheerfully absent from their kids' lives.
My dad did neither. In fact, seventeen years later, he
still hasn't remarried. I'm still holding out hope that he might, although given that he's not much of a dater, I don't know if it's really in the cards. So he raised us totally alone--there was never a girlfriend, there was never a nanny, there was never any substantial amount of help from his sisters or mother. We wanted our father, and we would accept no substitutes.
And he parented graciously. Now that I've been exposed to other people's families and the rest of the world, I'm shocked at how cooperative our house was. He is an extraordinarily sweet man, full of love, and we were, and still are, in a sense, very close. Even though we never talk on the phone, live seven thousand miles apart, and only email maybe once a month. I've got more in common with my dad than most people have with their parents—we're both highly idealistic dreamers who are deeply ambitious and enthusiastic about art and changing the world.
Growing up, I had to learn to be remarkably independent. My dad would cook for me most nights, and he would make sure I went to school and give me money, and ground me if I wasn't home by curfew, but that constituted the tabs he kept on me. He didn't buy me clothes, or call my teachers, or enroll me in summer programs. When I didn't have any clean clothes left, he reminded me how to use the washing machine. When I wanted to take a trip to visit my relatives in the US the summer after my sixth grade year, he told me to call travel agents and check around for prices. Looking back, I'm still kind of shocked that they let an eleven-year-old make a reservation on an intercontinental flight. He would entrust me with large sums of money. He would let me proofread and edit products he put out as part of his graphic design business when it became clear that my English skills had surpassed his (circa age 12). He would always, when I asked for advice, ask me "what do
you think you should do?" When I squirmed and pleaded for guidance, he would say "no, you're going to figure this out. I'll help you—let's make a pros-and-cons list."
But though I had to do almost everything myself but cook meals and make my own money, my dad was far from an absent father. We spent tons of time together. On school nights, we would sometimes stay up until two or three in the morning, talking. He would tell me stories about his childhood, or the story of how he met my mother, relayed (in part) here. Or we would talk about what I wanted to do with my life. He would tell me what he knew about history, and, in those days before the Internet, we would look things up in our giant set of Encyclopedias. He would show me ideas for his latest project, and I would give input. I would talk about my friends, and he would tell me stories of when he and my mother went traveling in Europe. When I got older, we would debate, about religion and politics and feminism.
I left for college three days after my high school graduation. It was not a surprise to me, because I had watched my two older siblings leave home with similar results, but it was still weird that I basically didn't talk to my dad anymore. The first time he called me on the phone after I left home was almost four years later, in 2004. We would email, and visited about once a year, but we were no longer a part of each other's daily (or even weekly) lives.
I have mixed feelings about the way I was raised. One the one hand, it made me tough and independent. Even when I was 18 I handled my whole life; my money, figuring out my education, applying for financial aid, getting jobs, taking trips home. It was easier for me to succeed in college because I was used to being on my own and doing things myself. I'm a problem solver, and I learned how to be one because I had to.
But, on the other hand, it's nice to have people do things for you. When my dad visited just over a year ago, the little things he did made me want to cry--sweeping up the floor of my kitchen, chopping fruit in the morning for breakfast, changing out the laundry, putting out a new decorative plate I'd bought as a centerpiece. I struggle with that every day—the competing desires of wanting to do everything myself and wanting someone, just for a day or two or three, to take care of me.
I grew up so fast, and the trajectory still just hurtles along. I'm handling my own cases, and I feel so much responsibility, and I'm scared I'll fuck up. I'm basically supporting my boyfriend and I. And on a morning like this one, where I look forward to another day of people depending on me, I wish I could call in the Daddy force for a little help. But it's both hard to admit you need help, and crippling to be arrogant enough to sometimes believe that no one
can help.
I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to end this essay--but there's no end, no lesson, nothing pat or pithy. There's only the confusion of how I can know with certainty that there are so many people in the world who love me deeply, and yet feel on most days like I'm in it all alone.
was sent to me by the author, whose girlfriend (very soon to be 
