Not even half as strong

My cousin always says, “We are not even half as strong as our parents.”

Our parents are people who uprooted their established lives in their homeland, left behind all that they knew and all that they loved, and moved to a country whose language they did not understand, whose people they had never seen before, and whose culture they could not grasp, all because they wanted to give their children the opportunity of growing up and getting educated in America.

Since immigration to America is such a norm, such a dream, it’s hard to see my parents’ decision to move here a sacrifice. But I try to imagine having children, whom I will love more than life itself. I imagine living in a future where America ceases to be the land of opportunity and instead, the title starts belonging to, for example, Germany. Would I have the courage, the strength, the willingness to leave behind the country I call home, where I understand the language, the politics, the culture, the people, the system, and move to Germany where I would have to learn everything from scratch?

I see my dad sometimes, so tired from work, so exhausted, and the sacrifices that are his life just take my breath away. He was almost 46 years old on the fated day the letter came that we had won the lottery to come to America. He had a house, which he had spent years building. A house where he saved and worked for each brick and where he laid and sweated for each layer to come together. It wasn’t a house he had paid money to buy. It was a dream he had physically and emotionally spent his life building. He had a job where he had respect, a job he knew the ins and outs of. He had a circle of friends who loved him and whom he loved. He had brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews all close by who were an integral part of his life. He had the izzat, the respect of the people where he lived. No one disregarded him; no one scoffed at his name; he was someone whose name was said in awe.

But he left all that. But not just left, he burned all the bridges to Pakistan. He sold his house, quit his job, took his money out of the bank, packed everything away—and he moved to a country he knew nothing about. He worked at menial jobs–at dangerous factories, at places that, in Pakistan, would have been beneath him and the education he had.

He couldn’t understand the English they spoke here. His degree, which meant something in Pakistan, was insignificant here. At mid-age, he was starting from scratch. But he didn’t have the luxury of experimenting, of searching, or finding a job that would have suited him. He had 5 other mouths to feed so he took whatever he could get and he stuck with it because he didn’t have the luxury of spending time training or going to school.

Today, I look at him and it’s staggering the amount of pain he has seen in his life. On one fated day when he had a conversation with me about what happened in Saudi Arabia when my mom died during a Stampede that took place during Hajj of 1994, it really hit home that I will never be half as strong as he is. He spent days searching hospital after hospital, dead body after dead body, looking for her. He was, again, in a country where he knew no one, where chaos was the name of the game during Hajj season, and he had to bury his wife and the mother of his two children.

He has been the father to a cerebral palsy’ed daughter. He has watched other people have healthy, perfectly normal children, but still loved his daughter more than the world. He grew up in a country where no one would have faulted him had he scoffed at the fact that his first two children were girls. But to my knowledge, he has done his best to not let there be any differentiation between men and women. He always, always wanted me to be a doctor. Big dreams–dreams that were never mine since medicine is not my thing—but dreams that many fathers were not dreaming for their daughters. He isn’t “liberal”–but he was liberal enough to let me go to school all the way in Boston—A 7 hour flight away from California. I’m not saying it didn’t take fights to win the battle to go to school so far away. But in the end, he let me go. And he let me go happily. It’s not something many men in my family would have done. But he did.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in the faults of our parents, that we fail to see that they literally live their lives for us. My dad, for how hard he works, never buys anything for himself. He maaaaay buy a new pair of sandals when his old ones start ripping from the seams. But that’s where it ends. If I ask him for 20 dollars, he’ll hand me a 100, even when it takes him hours to earn that much. He won’t buy anything for himself, but the second his sister or his nephews, or anyone else needs anything, he’ll send more than they asked over.

Whenever I think of the person I’m going to marry, I always pray that he doesn’t have my dad’s anger. In fact, I pray that in terms of anger, he is the complete opposite of my dad–that he is someone who never gets angry and is always calm and anger isn’t a word in his vocabulary. But then, in terms of everything else, I hope he is everything that my father is…but I don’t think anyone like him quite exists. Someone so selfless, so caring, so hardworking, so loving—they don’t make men like that anymore.

However much way I twist it, my cousin is right. I’m not even remotely near half as strong as my parents.

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