“You little asshole.”
"Wow, your dad is so cool."
"...yeah." I'd say while looking down at the ground, faking a smile to match their energy. I've heard this many times before, so I learned how to respond each time someone would say it. I'd sit nearby, listening silently to the things he'd say, watching him as he grabbed his stomach from the pain of laughing these deep belly-filled laughs. He'd crack joke after joke, an audience surrounding him, he was the star of the show. He always was. My father appeared to be loved by everyone. To the outside world, he was charming, funny, stoic and people praised him. I admired him, I wished that-that facade that my father would put on was my dad. But it wasn’t. At home, he was a completely different man, and it was rare for me to ever see that side that he portrayed so easily to the outside world.
My dad was pretty hard on us. I think I often tried to justify it as him teaching us how to be able-bodied women. I justified it because he was from the Middle East and women were treated differently over there. I justified it because he had four daughters that were tragically taken from him, and perhaps his mission was to keep us close and to keep us alive. I defended his honor and continued to even after death. But I think the truth was, my father had many demons, and he did not do a good job living with those demons. Those demons got hold of him for the entirety of knowing him, and maybe even the entirety of his life. I know I should say I do not fault him, but I am no longer naive to it, and I do fault him. He had the tools to face those demons, but his pride got the best of him, and he chose not to.
I was brutally scared of my dad. He was always yelling, and always upset. But, at the same time, there were these brief moments of pure happiness, where he would be super playful and adventurous. But those moments were far in between, and those moments almost always ended with my dad calling my little sister “an asshole” or threatening to kill us all, and then “blow his own fucking brains out.” He was the man of the house, and he made it known. If you disagreed with him, it would result in verbal berating and humiliation. You had to obey him, respect him and always be two steps ahead of him if you wanted to stand a chance at getting his approval. And that was our constant mission, trying to get his approval. We’d often fall short, and he knew exactly what to say or do to break you down. But those moments where he did show pride was the high that we were trained to chase. I think we were all too forgiving each time he was ready to laugh, we wanted to believe that each time he smiled, that maybe this time would be different.
Growing up for me was very hard, and I have always kept my childhood close to my chest. I was both ashamed of my home life, but was also told on a daily basis to keep what happened at home private. And so I did. But, there was this constant looming terror and threat hanging over my shoulder. I felt as if I was living in prison and my father was the Warden. He controlled what we wore and how we looked - to the point of him putting my little sister on the Atkins diet, when she gained a little weight as a young child. He would control how we spoke-even to the point that if he mispronounced a word, we were told to say it the same way as him, and we'd be ridiculed if we didn't. For as long as I can remember, we had a strict routine of school and work -no friends allowed outside of school hours and if we ever questioned him, he enjoyed reminding us, “I brought you in this world, so I can take you out.” And that constant threat scared me. He instilled a type of fear in each one of us that is hard to describe. It felt as if each day I wasn’t sure we would make it through, and honestly, most times I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be alive in a world like this. I was so angry and so miserable with the cards that I had been dealt and, for so long, I had so much hate in my heart for being born in such a negative environment.
It was around six in the morning one day, when my little sister and I jumped out of our beds to the sounds of what we thought was a gun going off in the basement. We stood in our bedroom doorway for a moment shaking, holding each other’s hands. My first thought was, “Papa killed Mama”, followed by, “Or maybe he killed himself.” We didn’t need to vocalize what we had just heard, we just knew. We tiptoed down the hall standing at the top of the stairs saying “Should we?” to one another, unsure if we should go down to the basement to where the sound came from. We held our breath, our stomachs in our throats and walked down each step slowly. No one was there, the house was empty, and we never did find out what that sound was.
Now, imagine as a child your first instinctive thought at the sound of a loud bang is, “I think my dad just killed my mom” and your second thought is, “Maybe he just killed himself”. I always had this strange feeling that almost became a learned intuition or maybe an acceptance. I don't know what you'd call it. But I just knew that one of us was going to die suddenly, and I always thought it'd be by the hands of our own father. I just never imagined it would be him to go first.