How to: Learn Stories About Your Parents’ Past that Never Came Up

A Comprehensive guide 

By Tala Alfoqaha

Step one: Linger after dinner, waiting until your mom begins to brew the tea that will carry her through the evening, until your dad begins to browse through Netflix to choose a movie to play and not watch.

Step two: Complain about the inconvenience of a global pandemic on your semester plans. Quietly sit through your parents’ subsequent lecture about being grateful that your college experience was halted by a precautionary quarantine instead of a military invasion, like their final year was. They’re right, but you’ve heard this story before.

Step three: Wait. There’s no rhyme or reason to when they begin to tell you parts of their adolescence that have been absent from the glimpses of their earlier life. Their twenties have always seemed less dynamic than yours, less real, confined to blurry pictures in old boxes and invoked only for moral commentary about your own choices. 

Step four: You always knew that your parents came to the US as newlyweds with no ties to the country beyond a student visa and a vision of a different life. Yet eventually, they tell you about Otis, the 83 year old man with whom they shared their first flat. Your mother spoke little English at the time. Otis had a son who worked at Microsoft yet never bothered to call. When your father was at school, your mother went on strolls with Otis. When your father came home, they all ate meals together.

Step five: Eventually, your mom tells you about the children that she homeschooled in Arabic in her early days in the US. The cheese pastries that you love? She learned from the mother of those children.

Step six: You ask more questions about Otis. Your parents smile as they recall his 74 year-old girlfriend, Wanda, who went dancing with him each Saturday. Was he still alive? Did they keep in contact after they moved away? Your dad will say that he visited him often afterwards, that they emailed and talked over the phone, that Otis told your parents that he felt that they cared about him more than his own son. You learn that Otis tried to leave his inheritance to your parents, yet your father refused his offer. Otis passed away shortly after. 

Step nine: Add those pieces to the mosaic of your parents’ life before you--a life that seems a little more real than before.