irish.lemon

it’s not often that i reflect on my family. family has become just another means by which i explain my shortcomings, since it’s always seemed that i’ve inherited all the undesirable traits of my forebears. i have a volatile combination of my father’s irish rage and my grandmother’s callous austrian demeanor when i’ve been crossed. i’m told i’m nothing like my mother…that hurts the most. honestly, i don’t want to be like my dad’s family, but i have most of their traits combined with my grandmother’s organizational anal-retentiveness. trust me, germanic peoples are structured beings. i’ve seen it and lived it within my academic and occupational areas, exclusively.

but i have a problem with all of this ethno-characterization. i’m expected to honor my irish and austrian heritage, which ultimately duke it out in the roman catholic arena of my upbringing as well. but my bloodline doesn’t stop there. i’m 50% irish, but i’m only 25% austrian. guess i forgot to mention i’ve never known my fraternal grandfather on my mom’s side. guess i also forgot to mention he was lebanese…and muslim. yep, i’m 25% lebanese. what’s more, is this comes as a complete shock to anyone i mention this apparent anomaly to.

this is my grandfather, khalil. obviously, i won’t post his full name for the sake that i think he’s still alive. he lived in beirut for years after my mom and grandma fled to the US and presumably moved around the middle east – he was an oil engineer. rumor has it, he was killed in a bombing in algiers. i don’t think he’s dead. i can’t prove it, but i can’t disprove it either. i remember growing up knowing literally nothing about him. my grandma has refused my attempts to know him through her since i found out many years ago her current husband isn’t my fraternal grandfather. don’t get me wrong, i love him and he’s the only grandfather i’ve ever known on my mom’s side, but even when i was little, i knew i wasn’t italian. my mom always played off being italian. she has very dark, kinky hair and olive skin. i’m pale as a ghost and have red hair. however, she’s the spitting image of him and i have more of his physical traits than i thought.

fast forward at least a good ten years to my first year at depaul. from the start, i met two kids at our “premiere” that were of lebanese lineage. ali is the one i’ll remember the most. even though i shared a meager common ethnicity with them, i knew nothing of it let alone the customs shared. they asked me, how the hell could i go around telling people i was of lebanese heritage and know nothing about it. the situation was too complicated to explain to them at the time and i eventually lost touch; something i regret to this day. i couldn’t find a way to tell them that i wanted to find out about myself through them. considering i looked nothing like them and had the “whitest” name possible, it was tough not only relating to them, but also talking to them after a while. fast forward another three years and here we are. my mom and dad divorced and i’m able to actually attempt to explore my middle-eastern lineage. however, i’m no stranger to “islamophobia” that currently has a grip on the US. my mom endured over twenty years of prejudice from my father who ultimately forbade me from recognizing the heritage i shared with my mom. if he knew i had a tattoo on my arm of my grandfather’s name in arabic, he’d disown me in a second…or at least stop paying half of my college tuition.

i guess my ultimate goal right now is to learn at least a little arabic and, hopefully, travel to beirut before i’m out of college. what’s the difference? i learned german and some gaelic…i see no reason not to know arabic. i’ve always gone against the grain in terms of intellectualism. i get that from my “mother’s father” as my grandma so begrudgingly puts it when i challenge her socio-political beliefs. ironically, neither me nor my mom got any math skills…his “fault” too, which makes no sense considering he was an engineer.

dead or not, i’d like to know him first-hand. i hope he’s still alive, and if he is, that he’d want to meet me, and my mom again. i guess the moral to my story is that you can be desensitized to heritage or ethnicity. i look predominantly irish – as rightfully so – therefore i fit that niche. i could easily pass off my austrian heritage as well, removed only by name through marriage. but the lebanese is so subdued no one would ever assume otherwise. i lived my entire life with the same identity crisis my mother endured…the difference is that i’ll find out eventually.