The (mis)adventures of Super-S

Do not be fooled by the title of this entry.

The past couple weeks have been a bit difficult with essay deadlines and friends wanting to see me piled up on top of the concern for my father. I thought that the thing that would help my parents get through this time the most was knowing that we’re all doing okay. That my sister is still going to work. That my brother is doing alright. That I’m getting my stuff done. But in an effort to finish my essays, and finish them well, I hardly spent any time with my parents, and now they’re leaving for the US in the morning so that my father can undergo surgery. I do not know when I will see them again. I’ll have gone back to Belfast by the time they get back, and though they’ve been mulling over stopping by to see me on the way back, I don’t know that it’s going to happen. We’ll see.

An old schoolmate who I recently got back in touch with (thanks to the magic of Facebook, of course), and who I have even more recently fallen out of touch with because I got the distinct feeling that he wanted to be more than friends and was being pretty underhanded about me and SuperM once told me, “Make peace with your father. I did, and I’m so glad.”

At the time he was referring to how he gave up the woman he loved because it was killing his father to know that his son was with a non-Muslim girl. A while after that incident, his father had a cancer scare and it scared this old schoolmate into realizing that he was glad he was his father’s son. He thinks (and he’s not wrong in thinking this) that I’m in a similar situation. That I’m with a guy who my father won’t approve of, and it will break his heart and mine to do this to him. To do this to both my parents. So he was advising me to make my peace, to choose my father and his wishes for me over my own desires. And I was appalled at his suggestion that my relationship with my father was not as good as it can be.
The thing is, I think I am at peace with my father. Never in my life has our relationship been better. Time was when we couldn’t have a civil conversation with one another. Now, my father — who is, like many men of his generation, a man of few words — can spend hours talking to me on Skype.

As more people found out about my father’s illness and the fact that he’d be leaving soon to have the tumor removed, the more the calls and the well wishes began pouring in. There was this incredible outpouring of praise and love for my father and my mother. So many people said, “God won’t let anything bad happen to them, because they have been so good to people all their lives.”

And it’s true. As much as my parents frustrate and anger me sometimes, and despite the very bad traits I inherited from them (my mother’s anxiety, my father’s occasional insensitivity) they have always been good to people. Their home has always been a refuge for other people. They have put a few of my cousins through college. They have taken the best care of their own parents. And they have always done all this with grace and sensitivity and simply out of the goodness of their hearts.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. I’m miserable because I didn’t get to spend enough time with them this vacation, but I know my father’s going to be fine and my mother’s going to be strong for him, for all of us. But I can’t help wishing that I’d made peace with myself sooner. I’m wishing it wasn’t hitting me just now how much I’m going to miss them when they’re gone.