Mereja Forum

[teodroseIII]

The one central oversight my father made was thinking that we had to attain the “American dream” no matter the cost. This meant graduating from living in an efficiency when we first arrived stateside to renting a basement to renting our own condo to finally owning a home. Every climb up the social ladder led to an increase of labor as he took on more and more jobs trying in vain to keep up with the rent. While he provided materially, he robbed us of his presence. Worse yet, the constant strain and stress of pacing the runaway cost of living took its toll physically and mentally.

He overreached because he was not taken care of as a child. His father murdered shortly after Ethiopia expelled would-be Italian colonizers in the 1940s, his mother gave him away to another family in Harar because she feared losing yet another son to early death. These twin acts of abandonment left a deep imprint in my father’s mind, he grew up feeling neglected and made a covenant with himself that he would never do to his children what was done to him. In an attempt to protect us from the pains he felt growing up, he gave my siblings and I our own sets of traumas...continued..

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