While I try to stay away from reflecting on very personal issues in such a public way, I decided that perhaps blogging about what I'm currently experiencing will help me cope and maybe even help others who are probably going through similar experiences. Some of you may know that my mother has been living with a rare autoimmune disease named Pemphigus Vulgaris for about 9 years now. While chronic, alhamdulilallah (Arabic for "Thanks to God") with proper treatment from a specialist at Johns Hopkins Medical she has been able to live a semi-normal life relatively painless. Unfortunately recently it has flared back and my mother is suffering.
Coming from a tight-knit Bangladeshi family, my first instinct during a family crisis is to call non-stop and if able, rush to my parents' side. Being in Cairo makes that shwaya (a bit) tricky. Understanding that regardless of my location there is only so much I can do, it's still an unnerving feeling to feel this useless when someone you love more than you love yourself is in such pain. Please don't take this post as a cry for sympathy, I don't intend for this purging to be construed that way. Rather, I feel like this can be a documentation of what it feels like when so many parts of you are torn - as a daughter of hard-working immigrant parents taught that family is always first, I feel alien for not being able to help in this family crisis. But then another part of me knows that as I embark on my adult life and career that will most certainly entail traveling and being far away from my loved ones, this is just the first of many tests of the different parts of my personality and upbringing.
In a similar vein, I found this great New York Times article about "the risk of regret." Using Obama's visit to his ailing grandmother in her last days as a launching pad for the discussion, the article provides comforting words on what it means to juggle sick loved ones in the busy world we live in:
"During a recent lunch, a friend talked with me about how a grueling workload and onerous deadlines were making it difficult for her to visit her mother, who has been struggling with a health problem. But it was also clear to her that her family must come first. 'I don’t want to have regrets,' she told me."
Coming from a tight-knit Bangladeshi family, my first instinct during a family crisis is to call non-stop and if able, rush to my parents' side. Being in Cairo makes that shwaya (a bit) tricky. Understanding that regardless of my location there is only so much I can do, it's still an unnerving feeling to feel this useless when someone you love more than you love yourself is in such pain. Please don't take this post as a cry for sympathy, I don't intend for this purging to be construed that way. Rather, I feel like this can be a documentation of what it feels like when so many parts of you are torn - as a daughter of hard-working immigrant parents taught that family is always first, I feel alien for not being able to help in this family crisis. But then another part of me knows that as I embark on my adult life and career that will most certainly entail traveling and being far away from my loved ones, this is just the first of many tests of the different parts of my personality and upbringing.
In a similar vein, I found this great New York Times article about "the risk of regret." Using Obama's visit to his ailing grandmother in her last days as a launching pad for the discussion, the article provides comforting words on what it means to juggle sick loved ones in the busy world we live in:
"During a recent lunch, a friend talked with me about how a grueling workload and onerous deadlines were making it difficult for her to visit her mother, who has been struggling with a health problem. But it was also clear to her that her family must come first. 'I don’t want to have regrets,' she told me."
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