Kith and Kin

Tomorrow I will be posting a blog my mother wrote about her visit to Cairo. She wrote this post in March shortly after I arrived in Toronto but I never got around to posting it because I’m a git. Before I share her wonderfully witty words, I wanted to take a moment to comment on how grateful I am to have such an understanding family.

I have always been the first person to joke that the reason my family gets along so well is that we all live so far apart. In fact, day before I left Toronto was the first time that my family has been together in the same place at the same time in almost 11 years. But what I realized as my brothers and I joked around, insulted each other, and were generally pains in the butt to my parents was that family is a pretty cool thing to have around.

You see, I showed up at my parent’s doorstep with literally 24 hours notice and asked them not to ask too many questions. And you know what? They welcomed me home, fed me amazingly yummy food, went shopping with me, watched countless hours of CSI with me, and didn’t ask too many questions.

My take home lesson from the past two months is that you never, ever stop being a parent no matter how much you may want to take a vacation. I listened to my mother fret about my brothers and while she worried over me, and was forced to laugh at those people who think that parenting ends when your child turns 18 and goes off to college. Eighteen, it turns out, is merely when the problems turn from teenage woes into full-blown, adult-sized issues.

So I’d like to take this moment to thank my parents for tidying up the guest room, ignoring my melancholic angst, breaking their diets, and generally putting up with my nonsense. I know that I’m vaguely annoying, annoyingly vague, and a royal pain in the knitting bag, yet you still put up my fabulous self. Thank you for not looking too relieved when I said was going back home to Cairo. And thank you for being my parents.