A little talk about secret love letters, a watermelon, a garbage dump and a doctor!

sandstrider (49)in #personal • 7 years ago

Steemians, hello.

Since I joined Steemit, I've been thinking of sharing a bit about myself, my background, early life, my surroundings, some experiences I went through and the people I met, you'll also know why in hell the title is made up like that, so right to the point, let's get started!

First off; my parents

It's kinda ironic for me to say this, but, my cousins, siblings and I are probably the only generation to live our whole lives in urban areas, my parents are of a heavy farmer-oriented background, they were farmers, as all the generations before them, basically, they're also cousins, they used to live in the same village with most of their family members, from grandparents to cousins, everyone knew everyone, it was a tightly knit - if closed off - society.

My grandfather (father's side) - an owner of a large piece of land, had all sorts of different different fields, some for wheat, some for corn, beans, peas .. and so on, so my dad - my grandfather's youngest child in a list of 15 - grew up working the fields as soon as he hit ten, that's about when people started heading heavily into runner-up small urban cities ( ones that aren't Cairo or Alexandria) and such, so my dad's oldest sister (older by about 16 years) got married and moved out. At some point in his youth, my dad's adventurous soul had him travel to many a city in Egypt, settling each summer at his sister's place in a once-was port-town called port-said (now a full-fledged city) and grew up that way, from one place to the other.

My mother has a bit of a complicated background, her parents divorced when she was very young (around 3 years old) and both remarried, she ended up being raised by her aunt in Cairo and, unlike my dad, in the summers she'd go back to the village they're raised in, at her dad's precise orders and spend the whole summer there, in his mansion.

My parents knew of eachother, always, but they never actually got to talking or even interacting up-close, as was the strict tradition that they had to follow back then, though they did, in fact, have a crush on eachother, as far as to send letters to one another in secret, like the old romance movies we used to see as kids, eh?

One summer, several years later, my dad - with the money and means - went to ask for her hand in marriage and the years went quickly from there, or so my parents tell me. 8 years later, they're married, settled in a city, have 3 kids (should be four, but fate wasn't kind) and are living their life with 3 more goals in mind, to raise their kids to the absolute best of their ability and get them ready for life, morally, psychologically and financially.

Now comes the part where we start talking about me!!

My very early years

My parents were always aiming at having 3 kids, ironically enough, I'm the third, my older brother died a couple of months after his delivery, but my parents tried for another after me and that's how my younger brother came to be.

(My sister seemed more bothered with me not smiling than the fact that I was the same size as her and almost suffocated her.)

My parents tell me that I looked like a watermelon as a baby (with pics for proof) and that the first word I started saying was neither mom nor dad, it was "No.", I was also the sort of baby that'd stay awake for any possible period of time if unfed, funnily enough, even now I'd have to struggle to sleep if i'm hungry, I was also very self-sufficient when it came to burping after being fed, however!

(The death-stare my parents used to get if i'm not fed.)

When I hit three I was suddenly hit by what we later discovered to be symptoms of G6PD deficiency, or favism, in a shorter term, a rather popular blood deficiency that occurs due to genetic mutations in the middle east. It was/is both a blessing and a curse, as it was kinda hard growing up in a country that REALLY loves it's bean meals, and I mean REALLY REALLY love them, the big upside to this is that I have more natural protection from malaria than the average person...I also lost a lot of weight, which was also a plus.

(The ever-famous Egyptian fuul and falafel meal, both made of fava beans, the bean with the titular name of my condition.)

(Sorry about this one, the family has problems with handling cameras.)

Being a middle child can be hard, especially for a young kid, you'll lack attention needed for - at the very least - teaching you basic stuff like writing the right way so that your hand isn't bent, for instance (which I only taught myself a few years back) though for most of the part it was a plus for me, I wasn't getting much attention from anyone so I had extra personal time with myself, which was something I liked from my earliest of days.

Back then we used to live with my uncle in the same building, so I spent a lot of time there, I always called him "baba" which means dad, because, to me, he was my second dad. We had neighbours who were friends with our family, their three kids were the same ages as our family's kids too, funnily enough, me and my neighbours' middle-child counter-part friend used to scour the grounds around the buildings we grew up in, we had this huge garbage dump a few meters next to our building, we'd play in the trash, chase cats and dogs and always, ALWAYS! fall in that hole 2 meters away from home, no matter how hard we tried to avoid it.

(Sometimes I surprise myself at how much swag I had as a kid.)

I started attending kindergarten, it became a usual, daily thing of course, so I doesn't remember much of it, except the places themselves, it had a very particular smell though, that place, on that I can't really describe, sadly, though I still remember this, one day, while I was being dressed by my mom, who got me a new uniform shirt because the old one tore for reasons I cant remember (honest!), the shirt reached to my knees.. so i stopped her before she started buttoning it up and stood proudly and gleefully saying "Look mom, I'm a doctor!" my mom, who still had eye-bags from sleep deprivation, started laughing hysterically, looking at her son, standing tall in nothing but an underwear and a shirt that looks like a coat as it reached his knees, it must've been a sight, haha.