Back in the summer of 2019 my cell service allowed people with blocked numbers to leave voice mail messages. It was through this loophole that I learned my mother, at that point blocked for the better part of three years, was planning to hire a private investigator to learn about my life. My immediate thought: What TV show gave her that idea?
My father, born and raised in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, first met my mother in her small High Atlas Mountains village during a family friend’s wedding. Fifteen years my mother’s senior, he convinced her to build a life with him in America. They opened a deli in Central Florida. Their lives as immigrants were arduous, and then further complicated by racism in the early 2000s — our neighbors spread rumors that my father had a harem of four wives, allowing one outside at a time. What’s more, I was repeatedly suspended from elementary school for fist-fighting students who called my hijabi mother “towel head.”
To put it generously, my parents were “misguided” in the child rearing practices that followed my troublemaking. But in our religious household, our parents were second to God; they had impunity.
The one silver lining? My experience of that Florida by way of Morocco chaos became the basis for the essay that earned me a full ride to Yale in 2016. A direct quote from my 17 -year -old mind: “While money may still be tight and prejudice may never disappear from this world, by refusing to let negativity mar my success, my happiness will never again be limited.”
One essay full of similarly melodramatic sentences later, and I became the first in my family to attend college. My parents bragged endlessly, and I couldn’t wait to see the world through the eyes of the elite.
Still, the memories of their strictness weighed on me. I felt trapped and limited by our shared history. At Yale, however, I could gain autonomy. If my parents were never going to see things my way, perhaps I needed to divest from their point of view entirely. I blocked their numbers and got a therapist. I cut them off.
I began the process of finding myself, unburdened by the expectations of their traditionalist worldview. But after three years of little contact, my mother worried that she’d lost me forever. All she could tell from stalking my social media was that I was alive and at college. She needed more. The voice mail messages she left were morose and tinged with regret for her actions, but she didn’t think she deserved to be abandoned. She often sounded as if she’d been crying, and I was quick to delete the messages after listening. Her final one, erratic and angry, brought with it the threat of the P.I. I got up the courage to reach out.
That summer, of 2019, seated on my bed in my New Haven apartment, I unblocked her number. My eyes scanning the floor, I called her back. I heard the relief and happiness in her “Hello?” I told her I’d finished my junior year. I was studying acting and writing solo shows. And, oh yeah, I was having sex with men.
She hung up.
Queerness, in my parents’ opinion, was up there with atheism and suicide. That is to say, unacceptable. Within the hour, I received an email from my father — how he’d gotten my address was beyond me. I deleted it after reading it, but it contained decrees along the lines of, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” and “Change your last name and stay away from my family, or else.”
My parents and I were finally back in contact, and now I had been disowned.
On the rare occasions we did speak after that, my mother would often express her great dismay at the fact that I ever shared the information with her to begin with. So why had I felt the need to divulge my sexuality?
My understanding of the answer has changed over time.
If you asked years ago, I’d say I came out as a sort of, “F you.” Here was a woman, who I knew wouldn’t accept who I truly was, saying that she wanted to know what was going on with me so badly that she’d hire someone to find out. After all the pain she’d caused me, I could finally turn the knife around.
In reality, it was about more than just retribution. While I’d like to have believed myself calloused, uninterested in my parents after years of oppression and subsequent independence, it wasn’t true. Something in me desired feeling seen by them, even if it’d prompt a turning away.
To fulfill this core need, I had let them down.
When my parents first conceptualized my “American dream
” — which is to say, the fulfillment of their hardscrabble one — the possibilities were those of many ambitious immigrants. Doctoring, lawyering, dentistrying. A beautiful, similarly religious wife. Future grandchildren. It was all so clear. All their struggles would be worth it. And they did their best to manifest this for me. From late night Walmart trips for school projects, to financial aid applications for expensive summer camps full of white kids. They worked hard to give me the opportunity to be successful in the way they thought I should be.
And yet after all this, America as a land of opportunity had backfired. Instead of their dutiful son escaping intergenerational poverty in the new world, he’d gone off to Yale, studied acting and been seduced by the worst sort of American values.
To this day, they speak with an air of zero autonomy; their sense of religion and the world is fixed. No matter how much they might wish they could unconditionally envelop my existence in their love, their hands are tied. It’s not up to them. In some cosmic sense, they feel they’ve lost.
It’s a tough lesson, accepting that my happiness could be linked to my parents’ misery. But I had to shatter their idea of me as simply the troublesome son with authority issues. Pretending it was that banal was untenable — though my parents still try to.
In the months after that unblocked call and leading up to my graduation, my mother reached out about attending the ceremony. Admittedly, it sounded sweet. After all, they’d helped get me there. This was my life, but also their dream. When I mentioned that my college boyfriend would also be present, she paused. “ … Oh.. Well … Nevermind.” I realized she didn’t want to see me graduate, so much as she did an imagined version of me.
The start of another lesson: In the quest for joy, sometimes you must also disappoint yourself.
Despite my parents’ total rejection of queerness, as time has gone on, their aching for me hasn’t lessened. On holidays, they’ve started to invite me home. “Thanksgiving is soon. Can you come visit?” Despite longing myself for a parental experience, I never go.
Their invite is a product of compartmentalization. They seem to sever the connection between myself and my queerness, and invite back only an idea of me. It’s just like my graduation. Even though I crave the love of a family dinner, I can’t head home knowing not all of me is invited. I must refuse to splinter my ego, even as it deprives the part of me that misses his parents. And I do. To this day, my go-to cologne is Wings by Giorgio Beverly Hills. It’s what my mother would buy my father from Ross.
In holding to this distance I insist on, I feel as if I let myself down.
In the space between us, however, I cultivate new memories, a new relationship to faith, a new life. My life. People who love me, make me laugh, whom I love. I think of the night when an ex hoisted me onto his shoulders outside a Manhattan bar. I was flushed with embarrassment and honored by his chaotic gesture. From our combined height, every New Yorker looked envious.
Tarek Ziad is an actor, a writer and a comedian. He performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade and writes the Substack “Perfect Information.”
Source photograph by Juanmonino/Getty Images
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