~A rare photo of my sisters and me in Diyarbakir where I started school~

For the last forty plus years I've been marking July 11th  and acknowledging its importance in changing the lives of my family forever. I cannot prevent myself from keeping sentimentality at arm's length on these anniversaries when great playwrights with their tragedies, or poets such as Robert Frost with his simple, yet symbolic “The Road not Taken” slip into my thoughts.

Initially, it was a novelty to mark a third, fourth, or fifth anniversary of living in the same city for more than a couple of years for me. Thus, being the eldest daughter and a romantic teen to boot, I used to coax my sisters into preparing a surprise for our parents to celebrate our family anniversary of arriving in Montreal. Often a fresh apple pie from the Dominion store, Babacim's favorite North American dessert, bought with the pooling of our modest allowances, and an LP of Beethoven's symphonies, with a bunch of flowers for Annecim would be the center piece of our dinner table as we reminisced still fresh memories of our closely knit life with which only we were intimate. There was no longing or wishful mumblings of returning; nor silent cursing of a fate that brought us here back then. Because our leaving Turkey, quitting a life we were accustomed to was meant to be only temporary. It was supposed to be like leaving home to go to college for a few years; and then come back.

Back then it was easy to talk about these, because returning to Turkey was always in my parents' heart. Going back with their daughters, with their completed university education, ready to serve their mother land and set their own roots on the soil, which their ancestors had watered with their own blood. That was my parents' plan and their dream for leaving their country in the first place. They never viewed it as quitting. They taught us not to be quitters, but to be fighters and always to complete something we began.

The feelings of novelty for the first few anniversaries inevitably yielded into feelings of incredibility that we had actually remained in one place for an entire decade by the time I had completed my undergraduate studies. Babacim's career back in Turkey took us from the most north-western point Edirne, to the most south-eastern point Diyarbakir, of a country, with a fair amount of interim living in Europe sprinkled in my sisters' and my lives. These moves had filled my young mind with a detritus of sad memories: unfulfilled friendships, names whose faces I could no longer remember, a reluctance at getting attached, and finally a slow-growing silent rebellion of which I wasn't aware then.

While they may have acknowledged July 11th  to humor their daughter, my parents no longer liked to be reminded of that date which made such a difference in all our lives so many years ago, and probably wondered what might have happened had they taken the other road maybe less, maybe more traveled. Don't we all, in retrospect ? We do what we do with the purest intentions and best of hopes but somehow when the results turn out very different from our dreams, we are shocked. We ask ourselves: What happened? Where did I go wrong?

This year, with Babacim long gone, and Annecim living in the twilight of her delicate life, I still noted that life changing day of many years ago for each one of us – only in my mind and with an email note to my sisters letting them know they are in my heart. Then, since I can afford the luxury of a little time, I spend my morning reminiscing every little memory my mind can still hold onto and what I can remember from a very different reality in a world I lived, before quitting that reality to embrace another life in a new country, which I have made mine – against all my parents' dreams.

~ Annecim and my sisters on her 81st birthday ~

~*~~*~~~*~~*~
It Is Not A Word
by
Sara Teasdale

It is not a word spoken,
Few words are said;
Nor even a look of the eyes
Nor a bend of the head,

But only a hush of the heart
That has too much to keep,
Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep.

~*~~*~~~*~~*~

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © Will of my Own - 2011