In the Arab world, family isn’t just important, it’s everything.
It shapes your identity before you even have a name.
You are not just you.
You are your mother’s son. Your grandfather’s granddaughter. Your father’s legacy.
You belong to something bigger, older, louder than your own desires.
To be a “good” child, especially a daughter, is to remember.
To stay close.
To carry what you’ve been given, even when it weighs heavy.
Then you move West, and meet a different kind of love.
Here, love means letting go.
Parents raise their children to leave.
To question. To wander. To become.
Boundaries are healthy. Freedom is sacred.
You’re taught to find your truth, even if it contradicts the one you came from.
In some American homes, children argue with their parents openly.
They move out at 18. They call their parents by their first names.
They say what they feel.
And none of it means they love less.
Because here, love isn’t measured by obedience.
It’s measured by honesty, even if that honesty creates distance.
But in Arab culture, love is devotion.
You don’t just love your parents. You owe them.
You care before they ask.
You don’t leave, or if you do, you return often.
Love is loyalty. Love is sacrifice.
Love is silence when you want to speak.
Love is staying, even when everything in you wants to go.
I grew up between these two expectations.
One taught me loyalty.
The other, liberation.
And somewhere between them, I became someone who felt guilty for wanting space
and lost for staying too close.
My American friends say:
“Your family shouldn’t make you feel trapped.”
My Arab family says:
“Love is sacrifice, who are you without us?”
They’re both right.
And also: both incomplete.
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to belong to a family where I could say:
“I disagree.”
“I need space.”
“I love you, but not like that.”
…without it sounding like betrayal.
And sometimes I wonder if, in the Western pursuit of freedom,
something’s been lost
that deep, ancestral sense of responsibility
that reminds you: you’re never just living for yourself.
There’s no clean answer.
Only tension.
Only the hallway you stand in after a phone call with your mother
torn between love and resentment,
between the life you want
and the people who made you.
If you know that place
you’re not confused.
You’re just in between.
And in between is where so many of us live.
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