My Life, I Guess (A Memoir)

Chapter 2

Due to my Muslim upbringing, apparently the custom over here for little boys is to circumcise them not as a baby, but later in their childhood. In my case, it was when I was around five or six.

My family took me out of town for it, and it was at this very fancy, huge hospital where the process was supposed to be painless. I was helpless against my family's word--a common occurrence in my life--and so I had no choice but to go along with it.

I remember sitting quite a while in the waiting room by myself, with a bunch of other terrified kids. There was a happy-go-lucky cartoon playing on the TV in the room, but the sounds were drowned out by the wailing screams and cries of dozens of kids whose families also forced them to go through with this. I kept needing reassurance from the nurses that it wouldn't hurt, but they barely gave me any straight answers. To them, I was yet another annoying little shit who wouldn't shut up. They weren't exactly the nicest in that hospital, despite working primarily with children.

When it was my turn, I was ushered into a bright room and had to lay down on the flat hospital bed with a handful of doctors and nurses crowding around me. They gave me something to numb the pain, so the process itself was not so bad and ended pretty quickly. It was very uncomfortable and I felt some pinpricks here and there, but overall it wasn't as terrible as I feared.

After it was done, I was given underwear that was cupped around the crotch area--in order for the fabric to avoid contact with ground zero, basically. I had my picture taken at the hospital lobby, which all the kids did as sort of a "job well done" for getting their willies sliced up. And then I got in the car with my family and went back to the place we were staying.

And then the pain started.

The painkillers wore off, so I was in that car on the way home screaming and crying my lungs out at the unbearable agony. I felt tortured for those next few days, and even more so considering the affected area needed medicine applied onto it a few times a day. The slightest touch was unbearable for me. I don't even remember how I was able to pee during that period.

About a week or so later, as the pain died down, we went back to my hometown, with my family promising a big party and that I would be showered with gifts and toys. That was basically the tactic every parent used as a way of convincing their kid it won't be so bad. "Don't worry that you're getting your penis mangled! There will be toys after!"

Sure enough, when we got home there definitely was a party, and there definitely were toys. Obviously not the girly toys that I really wanted, like Barbie or Bratz dolls. They were toy trucks, toy robots, toy dinosaurs, basically anything that society perceived was "for boys".

In short, the experience was absolutely not worth it. They could've easily had me circumcised as a newborn, but apparently that just wasn't customary. And doing what was customary was always more important than common sense.

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I was never really that close with my sisters. By the time I was born, they were already teenagers, and in my early childhood they were college age. I have memories of seeing my sister Nadia hanging out with her friends and me wanting so badly to be a part of it. I wanted to join in on their gossiping, their inside jokes, their slumber parties. But I was the little brother, so I was mostly kept at a distance. All three of them were only a year apart from each other, while I was fifteen years younger than Nadia, the sister right above me.

My sister Nina, for as long as I can remember, has had a mental disorder which causes her to mentally not age, meaning she's forty-something now but still has the mind of a thirteen year old. I remember when she would have her episodes, and it got extremely bad at some points. There were times where she would walk out of the house completely naked and screaming about her fear of dying.