I Was 3 When I Watched My Father Kill My Mother And Himself. Years Later, I Uncovered The Truth.

Rather than triggering traumatic memories of my birth father, these experiences offered a safe harbor from which to embrace a part of my identity that had been complicated by Islamophobia, “colorblind” parenting and the questions, too many questions, that went unanswered throughout my childhood.

Following the study abroad program in Morocco, I crossed the Strait of Gibraltar by boat and took a commuter flight to Bulgaria, my first time there in over a decade. 

The first day of my visit, I toured the ancient city of my birth, Sofia. Emulating my birth mother in the images I had scrutinized hundreds of times throughout my childhood, I posed for pictures at various cultural sites where I’d seen her stand years before.

That day, I also met with another one of my birth mother’s best friends in the lobby of the Sheraton — the hotel where my birth mother used to work. But instead of asking about the woman I had spent years quietly grieving, who I already knew so much about, I asked about the man who had been her husband, my father, and in the end, my birth mother’s killer.

In all of the years I spent thinking and not thinking about my birth father, there had always been details I’d failed to reconcile, including fragments of sweet memories that contradicted what I and my adoptive family had been told at the time of my adoption. 

I knew my birth father immigrated from Iraq in the ’80s to escape conscription into the war with Iran. I knew he was unconcerned with whether I was raised Muslim and didn’t object when my birth mother decided to have me baptized. I also knew that he left for Sweden shortly after my first birthday to build a life for us abroad. 

My birth father killed my birth mother and himself because she divorced him while he was out of the country. This, I also knew.

What I didn’t know — that to extricate my birth mother from her marriage, my grandmother persuaded her to claim abandonment through the State Gazette, knowing that a divorce would be finalized when the notice went unanswered for 90 days. 

Despite their ongoing contact, my birth mother used my birth father’s absence to achieve a legal separation without his knowledge or consent. I tried to imagine him returning from a country where he would never be seen as anything more than an outsider, only to learn that he had been divorced by the woman for whom he’d left in the first place.

While knowing the truth never changed the way I felt about my birth mother, and while it certainly was no excuse for my father’s violence, the explanation complicated the narrative that I had come to understand throughout my upbringing — the one that had kept me from wanting to know more about him, and in turn, from knowing more about myself.

My birth father made a terrible, irreversible mistake. But I now believe that the tidy cultural narrative surrounding my parents’ deaths, the one that tied my birth father’s actions to his religious beliefs, was based upon unexamined stereotypes. Bulgarian or Iraqi, victim or perpetrator, my parents were so much more than any one identity. So am I.

People often assume I could never forgive my birth father for what he did, but I have found forgiveness, in part, because I learned to humanize him. I recognize this isn’t possible or right for everyone, but choosing to forgive was a decision I made for myself and was, in the end, largely to my benefit. Doing so required me to look beyond the stereotypes that came to define my birth father’s life. That process began with my cultural immersion in college — a process that allowed me to lay the groundwork not only for forgiveness of the person whose actions irrevocably changed the trajectory of my life, but also for my own self-discovery and acceptance.

The year following college graduation, I moved abroad to work as a grant writer for a global refugee rights nonprofit, where, after nearly two decades of straightening my hair, I began to wear it curly. I returned to the United States the following year, entered graduate school, and with a wonderfully skilled therapist, began to do the work of coming into my own racial consciousness and defining myself on my own terms.