I’m a Grandpa! So Indulge Me.

OK. I know this is a political site, not Facebook or MySpace, and that, given the state of the world, there are certainly more important things for me to be using my share of pixels than talking about my family. But tonight I can’t help myself. My first grandchild has arrived. If you haven’t already guessed, that’s her to the left.

She was born by c-section on December 17 in Manchester, England, and weighed in at 7 pounds, 1 ounce. Her name is Mariam Ahmed al-Musaud al-Hashim. Mariam is the name of her mother’s mother, and also of her father’s other wife. (Yes, my stepson’s father-in-law is a polygamist.)

There is, in our house, a special kind of joy from this birth. As many of my on-line acquaintances know, my wife taught English to nuclear engineering students in Libya for three years after marrying a Libyan. In 1983, she divorced and her ex-husband kidnapped her two children, smuggling them out of the United States on false Afghan passports that were easily available at a time when the United States was aiding the mujahidin war against the Soviets. The children were 3 and 2 at the time. He took them  to Libya and refused to allow my wife to see or even talk with them.

Politics, including the U.S. bombing of Libya, the bombing of Pan Am 103, an economic embargo, conspired to make it impossible for us to track down her children by traveling to Tripoli. In a Catch-22, the only way she could obtain a visa from Libya was to get her ex-husband’s permission. Which, obviously, he would not grant. The U.S. State Department was more of a barrier than a benefit. Finally, 10 years ago, a trip to Tunisia to visit my wife’s former sister-in-law helped break the ice. For one thing, we learned that the extended Libyan family of my wife’s kids – and the kids themselves – had been told their mother was … dead.

In 1998, after years of grasping at every straw in an attempt to reunite with her children, my wife joined a group of British mothers in similar circumstances and traveled to Libya. After three tense days, with her ex-husband doing everything he could to keep the children away from her, my wife’s former sisters-in-law forced the issue. In a reunion that someone thoughtfully videotaped, the children were brought to her. Fifteen years had passed since they had seen each other. What followed was what my wife later called the best two weeks of her life.

In 1999, she returned for another visit. And in 2000, the four of us met in Malta, which has been a crossroads of east and west since the time of the Phoenicians and is a short haul from Tripoli. In 2001, my wife’s children came to the United States to visit. After six weeks, they returned – on September 6 – to Tripoli. Shortly afterward, as the United States geared up for war and many Americans began looking at Arabs and Arab-Americans through narrowed eyes, my wife’s son called to say he wished to come to the United States and live with us while he attended college. This he did. In 2005, when he married a British-born Libyan and moved into his own apartment, his sister arrived from Libya to take his place in our house, where she still lives. Last year, he and his wife moved to Manchester, where her family lives.

Needless to say, all this would have made for interesting times under any circumstances. But with two wars going on, with young Muslims (and their families) getting extra attention at airports, with rendition and torture being justified, with the Constitution being selectively dismantled, with neoconservatives talking about the “long war,” and the “clash of civilizations,” with ethnic hatred resurfacing in public discourse, and with Libya going from pariah to America’s new best friend, we cannot but feel we have had a front row seat at a cultural and political crossroads in world affairs. Often, it hasn’t been easy. Some people we thought were friends turned out not to be. Others unexpectedly went out of their way to make my stepchildren welcome. There are other stories with political implications, too, and perhaps I’ll tell some of them another time.

For now we’re basking in the joy and energy that comes from being new grandparents. Indulge me if I wax pollyannish  knowing that Mariam will get to learn Libyan-Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and two brands of English. And that, like other children of mixed heritage, she’ll have a rich upbringing and a chance to leave behind much of the racial and ethnic and political crap that has afflicted people of her American grandparents’ generation.