Disney Land

This photo was taken at Amsterdam airport by an employee of KLM airlines when I was roughly twelve years old. My brother (seen in the back with his eyes and bowl haircut peering above the other kids) and I were on our way back to the US after being kidnapped by our dad.

When we arrived at Amsterdam airport, we were escorted to unaccompanied children’s area, an area for children who fly without adults. The area had a couple of Super Nintendo systems setup with Super Mario World to play. As much as I would have been keen on playing, I learned there was a bed in a room to sleep in and went to crash for a bit. I don’t recollect the time I arrived, but I may have had to wake up early for the flight leading me to be tired. Maybe I was sick. Maybe all the exhaustion of keeping myself in check during the last few weeks caught up to me. Maybe I had mono. Maybe it was all of the above.

I woke up and made my way back out to see other kids around, most of them were from African countries. The KLM attendants asked us if we were hungry and wanted anything from Burger King, and I meekly said I guess. I had no voice to speak for myself, I was hungry but was afraid of overstepping invisible bounds that I didn’t know of. I remember showing the kids how to play Super Mario World and getting bored because my mind was exhausted.

My brother and I had just spent 2-4 weeks (I can’t remember) being kidnapped by my father; we were finally free, we were in this secret area in Amsterdam reserved for unattended kids, we had flight attendants offering us anything we needed. Usually, kids would equate this as heaven: video games, food, no parents to watch us. For me, this is a war veteran coming back to a buffet and an orgy while images of death flickered through his head. I didn’t know I had gone through war. I didn’t know what I went through and I was too ashamed and embarrassed to talk about it.

Back home, my uncle took me on a 2 hour car ride to try to get me to talk about it. I kept mum the whole ride. Over and over he asked me if there was anything to talk about. I didn’t want to, and being in the car felt like a mild continuation of what I had gone through, stuck, in an unknown situation, under the care of someone that is a “loved one”. There’s no way I’m opening up in that situation, I’m not falling for that trap, not again, I thought. I’ll never tell anyone my thoughts and feelings again, I can’t go there again.

It wasn’t my uncle’s fault, he tried to help me, but I don’t know what the most effective way was to help me with this situation. I didn’t explode, just stayed quiet the whole time. PTSD wasn’t even a coined term yet, and I don’t know if my family knows how much of an impact this still has on me, relationships can feel like unsettling to me, they seem like opportunities for me to be stuck, used, manipulated. I never fully developed the ability to put my foot down and say no to things that disagreed with me. I was always encouraged to be agreeable. I could have said no at Dulles Airport; I didn’t. I could have said no in Detroit airport; I didn’t. I could have said no in Amsterdam, I didn’t. The guilt and resentment I carry is large. Of course, I was a child, I was not expected to know what to do, but I knew something was off. I didn’t listen to my intuition.

I was an 11 year old in 6th grade during the fall of 1994. My parents were going through a divorce. During that time, my father was spending a bit more time with me than I had in my past. My gut was telling me this is a tad strange but he was taking me to Toys R Us and buying my love through sports cards. I also didn’t know what divorce was supposed to be like, so I thought this was par for the course. I’d met friends who had divorced parents but this wasn’t a typical topic that people spoke about. I saw divorce on TV but it was so trite and foreign to me. I ignored the strangeness of the situation and just accepted the bribe.

My father stayed at his sister’s place (my aunt) in Toledo, Ohio, which wasn’t far from Ann Arbor. So he was coming up a couple of days a week to see me. Maybe due to his regular appearance, my mom felt comfortable enough to agree to let me and my brother go to Disney World with him. (Actually, no. My mother, as did I, feared him. He had a way of intimidating you and really twisting you psychologically into making you feel that if you didn’t listen to him, you would feel bad. Gaslighting at its finest.)

I can’t remember if I was excited about Disney World but I had never been and it was something I had seen a lot on TV, on the Disney Channel and relatedly Nickelodeon. We flew from Detroit to Washington Dulles airport, and I didn’t think much of it. I assumed we were connecting to an Orlando flight.

We made our way to our gate in Dulles, but it didn’t say Orlando, it said Amsterdam. I asked (almost knowingly, but ostrich-like) why we weren’t going to Orlando and my father claimed that the airline (Northwest, if I remember correctly) screwed up our flight somehow and gave us free tickets to go to Europe, allowing us to go to DisneyLand Europe. I knew deep down I didn’t want to go to Europe and Florida would have been fine, so now I know things were not right.

I remember an NBA game playing on TVs at the airport. It felt almost like an ominous signal coming from the TV, as though it was the last time I’d watch the NBA for a long time. I was a fan of the NBA then, Shaquille O’neal was dominating the league, while Michael Jordan was away. These players and events were anchors for the turbulence in my life then. Sports cards solidified this with tangible, physical objects. The airport TVs, playing some pointless game, gave me a sense of comfort, a sense of consistency, an image that maintained and persisted through what I went through.

As a member of an Arab family, we don't really differentiate between Disney World and Disney Land. So, in our family, Disney World was always referenced as Disney Land.