Solo Mother

I’ve been cleaning up files tonight, wading through the detritus of the destruction of my marriage, and came across this oneiric essay I wrote two and some odd years ago, when I lived in Dubai with my husband and our small son.

I thought I would share it with you…

My life in the UAE has very little in common with the life my husband leads.

I navigate the nuances of mothers, of women of a myriad of colours, from darkest litchi nut to palest ivory; from women who show shoulders and cleavage to women who leave only their eyes exposed to tell their story. I settle in for coffee with women who cluck their tongues and smile with pity and envy at my single son, my only child, while they try to tame the proof of their own fecundity. “She is European, habibti,” one woman said to another, gesturing towards me. “European women have one child. Arab women have ten!”

While my husband wades through a corporate culture wherein buying a low-level staff member a cup of coffee can be misinterpreted and exploited as a weakness, my child and I are plied with sweeties, we trade plates of home made cake back and forth with the neighbors. My days are filled with children, with their mothers, with the occasional merchant. Men are foreign to me, here. The sexes do not mingle the way they do in the West. While my husband’s work lets him freely socialize with men and women from the Middle East as well as the West, my smaller orbit excludes most men but offers me a glimpse into women’s personal lives to which my husband is not admitted.

Strange women fold themselves upon next to me on the majlis cushions and begin a conversation in the middle, as if resuming a thread we’d begun over a cup of tea earlier in the day. This one tells me about an article she’s writing on modern women in Mumbai, where she is from, and slips me her card, because we are both writers, no? She enthusiastically fills me in on her exhausted friend who is stretched out on the majlis opposite us, fluttering in a light sleep from which she stirs whenever one of her boys stops his frenetic dash around the play area and plonks himself down upon her tired body. “She is very important Doctor,” her friend tells me. “Married at 15, in Iran, what chances do you give, she would become a doctor? But she wanted to help children, praise God, and so she went to school. And now she works with children with handicaps.” I look at the woman’s young, lovely face, the dark shadows beneath her eyes only serving to accentuate her features. Her children give her no rest, and finally she gets up, her black ħijāb falling from her hair. It is the first time I have seen a Muslim woman’s hair, and I am struck by its lush beauty. She has obviously been following the conversation, and reaches out to pluck two children, in mid-careen, from the throng of little bodies intense in their play. “Look, see,” she tells me, eyes burning bright with a strange kind of pride. She pats one twin on the head. “This one, he is born perfect. This one,” – and here she gently turns the second boy so that his right side is better seen, “he is born without. And so I decide I will be doctor, to help boys like my son.” The boys are used to this display, and wait patiently to be released. I tell her about my grandfather’s work at Walter Reed Hospital, developing the artificial limbs department all those many years ago; about how my mother would sometimes come home to find an arm or a shin baking in her oven. Women find a common ground, often centered on their children: a platform from which to relate, without competition.

A merchant in a souq is selling handmade, natural cotton clothes, and he puts on his charm act, wraps himself in smiles and welcome for the little European lady, or are you Canadian? or perhaps, no, not French, surely? American? he never would have guessed. He tells me stories about the cotton, hand loomed in the Sudan, as I fondle it gladly, letting its smooth comb and thousand year softness trail down fingertips scraped rough by a fine layer of sand permeating my every pore. He regales me with the inspiration for this design or the other yes, he has designed all the clothing himself but is tiring of this line, oh no he will not make clothes like this again, images are burning in his mind… and the cotton hangs like an elegy to whiteness, settled into rocking chairs and window seats, a white that sets out, not to burn and gleam like the sun here in Sharjah, but to cushion and envelope…. A white with all the edges burnished out of it, hand shaped porcelain fired with a bit of horsehair to add a memory of smoke and rain to the tint and sway. I receive stories from a man the color of a cracked Brazil nut’s inner shell, stories of his children, his wife who hand selects the sweeties in the bowl he proffers to my happy son. But when I bring my husband to meet this interesting character with the lullaby clothing, the merchant pulls him into tales of modern day slavery in Sudan, in a voice above normal, delivered by a face closer than personal space might declare comfortable. My husband is dragged by a whipcord arm flung over his shoulder into a modern day conspiracy.

My son and I fall into step with a young woman and several children of various years, and by the time we have reached the square, we are fast friends. Before the sun sets she is giving me advice on marriage and has confessed that hers was a love match, W’allah! and had her parents known… the idea of it is left to quiver in the air. She tells me that her father came to her one night, when she was 14, and asked if she would consent to marriage with her cousin… but named the wrong one, sending her into a barely contained spasm of panic, until he cast about to come up with the correct name: Mohammed. “We had been in love since forever, can you believe it?” she beamed. Her one year old son tried to relieve my three year old of his little scooter car and she gently pried the little one’s hands away. “But in my country, something like this is haram, forbidden. Did you marry for love?” As night falls behind the mosque, we are fast friends, deep in conversation about life, love, and leaving our homes to come to the UAE. “I ask you, if someone walked into your home and said, ‘This is now mine, you must leave, would you go?’ or would you fight to keep what had been yours?” she asks me in a voice full of sadness and confusion, void of the zealotry that national television would have you believe of all dispossessed Palestinians. “Does this make any sense to you that we should be asked to simply go?” I have no words for her, only sympathy, and the same uncomprehending wonder that any son or daughter of mother borne could behave the way the world is behaving right now.

One afternoon, after much negotiating regarding nap schedules, four of us mothers meet for a play date. The children are delighted to play with someone else’s toys, and the mothers settle in for Arabian coffee and a French gateau chocolat. I am the only non-Muslim, and so I am the only one whose hair is already down before the salon doors close. Ħijāb and abayia fall in discrete pools under diaper bags as each woman finds herself in the comfortable surroundings of a modern-day harem, which is nothing more than a private space where women are safe from the eyes of men who are not family. I feel home, finally, after a year and a half spent drifting among various expat groups here in the UAE, from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to Sharjah. I am drinking coffee and laughing with a Jordanian, a Pakistani, and two Palestinians, suddenly very much aware of how far away from home I am, how isolated the United States has become, and how welcoming these women have been to me. There is a depth of feeling here for each other, based on our love for our children, on the sacrifices made on their behalf, based on the sleepless nights, the anxious moments, the heart-bursting pride: the commonality of motherhood that binds us close and makes us kind to each other, no matter our differences. My husband’s world revolves around the surface, the here and now, and does not delve into such soft intimacies.

One day, I look up from my scribblings to find a small, new faced child skootching nearer, nearer, closer to me, a child with deep brown eyes, shining black hair gone wild with play, and caramel skin the texture of a silk Persian rug: a tired little girl all done out from playing and needing a somebody to lean on, and I will do just fine. I can see the baby she was, the woman she will be; she contains all this so comfortably within such a small frame, fine of bone and black of hair, perfectly proportioned and poised in mid leap from here to there in her evolutionary time line. A child who never smiles but still seems always on the verge of laughter, her baby bird voice trilling in a language I can’t even hear, let alone identify, above the funhouse screams and rollercoaster roars of the park… she pats my water bottle lovingly and leans warm and safe and unresisting into my mama body, takes my hand in utmost trust as I lead her to the concession stand to buy her a water of her own. My husband comes home to a dark house, to a sleeping snoring boy child sprung half out of toddlerhood already, whispering in his sleep, “…papa…” with a smile and a toss of his hip back into sleep against the cool plaster wall. He asks me what I did today. How do I tell him of the richness of women?

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