“Mama, wake up. Wake up, Mama”

I begin in the most transformative moment in my life. Not the moment when I promised to share my life. Not the moment when I became a mother. Not in a moment of accolade or condolence. Not one of anything, to anyone, for anything. Except for me.

“Loss”

“Loss?” (Recounting the only word I heard).

The doctor repeated, very matter of fact. “Yes. Loss”.

“As I said. It is very clear that you are afraid to experience the same Loss that you have experienced throughout your life…”

In that one simple word, loss, my whole life was changed. I instantly became a child whose world was chosen for them. I felt afraid, helpless and innocent. I felt it. In both times. In the past and in the present simultaneously. I saw my mother lying on the floor, on her side, pressing her tears into the floor,  hoping they would drown him. She was very much broken and defeated, yet, as always, ingenious. It is he who haunts me the most.  The greatest tragedy of my life. And it truly is as it is said, “One of the hardest things you will have to do, is to grieve the loss of someone who is still alive”. For me it is this, for others it is preparation for the inevitable, or for the unimagined. We are connected in more ways than we know.

“Mama, Wake up. Wake up, Mama. Please”.

I saw a child kneeling next to the face of a mother, curled up, playing dead, playing done, you won.

My whole life has been conceptualized as a series of survivals.

As a series of non-choices.

Of necessities.

You did what you had to do, to survive.

To literally stay alive.

I learned this from the ultimate of survivor in my world, my mother. From a lineage of women before her. From journeys past, haunting the living. Immigrant geographies are not simply dreams from point A to B, they are historically embedded in the violence that engenders dreams of survival. In the genealogies that accompany geographies of migration. In mapping these journeys, we can simultaneously ‘unmap’ the histories, legacies, and lived experiences that make dreams possible. Those of battered women and drunken men, of imprisoned and impoverished masses, of broken promises and failed dreams, of colonial dislocations and systemic inequalities, of poverty and labour, of patriarchy and racism, of realms of possibility, and the nightmarish pain that awakens.

Loss

It happened sometime around February, maybe March. It doesn’t matter exactly when. What matters is that it took so long. It matters that I did not know what I was missing. I pressed my lips into the softest squish of a cheek with the sweetest scent. Into a being of which I am a part. As I pulled my lips back, I realized it. It was my first time. It the first time I kissed my baby. It was too many months into his life.  We shared a proximity that cannot possibly be any closer, and yet, here I was having never laid my lips on his delicate face. When I think back now to that moment of realization I cry for the pain I felt but did not know until then. In the moment however, I smiled from my stomach. From deep inside. From the gut. I did not feel bad. I felt relieved. I felt so full. I felt thankful.

Without the pain, I would never have realized the weight of his generosity. My son, Kareem (الکریم‎‎ [1]), you have given me so much more than you will ever know. You triggered in me the pain I felt, but did not know was there. Deep. Hidden. Unconscious.

Your gift was my pain realized.

Loss

My Dad (not to be mistaken with ‘real d.a.d.’, ‘real’ to denote biological from the limits of a child’s vocabulary, and d.a.d. to save new phone numbers from someone who I know is my father, but I am not sure about). A different man. A different ‘father’. Gentle. Kind. Eccentric. Genius. Living in his beautifully unstable world. How much pain he must have felt. Diagnosed and medicated, sometimes sedated. Delicate and beautiful collections of dead butterflies, du Maurier special mild cigarette hanging from one side of his lip, Grolsch on his office desk, rips in his Fido Dido pyjama pants, soldiering iron in one hand, acoustic guitar in the other. As a child I felt wonder, beauty and kindness. And then, simultaneously, I was afraid, angry and resentful. I did not know what I know now. I could not have known. But I wish I did that day.

I looked into the backyard through the glass and saw his figure sitting upright in a chair, ciggy in hand, talking. Talking and talking and talking. I stayed. I starred. I searched. No one appeared to me. I went upstairs angry. In the evening I was forced to take a ride from him to my soccer practice. On the way I interrupted abruptly in the midst of his conversation about finding God or realizing something monumental and asked,

“Who were you talking to today?”

“No one”, he said. He hesitated.

“Sometimes I get lonely”.

I wasn’t supposed to know. But I wish I did. The things I would talk to you about today. The things that we would share. The tears we would cry together. I could never have known the weight of all of that pain, but I always wished I did. And now I do.

Loss

She said I experienced tremendous loss as a child. That was loss she said. Not my choice. Not my fault. Something was taken from me. I never saw him again. That was 2002. It’s 2016. I am 32. That is a little less than half of my life and it still hurts like a fresh wound.

Transformation of Lime Butterfly ( papilio demoleus )

My daughter loves caterpillars and butterflies just like he did. She is mesmerized by their movement, shape, colour and ability. Children know the true captivating beauty of nature, as with each new encounter their world is entirely transformed. They have so much to teach us.

I understand now why he was so delicate with their beauty, as caterpillars embody something so powerful. They do not know what is coming, or perhaps the knowledge is in them all along, either way they must remain faithful.

Trusting, believing, living, evolving.

 ‘And just when the caterpillar thought the world was over,

it became a beautiful butterfly’

And the butterfly is so beautiful because it carries with it the unknown possibilities of things it cannot know then but feels now. It carries with it a genealogy that is embedded in its being.

Loss

Anxiety. What a painful, miserable state of being. Not only a state of mind but an all encompassing feeling of overwhelming proportions. A set of possibilities, of impending fears, of what ifs, of unknowns, and endless imaginings, leading to the intoxicating dreams of sedation. The months that followed the birth of Kareem were some of the most painful moments in my life. I was drowning and I was looking for anything to stay afloat.

 “God. If you take this away from me,

I promise I will never take not feeling this for granted.

Please. Help me”.

It is not necessarily being a mother that made me feel this way. It is being a mother who carries a genealogy of loss. Who carries pain that has not be realized.

“Loss”, she said.

I have never conceptualized my life in this way. I have never thought back on anything that has happened in my life and thought that this happened to a child. As a child I always felt it my responsibility to protect us, to hold doors closed with one hand while they are being broken down, and press the security button with the other. I never knew how inconsequential my efforts were, I always imagined myself to be a factor. So back to the word loss. It hurts and heals simultaneously. It hurts for that child and for the mother. And it heals, as it allows the child to be consoled by the grief they are entitled to feel, the pain they felt but never understood. And it heals the mother, the women, the daughter, for the pain she feels now, from the hurt she felt then but did not have space to feel, from a place she did not know she would be, into a future she can not yet imagine.

Loss

“You are afraid to experience the same loss that you have experienced throughout your life with the thing you love the most right now, your children.”

 I literally love something so much that it hurts.

And I love them so much.

And sometimes it hurts so so much.

I have said it before. And I will say it again…

I am overflowing with tears and fears.

I am so grateful and so scared.

I am so happy and I am so terrified.

I am so thankful yet sometimes, I feel so trapped.

I am so in love, and so tired, frustrated and sometimes sad.

“Mama, Wake up. Wake up, Mama,” and so I have. Living a dream, awoken by a nightmare.

Thank you my sweet Kareem, you truly are generous in ways that you do not yet even know.

As I mourn these ‘new’ losses, I am brought to the most beautiful words I have ever felt.

I hope that the memory of this pain remains, so that the weight of these words never fades.

 It is a burden and a blessing that I wish to bear

again and again and again.