My mother turns sixty-four this month. I have only been in her life for twenty-nine years, yet she has been at the center of mine for every single one. Words cannot carry twenty-nine years. They scatter, they slip, they fall short, as if language itself recoils from the weight of her presence. Still, I attempt it, for she was the first to place a book in my hands, and from that book a library grew. She was the first to leap with joy when I passed an exam, the first to clap her hands in celebration, the first to hold me without ever demanding I smooth out my oddities, soften my stubbornness, or hide my inconvenient truths.
When I was only fourteen, and everyone else dismissed me for wanting something larger than myself, something beyond the narrow walls of my own world, something unconventional but rooted in helping people, she did not. She believed me. A woman with no professional knowledge, an ordinary woman by every standard, she became extraordinary in her faith. She ran from one place to another, searching for opportunities, opening doors in schools and refugee camps, carrying my vision as if it was her own. Jerash Refugee Camp remains with me as if it was yesterday. It was Ramadan. I was fasting. We had finished our work in the camp, where families were handed small plates of food by an organization to break their fast. Each family, often with more than five mouths to feed, received a single small plate of Jordanian Alayeh, tomatoes sautéed with olive oil and aromatics. The children, as generous as all Palestinians, invited me to join them. I held myself together on the way home, but when I reached the door and she opened it, I crumbled in her arms. She held me and washed my tears. She did not force me to break my fast that night. She understood. She always understood.
Not only my mother, but the center of gravity around which so many others have circled. Strangers, cousins, friends all speak of her touch as if it was sunlight. People often tell me they love me simply because I am hers. She is made of contradictions that somehow resolve into wholeness: strong yet tender, opinionated yet kind, fearless yet gentle. She tells me I healed her, that she wishes I had arrived in her life earlier, as a sister, as a companion, in any form at all. Yet she was already the best of mothers. Cousins and friends circled her, whispering secrets, confessing taboos, laughing even when her temper flashed. It is a temper that warms rather than punishes. They told me often they wished she was their mother, that I was lucky, that they could never speak with their mothers as they spoke with her. Life’s cruelties and miseries could not corrode her kindness, could not harden her open heart. I envy her for that every day, as I feel the world carving its edges into me.
She was the girl whose small hands were slapped with a ruler for curiosity, or for the crime of drinking cola in the schoolyard, and still raised me to never tolerate anyone raising their voice against me. She was the sister beaten for reading a love letter in secret, yet became the mother who defended my right to speak to a boy on a school bus, the same mother who later listened to every story of every crush, who offered advice, who befriended my first and only love.
She was the girl who once wandered from house to house in Amman, sitting on the floor with neighbors to eat fried eggs off cracked plates in the morning, or scooping stuffed zucchini until her hands turned red from tomato sauce, behavior forbidden by her Circassian mother’s rigid rules. She became the mother who encouraged me to do the same. She tolerated me pulling open her eyelids early in the morning so I could run to our Syrian neighbors, drink maté, crack sunflower seeds, and listen to their Druze stories of reincarnation. She welcomed me back with a smile even when my stomach churned from too much maté, listened with wide-eyed delight as I recounted every detail, and endured it all again the next morning when I woke her for another round. She never told me to dismiss their stories, but placed books in my hands so that I might study and decide for myself.
She was the woman pressed down by taboos and the weight of judgment, yet when I embarrassed the pregnant neighbor by asking how babies are made, she defended me. “There is no shame in science,” she said, even if it earned her an eye roll and the label of a bad mother. She was the woman who could not conceive for six years, who obeyed a dream in which God asked her to stay silent for three days and repeat specific verses from the Quran. Faith and obedience did in fact deliver her into motherhood. Yet when a teacher told me that hell awaited me unless I wore the hijab, she stormed into the school. “God is not only severe in retribution,” she said, “He is also the most gracious, the most merciful. That is the God I want my daughter to believe in.” And when fear still clung to me and I insisted on wearing the hijab, she filled my closet with colorful scarves so that fear became something I could carry with joy in Quran recitation classes.
She was the woman who fell in love in college, married, and abandoned her dreams to follow her husband to Kuwait. She became the mother who asked me, without shame or hesitation, not to repeat her path. She told me to focus on my studies, to build my life first, and only then find someone who would complement it, someone who would nurture my ambitions and dreams rather than reduce me to a picture of happiness that is hollow inside. To this day, when relatives ask me when I plan to get married, she jumps in before I can respond, saying, “She knows what she wants. Don’t pressure her. She’ll know when the time is right.”
She was the woman who stayed in a toxic marriage, endured things beyond words, and painted a façade of happiness in front of me, my brother, and the world, and still taught me never to remain where I am diminished or humiliated, not for society and not for anyone. She showed me courage through her endurance, and love through her honesty. She stayed in that marriage because society demanded that a good mother remain, yet she never judged me for cutting ties with a father who had never been part of my life. She defended me against relatives who quoted the Quran to lecture me: “And your Lord has commanded that you worship none but Him, and to show kindness to parents.” She was the only one who truly understood, the only witness to why I made such a hard decision. She held me while I cried every night, as I still prayed for him, despite the pain, repeating God’s words: “My Lord, have mercy on them both as they cherished me when I was little.” She was always, always the one who saw the person I truly am, deep inside, no matter how tough I pretended to be.
She was the woman crushed under the weight of what was socially acceptable, yet she became the mother who taught me to speak up, to stand firm in my arguments, so long as I had done the research and could defend them with thought, with care, with stubborn courage. And even when, as so often happened, those arguments challenged her before anyone else, she still listened.
If I have courage, it is because she gave it to me. If I have kindness, it is because I drank from her endless well. If I have faith, it is because she showed me how to believe in a God who is mercy before wrath, love before fear. If I have humility, it is because she allowed me to see beyond myself. If I have hope to be a mother someday, it is because I pray that I might be even half the mother she is. There are women who bend under the weight of the world, and there are women who hold the world steady on their shoulders. My mother is the latter. She is in the lives she lifts quietly, without recognition. She is in the love and freedom she gives. She is my sun at sixty-four, and the world is brighter because she burns.
Why do you insist on making me cry?
This is a beautiful and sweet piece. ❤️