I Am My Mother's Daughter, I Cry on My Birthday
Letters to the Ether, S2E3
I began writing this on March 1st, and after a painful amount of edits, I deliver it to you on this day, March 17th, 2025.
Dear whomever,
I dreamt of my grandmother. She’s long dead; though her bedroom remains a shrine, one I have not entered in years. Sometimes, my aunts will sit in there, talk, hug, pray. But I am incredibly fearful of the dead, so I try to stay away.
In the dream, I walk into that very bedroom, where three more sort-of-familiar old women sit in fancy, wooden chairs. My aunts flock around them. My grandmother, in the middle. I can see a camera, vaguely, in the corner. The red light blinks at me, watchful. The women, they look at me with piercing brown eyes, and I feel my knees go weak.
It is a court hearing, of course. I am on trial.
I remember the hearing vaguely, dreamlike, different sentences and guilty verdicts. Boys, drinking, smoking, lying, being lazy. Saying No to the wrong things, saying Yes to the wrong things, too. There is one string of words that stuck: You just never get it right.
I stared at the closet a lot, in the astral. I couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. It’s a grand one, dark wood, intricate carvings decorating it all around. Only a few minor scratches, testament to my grandmothers’ careful taking of things.
I woke from this dream very still, though my heart was jumping around in my chest. I know what the jury decided: GUILTY.
I do not know why I walk with this invisible ankle monitor on me, at all times. The guilt eats me alive. Perhaps, in part, it’s due to my religious Arab upbringing, though I wouldn’t say my family is religious. I would say that my mother fears the culture, and walks in its confines briskly. She rarely told me This is wrong. Instead, she’d say, People will think this is wrong.
So it’s always been a show, every step pre-planned and carefully done. I also grew up a caretaker, with a heartbroken widow navigating four children in the wake of his death. I learned to pout, to soothe, to set aside my big feelings for everyone else’s big feelings. As a child this is accepted, celebrated. Your uncle wants a kiss on the cheek? Go, go, go on. Your older cousin wants a glass of water from upstairs? Amal, listen to him. Go. Your mom wants you to stay with her forever? Of course. You have dinner at your aunts, and all the girls get up towards the kitchen, while the men light their cigarettes and lean back against the couch, bellies full, breaths of contentment. What else would you do? You follow them. You wash the dishes. You wipe the floors. You were the guest, sure, but you’re still not a man.
Maybe it’s because of my first relationship, in which over my years of becoming I turned ever-so-docile in the name of love. With him, I learned to swallow my tongue, and nod, and keep my eyes big, wanting. It was a seamless transition from being the Perfect Daughter, to being the Perfect Girlfriend. I learned the best fight is one you let happen to you, the ones you do not participate in. I learned to get thrown in the ring, and stand. At least I stood. Let the rest do what they want. Take. I am the main dish, the delicacy, the dessert. Eat.
Punch me on the cheek, get my ribs, break my nose. I understand. I’m here for you. You should win. I’ve known to be the loser - and I’m good at it.
My mom cried on her birthday. A relatively normal experience for a woman, though not a pleasant one for a daughter. There is no sharper pain, no jolt into the reality of existence more powerful than seeing a parent turn into a person. A human. Since March 1st, I’ve felt softer than usual, as though a thick blade has torn through my ribcage. Me, I’m always wide-open, delicate and dripping with blood, but this month has felt even more raw than usual. I’ve been laid off, my savings account is a joke, and I have dreams that won’t reach me. And my mom cried on her birthday.
I’m smoking a lot these days, laying upside down on my couch, hoping the dizziness will make me feel lighter. I pray, to God, in this Holy month of Ramadan, to take me back in time. Back into her womb, then out. A do-over. In this reincarnation of myself, I would learn the word No, and I would dive out into the world Better, Correct, Right, with less Heart, and more Brains.
I would grow truly rebellious, unthinking and incredibly selfish. I would be a teenager who climbs down the windows, only to come home to an angry mother, whose anger did not move me, did not break me. I would wake past midnight to a crying widow, whom I would be able to soothe without feeling as though her loss was a fault of my own - without feeling as though it was me who was born cursed, me who came and then slowly, the life they lived, bright and hot in Tampa, Florida, was ruined.
People tell me I’m incredibly positive - for many of the men I’ve dated, too much so. Amal, you’re not being realistic. Amal, stop trying to make this better. It sucks. Though it doesn't feel like who I truly am: it is the role I have learned to play. Happy and easy. Lightweight, easy to carry. The other day, my boss walked over to my desk when the office was empty, and she asked me, in all sincerity, if I was okay. I smiled, wide, immediately, and played the role I’ve always known how to. Like a sleeper agent, I heard a command. “I’m good,” I lied, my yellow teeth on full display.
She frowned. Leaned closer, down towards my desk. She said, “I’m sorry for asking - you’re just usually so bubbly, and lately, you’re so quiet.”
My mom cried on her birthday, is what I wanted to say. My mom cried on her birthday, and I am burning with guilt. I am here, a million miles away, stuck in this weird dream that is never-ending. My heart is leaping around in my chest, and it all hurts so intimately I don’t know how to calm it. There is so much I’m thinking about, so much I want to say. There are so many dreams I’d like to catch - so many ideas stuck inside me, and I am but a volcano which refuses to erupt. I’m trying to cry, I’d like to tell her, but I can’t. I am guilty. I received the verdict, and I am guilty, but there is no way to pay for my crimes.
I am a fugitive. My entire existence offensive. How incredibly demeaning for me to pretend arrogance, to feign independence, to fake this indifference. I am fully feeling, skin alight with desire and worry. I am everyone’s devotee, and all I think of is them. You. Reader, who are you? I have love for you that is intense. I am striving to please you, even here, even amidst words that are entirely, completely mine. I am so selfish it’s selfless, so desperate for your love that I will do anything. I will do anything. I will do anything. I will do anything for love.
I lived with my mother my whole life. It was her and I alone for most of it, and I learned to grow into that role. I learned to be cognizant of her emotions, though it isn’t entirely her fault, for she is incredibly cognizant of others’ emotions, and I am nothing if not my mothers daughter. She grew up a people pleaser, and so did her sisters, for that is the way for women. My grandmother would often do this thing where she bit the side of her palm, Shush, and her children would fall silent. My mom would tell me, back in her days, you weren’t meant to eat at people’s houses. So when they were invited to dinner parties, my teta would feed all her kids so they’d shake their heads when offered food. Perhaps this is where the shame comes from: the deep, embedded, generational shame. To express hunger, or want, or emotion.
I am a good girl. I eat before I go out to dinner. I listen when I’m told to quiet. And I shake my head, as my mother once did, I say, I am full, thank you, even if I am starving.
And I am usually starving.
Within me I carry decades of my ancestors DNA, of women who only wanted, only craved, and never took. I carry the blood of carefully trained women. And I was born in the 2000s, and grew up in the boom of feminism. I have been urged to take, to display, to be, without remorse. The world has exploded in the past two decades. I am too slow to keep up with modernity, and too quick in shedding the cultural nuances my ancestors grew up with. I want to be like the women on my screen, I do, and yet, my veins burn with a deep instinct to submit. It’s a sin to say this now, but lately, I long to be told what to do.
At family weddings, my mothers’ aunts, wrinkly and aged, sit in a line in their deshdasha’s, and growing up, my cousins and I would giggle at their empty eyes, at their judgmental looks, but every once and a while, they will hear a familiar song and jump up to the floor. They would dance with such freedom, such dexterity, in a way you only see in vintage movies. The crowd would shout for them, and for a moment, they would seem like they were walking on air: all worries, all heaviness, completely eroded within the tune. I realized soon enough that they craved familiarity, and the simple days they grew up with, when the hours were longer and the children still laughed, still cried, without being stifled by bright colors on a rectangle screen. When the dances were taught, beats trained, when everything worked in a certain way. I try to imagine how the world has dimmed around them, contracting and opening into a brand new age of quickness, of limitlessness, of unbearable difference.
I can barely keep up with modernity now - always a new thing, always a different outcome. And sometimes, when I watch them dance, I feel a sense of mourning, a deep sadness for them, that they had to survive such sudden change. Their change was true, damning. The change I grew up with was constant. I know nothing but change. I crave for things to pause. And oh, to be a woman, in a simple life, in a simple time, without the internet urging me to change every moment, begging me to adopt a new style, selling me something new every moment. It is the 21st century, and I can be anything. I have so many options, it’s limitless, it’s infinite. I wish, in a way, for less. I wish, in a way, for the simple day-to-day of a compliant woman. I wish to be the doll of an Arab man’s dreams, in a small home, a schedule chosen for me.
Of course, this is nonsensical. I am lucky: luckier than the women before me. They paved the way for my freedom, but you see, they resent it. They tried to build a better life for us, away from the confines of culture, of patriarchy, of dreaming only of marriage. But they hate it. They see a reflection in us, a glimpse of the life they could have lived, and it breaks their heart. And I see this: I see it and it breaks my heart. I wish, I wish I didn't see it.
my mother grew up in the middle of that vortex. Of the explosion of modernity. She squints at her screen, she taps it, she gets frustrated when instead of teaching her, we just do it. It’s easier to just do it for her. And I can’t help but see how frustrating that is. She experienced the simplicity of life and marriage and housewives and watched it explode and take her children with it. Which is why she cries on her birthday, why when I tell her she’s beautiful she frowns and says, You know, I haven't looked in a mirror for years, and now, I see myself, how I’ve changed, and I don't recognize the reflection. I don't have the heart to tell her I’ve never recognized my reflection, that ever since I gained consciousness my features have been dulled and shaped by filters, but I tell her it is okay to cry. Even if it makes me want to die.
I often wonder, when she was a child, what kind of future she saw for herself. What were her dreams? I am familiar with the state of the world, and understand that I can never know what kind of life my future children will live; but to her, perhaps, she saw a life just like her own, with little technological advancement, with little changes to the world she knew it. And yet. And yet.
I don’t have much words, left. But here is a poem I wrote sometime in 2023:
With love,
Amal
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this really resonated with me, you truly have a talent for writing❤️
the best piece i’ve ever read about the mother/daughter relationship. i lost my dad 5 years ago, and ever since then, the thought of being separated from mom feels like it’s tearing me apart from the inside out. i feel guilty for having fun, going out, or even having dreams - dreams that don’t include her. and nothing kills me more than watching my mother cry. this article made me feel heard and understood.