A Syrian Mother's Dream

Her name was Fatima, or as her children called her, Fatoom. She was known to be one of the most beautiful girls in a small village in Syria: blonde hair and green eyes with fair skin. Like many girls in her village, she dreamed about marriage and of having children. When that fantasy became reality, it took less than ten months for the birth of her first daughter. In a time where boys were preferred, Fatoom was pressured by the town to try again quickly. She attempted a second time. A third. Fourth. Fifth. Sixth. Seventh. Her value as a woman was reduced as she became known as "the mother of girls."

When Fatoom learned of her eighth pregnancy, she anticipated more verbal lashes from family and neighbors. The pressure was too daunting she could not sleep for days. She tried many things to detach this baby from her body. But the little boy inside only grasped stronger. After seven girls, her first son was born: Yahia.

In a culture where superstition surfaced, Fatoom believed that the jealousy of other women, women who insisted that she continue trying for a boy, would destroy her green-eyed son. She extended her reputation as being a "mother of girls" by allowing Yahia's golden blonde hair reach his back and flow down to his waist for seven years. To the village, he was just another daughter, Number Eight, until she cut his hair and distributed its weight in gold for charity.

Fatoom taught all ten of her children to serve the earth and feed the hungry. She shared the story of how her mother never locked their door in the village because if someone ever tried to steal, it probably meant he needed to. Her illiterate hands whipped them with the hose used to wash the balcony if they failed to do well in school. She was a pillar of strength, a leader in her home, and a follower of her own wisdom: God gave you two ears and one mouth to talk less and listen more.

Yahia was a bright student and scored very high on his high school exam, landing him into first year of medical school. Fatoom took care of her children. She cooked for them. She washed their laundry. She disciplined them if they fell off track. She gifted them her heart and health all at the expense of them earning an education, something that was not available to her. She was proud of Yahia’s promising medical future, proud that he would be the child to take care of her when she became older, and proud that he clung to her womb when she once tried to slowly erase him from life.

When her son graduated medical school, and moved to Beirut for residency, Fatoom’s vision of his future in Syria, by her side, was invaded. For no crime other than wanting to live in a free and democratic Syria, Yahia was harassed by the bloodthirsty Syrian Secret Service in Lebanon and disappeared. When Fatoom learned of his eclipse, she became physically paralyzed for three months until she received word that he was alive and had escaped Beirut. Just like that, her “eighth daughter” was gone.

Fatoom held on to her dream of welcoming her son back into his country, back into his city, and right into his very own home. Every time the door bell rang, she glued her eyes to the door and prayed it would be her son. “I want to hear you climb up the stairs, hold your hand against my face, and smell you before I die,” she said every time she spoke to him. Even after her stroke, destroying her of the ability to lift a spoon into her mouth, raise a cup to her lips, or elevate her own neck, she held on to that dream. She survived off the compassion of her children and grandchildren for six years. Her nine other children were by her side serving her, especially her two adult daughters who never married. But her son, her Yahia, was now only a memory, a picture in a frame with his wife and five children in Florida. She held on to her dream of playing with his now fading black hair while his head rested on her lap, of boiling him tea to help him study at night, of asking him to deliver homemade pita bread to hungry families. She held on to her dream for 31 years and two months.

On October 4, 2010, Yahia arranged for a grand family reunion in Mersin, Turkey. Everyone would attend: father, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, grandchildren, and even Fatoom’s sister. Fatoom’s 80 year old veined body regained little movement in her legs. Her reversed lips turned into a crescent. Her dry eyes no longer itched and a rain of tears fell down her face. Her concrete voice found laughter. Every family member in Aleppo witnessed the changes. She decided to wear a pink, long-sleeved dress. She insisted on purchasing new shoes even though her legs failed to carry her.

On Wednesday, October 18, four days before the reunion, Fatoom Skyped with her son in the United States. She giggled her way through the video-chat, and continued to tell her children to make sure the bus would not leave her behind. Whenever anyone came to visit Fatoom as she sat in the living room wearing her new shoes, she directed them to the balcony and asked if the bus had arrived.

The day her son left the US on October 22, and flew to Turkey, Fatoom’s body felt warm. Her two adult daughters that still lived at home decided to take her to al-Shahabaa Hospital, only a few miles from their apartment. Fatoom refused to go at first. She was terrified of not returning in time to catch the bus. As she laid on her hospital bed, draped in her pink gown with her feet tucked into her new brown shoes, the doctor entered as her state of awareness began to decline.

          “Yahia,” she said in a small voice. She took a deep, long pause as she felt her chest pump oxygen.
          “How did you come? Are you safe? Are you sure the Mukhabarat are not following you?”

          The doctor pulled down his glasses, looked at Fatoom’s second daughter, and lifted his right brow.

          Fatoom inched her neck forward. “Let me touch your face.”

          The doctor slowly pulled himself closer to his patient.

          Fatoom took his hand and held it to her face. “Ashhadu an La illaha illa’Allah, wa ashhadu anna  
          Muhammad rasoolullah.”

She continued to repeat what every Muslim is taught to say during their last seconds of life, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger,” until the last breath was expelled from her mouth.

Meanwhile, Yahia was at the airport in Istanbul, showered with fresh cologne, waiting for his 4 AM flight to Antakya, the closest airport to Mersin. He sat in the blue airport chair with his gaze fixed into the air. The smile on his face was so large as he imagined himself kissing his mother’s hand, and thinking of things to say that would make her laugh and lift her spirits. His international cell phone rang and interrupted his daydreaming. It was his eldest son in Philadelphia. Words struggled to come out of his son’s mouth. There was a pause. And then it was silent.

          Yahia subtracted the smile off his face and cleared his throat. “Did your grandmother die?”

          His son let out a gush of breath. “Yes.” It was silent for a few more seconds. “Athamma Allahu
          ajrak. May God reward you greatly for your patience during this loss.”

Eleven months after the people of Syria peacefully stood up to demand freedom on March 15, 2011, mothers are still watching their daughters and sons, both children and adults, be brutally murdered. Sometimes the fight gets so dark before the birth of a new dawn. That sun will rise soon, and lift the curtain to thousands of mothers waiting to reunite with their children, and prevent future mothers from ever having to return to God before touching the faces of their loved ones, or ever having to kiss goodbye the faces of their children who should still be alive 

Finding My Syrian-American Identity

My father always said, “You don’t understand the price of freedom.” But I know I understand the price of being robbed of my right to grow up around grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I know the price of growing up nation-less. The price of having no national identity. The cost of not knowing where I am from.

I am the daughter of a mother wanted for execution in Syria for simply owning a dream to think freely, and of a father who would not bow to the country’s criminal silence. They escaped in 1980, reunited in Jordan, moved to Iraq, United States, Canada, then once again back to the United States. They stamped each country with the birth of a child, clinging to their dream of returning to Syria. I was born in Montreal, Canada.

As a child, I was Syrian. But as a teenager, I was lost. In America, I wasn’t American. On my two visits to Syria, I wasn’t Syrian. I couldn’t own pride to a country that stripped my mother and father from the right to live or the right to return. I didn’t understand the fear, the silence, the poverty, or why my grandfather hung a two foot portrait of the President Hafez Assad right above his television. When my 13 year old cousin pointed his finger at me and accused his uncle, my father, for being too much of an arrogant doctor in America to even pay a small visit to his family in Syria, I opened my mouth to unleash my rage only to find my grandfather’s strong palm glue itself to my lips.

At 24, after I completed Graduate school, still without an identity or nationality to boast, I decided that I would embrace the identity of being an “American,” and accept my Syrian heritage as something that belonged to my parents, something of the past. I slowly erased that image from my memory.

After the revolution in Tunisia dominoed its way to Syria, and peaceful protestors were instantly captured, detained, and had their hearts foam out of their mouths, I didn’t understand why my mother and father were depriving themselves of sleep at night. I was offended that when I flew across the country to visit them over the holidays, they were not emotionally with me as we sipped our nightly tea. They were glued to their computer screen at home, signed into Skype, talking, arranging, organizing, doing anything and everything within their human power to help the people of Syria. They even traveled to Turkey and lived with 8,000 Syrian refugees in Antakya for one month as an in-house doctor and emotional supporter sleeping in their tents and using their overcrowded toilets.   

For 11 months, I prayed for the dead, the detained, and the tortured. I followed the news for ten days then abandoned it for twenty. I wanted to put this past behind me. I wanted to convince myself that there was nothing more I could possibly do. But as the symphony of protestors grew louder and stronger, bouncing off high concrete walls, over a web of narrow ancient alleys every time a child was sniped, a woman beaten, and a man burned to death only after breaking his back and slicing off his fingers, my heart began to feel alive. I began to see a different purpose to this life. Was it simply to get an education, dine at fancy restaurants, travel, have children, and move into a large home while the blood of others gushed into rivers, or children die of starvation? Where were the Syrians finding the courage to persist? Where had their fear and silence gone? I no longer wanted to continue my perfectly played out movie, or worry about things that really didn’t matter.

My numbness to the image of tortured body after body after body for the past 11 months burst. I finally understood my parents’ overworking their mind, body, and heart. I understood how they went two days without feeding their stomachs because they had no time to stop. No interest.  They had no time to even grow hungry. My parents outran death, literally, when 40,000 others couldn’t.  For 26 years they told me and my siblings that this life was only a journey, and the purpose of that journey was to make it to heaven. “Never get too comfortable,” my father said. “Be the last to eat and the first to serve.” Just as my parents began to grow numb to the idea of ever returning to Syria, watching the last flicker of fire fade, a few boys in the village of Daraa relit the match.

I am not the child who was brought to America to have a better life. I am not the Syrian daughter who came because her parents wanted to practice medicine and flourish financially. I am the child of a man who miraculously escaped in the trunk of a Beetle, and helped by a Lebanese priest flee the country. I am the daughter of a woman who was grabbed by her neighbor inches before entering into her apartment to warn her that the Syrian Secret Police were inside waiting for her. She watched her two roommates be hauled into Mukhabarat vehicles, then thrown into torture cells for nine years. I am the granddaughter of a man shot by the Mukhabarat, and later killed. I am the granddaughter of two women whose dying wishes were to see their daughter and their son in Syria, embrace their hand, and hold it against their own face while they ejected their last breath.

  

That is who I am. Only now am I learning to adopt and combine the qualities that make America so great, and the qualities that charge Syria with spirit. Only now do I realize that my lost identity, split into two countries, symbolize who I am. I know that I am proud to have grown up American and free, to have been educated, to ask questions, seek answers, sleep at night comfortably, proud to have a childhood. I am proud to see the men, women, and even boys and girls fight for freedom, fight for the silence of their parents and grandparents. I am proud to own Syrian blood. I am proud to stand up for truth and speak against injustice, something my parents were able to teach me because we were in America, and something I witnessed my Syrian brothers and sisters die for. I am proud to be Syrian-American and American-Syrian. And in the end, this life is really only a journey; and my journey is to hold my free mind in one hand and courage in the other, and live for something worth living for.