I look back at the thirteen-year-old girl in this photo, this totally normal, average looking girl on the cusp of teenagehood, and I almost can’t remember why she hated herself so much. Where are the giant fat rolls that she thought she had? Where is the hideous chubby face with the double chin and where are the jiggling thunder thighs and the stocky cankles and whatever other insane bodily flaw we’ve invented?
I can’t believe that what I’m seeing, captured for all time with undeniable photographic evidence, is the same person who was looking at herself in the mirror, wondering if someone could magically chop three inches of fat off her thighs.
Because what I see is lovely and awkward and fabulous in her flares and blue-foam platform shoes and sunglasses, totally average and normal and healthy. (If you’re wondering how foam platforms could be considered normal, just remember it was 1998.)
I spent so many years following just utterly hating myself. Scrutinizing everything about my body; agonizing over every detail: the stretch marks on my boobs, the flab around my biceps, the amount of fat that would smush out the to sides when I bent my knees. I hated everything about myself. And recently something has occurred to me: it’s because I thought I was supposed to.
I thought I was supposed to hate myself because I wasn’t super skinny, or didn’t have long legs or an Audrey Hepburn neck or shiny straight hair. I thought this, was convinced of it, actually, for most of my life. And I got fatter, I think, because of it.
And then, sometime in my mid-to-late twenties, I started to realize I didn’t hate myself. I actually kind of liked myself, even. “Okay, Saadia, you’re always going to be a little fat, but you’ve got that hourglass thing going for ya, and also who cares?” started to become my tune. But I didn’t totally believe it until – cue dramatic “we knew it was coming” music – until I became a mother. And my body was shit during pregnancy, but damn did it still grow an incredible baby. And my body was shit right up til labor, but then – damn, it was gold. It was miraculous. It was all strength and beauty and holy hell am I in awe when I think back on all that it was then.
And now this body has a daughter. A little girl who might be lanky like her daddy or chubby like her mama, or something totally her own. And I want her to feel nothing but love for the warm tiny machine that holds her soul. I want her to feel inspired by every nerve ending and blood vessel and hair follicle. She inspires me, and my body, once hated, now inspires me to. My body brought her body, every cell of it, into this world.
So I don’t really give a shit anymore if my ass is wide or my stomach is flabby, because this body is mine. It holds all my secrets, all my wishes, all my loves. It’s mine. And it doesn’t belong to anyone else.
I just wish I had known that when I was an adorable thirteen-year-old. I wish I hadn’t waited so long for someone to tell me I could love myself. I wish I could have just done it.
Long after we should be asleep, her hands are like arcade game claws, grasping for my hands, clutching the air with determined desire but a lack of precision.
We play like this for quite some time, and I lament the fact that it’s been two days since I last snipped her razor-like baby talons. I never knew baby nails grew so fast. Her grip is so strong these days, and she’s gotten less robotic in her movements, despite the fact that her arms reach out for me, all angles and starts-and-stops, still. Yet somewhere in the last few days she’s begun to sway her arms, rather than drop them; to wait to grab the prize with her long fingers, fixing her eyes for a moment, before making the dive.
Sometime, so quietly, so without circumstance – she changed again.
As I write, I keep being reminded of the e.e. cummings poem that begins,
since feeling is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
Somehow it resonates with me when I think of trying to capture my birth experience. There were so many words unspoken during my labor because feeling was always first (and last, and everything in between), and yet there are so many words here. I fear that no matter how hard I try, they will never kiss you. Here I am, trying anyway. Continue reading →
Having a labor that initiates itself 5 days before you actually meet your baby makes it hard to remember everything as it happened. First, there are too many days and so much waiting that it becomes difficult to remember how you filled your time. And second, by the time you actually meet your baby, you are so tired from working for so long, that it is difficult to remember the details. The things you keep replaying over and over again are the feeling of that final push, knowing you will see your baby in just a moment; the feeling of baby on your chest; that feeling of “it’s finally over” paired with “this has just begun” that leaves you bereft of speech. The rest is blurred in a haze of too many hours, coming back to you in images and sensations. Or, that’s what it was like for me. But that’s the end of the story, so where to begin?
Kiran’s birth story doesn’t begin with water breaking, contractions starting, or anything physical. Her true birth story would have to encompass all of Patrick and my story – our relationship, how we met, the last ten years of our lives; all the stops and starts along the way. Those stops and starts sent deep reverberations into how Kiran came to us. But her story also goes beyond that to how we got to be where we are. It includes our parents’ stories, our grandparents’ stories – stories of courtships, migration, things lost and things found. Without those things – the love letters Patrick and I wrote to each other from different states, different continents; the choices our families made to come to New York, leave New York – without those stories, how would Kiran have come to be? Her birth is tied to that history irrefutably. My heart is full thinking of how Patrick and I will tell Kiran all of those stories big and little, weaving the fables of our family for the rest of her life. But those stories are for another time. So I will instead find the thread of how Kiran began to come into this world, how she slowly, slowly, slowly descended, and how hard she and I worked for each other. That is the story I will tell. And I will tell it for Kiran.
I’m trying not to think of next year; trying not to make a decision about the trajectory of my life; trying not to look forward, all so that I won’t look back. I’m just not ready for it.
Today I packed up my classroom, room 208. I remember so well the feeling of unpacking it, of walking the four endless flights of stairs in the sticky August heat with box after box after box; setting down each one atop another desk with P. looking at me, exhaustedly after each trip; the sweet, unidentifiable aroma of the second floor in the warmth, a smell that I now know my dear friend Linda is responsible for with her incense cubes.
Unpacking
I remember fasting and feeling desperate for water as I blew dust like dandelion snow and sneezed for minutes afterward, particles stuck in my throat and nose. One of my students would sneeze like that each day of the year, and I would always think I just never got those back shelves quite clean enough.
I remember the feeling of nervous excitement, of anticipation; the feeling of pride as I hung the painting of the deer, adjusted the placement of my plants, clicked on my two lamps, and watched P. drill holes into my closet door to install the full-length mirror. (A mirror that would become famous among my students – I would often have them come in to “check themselves out” between classes and I would shoo them away, telling them to BE ON TIME! Several students told me that I’d see a lot of them next year, as I “have the best mirror in the school.”)
Ragamuffins no more!
I remember the musty, yellow smell of the ragamuffin books on the one shelf in my room, the feeling that I needed to bring them back to life, bring the room back to life, bring myself into life. My new life. A life in which I would spend most of my week in that very room, with its cornflower walls and squeaky ceiling. I imagined myself clicking the lamplight on in the early winter mornings in my room, sitting at my desk grading papers, or planning, or eating my daily apple; or, simply being.
But I don’t remember the winter, don’t remember the cold weather. At least not by smell. I always say that smells change throughout the seasons; talk about how my parents’ home smells deliciously summerish when it gets warm, a smell that may be old wood expanding in the humidity, or allergens, or sweat, but to me means freedom and peace and long, languid afternoons spent floating in the pool and eating pretzels with pruney fingers – pretzels that always taste better because of the chlorine residue and the fact that mom put them out in the white metal bowl with the blue trim. But there’s nothing that reminds me of winter in room 208. Not even those lamps with their 60-watt bulbs softening the bleached fluorescence in the room, nor my winter boots sitting in puddles of former snow near the radiator, nor my thick socks on my curled up toes; not even the asbestos tiles on the floor. I did sit at my desk on those winter mornings, grading by lamplight, but that’s not what I think of when I think of my room, of my BKHS.
Just your average Wednesday morning
What I do think of are those humid, humid, beyond humid afternoons, my brow accumulating sweat despite the ferociously loud air conditioner (far more bark than bite, let me tell you), and the peace of organizing, of sorting, of putting things where they belong in my little world. Of finding treasures, like a lock of baby hair in a sock drawer: the letters my students wrote me on the first day of school, or the remnants of school days past; the bubbled handwriting of a now fully-grown student, or the forgotten resume of a young teacher with boyish annotations. All these I inspect, smile at, regard as sacred.
My little corner of the world
I wonder what of myself will be left behind when I leave. Who are we in pieces? What pieces of myself will remain and what will the person who finds them think of me? Will they find my lessons and think me creative, or neurotic, or neither? Or perhaps my letter to my students and think me sentimental, or devoted? Or perhaps they will find the letter I wrote to them, whoever they are, taped to the top of the little drawer in my desk, and understand.
What I do think of are the sounds of boisterous laughter echoing throughout my room when I have said something “corny,” or when someone has made a joke. What I do think of are the moments when I had to cover my face with a book because I was laughing so hard (usually trying to conceal my amusement at an off-color comment). What I do think of are my students skipping down the hallways after finding out their grades on the Regents, or having me call their mother to tell them that, YES, they passed! And yes, you should be so proud. What I do think of are the moments I felt my eyes well up during writes, and then spilling over when my students read about their families, and the homes they have left, and their broken hearts, and their endless, endless love. What I do think of are the moments when my stomach would flip-flop over and over, a student in my face and challenging me, and me, fighting with myself internally. What I do think of are the millions of moments spent sharing life with my kindred spirit. What I do think of are the looks on the faces of all of my students on the last day of class, when we realized that we had made it. We had made it to the end, together.
We began in a circle on an 80-degree day, and ended in a circle on an 80-degree day.
Last day of school, 2011
And I packed and packed today, carrying box after box down the four endless flights of stairs, joking about the elevator being broken, as on the first day of school, packing my things into our hunter green Honda Civic, feeling like I was moving, but not knowing where from or to. As we pulled away from the school, I didn’t look too hard, didn’t want to say goodbye, didn’t need to. It’s not goodbye, really. Only goodbye to this year, only goodbye to the Saadia of this year. So I did not roll down the window and rest my head on the door as I watched Longwood Avenue recede into the distance. Rather, I sang to the music in my head, looked long at the man sitting next to me, the one who was with me on the first day, and will be on the last, and was in love. With the summer, with a teaching life, with the person that teaching makes me. A better person than who I am without.
So I will not look forward today, nor back. Instead, I will stop for a moment, and look around.
my students asked me today why, when I ask them to write for full presence, I also ask them to write for the full time given, and what, if they have nothing to say, I expect them to write. I told them about writing to think. how important that is. I told them about the times when I sometimes lie awake at night, unsure of the “why” I’m lying awake, but completely conscious of the fact that I am, as it happens, utterly awake, and generally holding a heavy stone in my stomach. I told them about how in those moments I take out some pen and paper and write, steam of consciousness, not knowing what’s going to come out, only knowing that above all else, I must. keep. writing. they didn’t know what stream of consciousness was, so I explained it to them. I shared with them the essence of what I wrote SOC last time I did, and they asked me to read it to them, as though I would have it, as though I live in the closet at school, as though the closet is like mary poppins’ brocaded bag; stick your arm in and everything you could possibly want it right there. unfortunately, I don’t live in that world, or, as it happens, the closet at the back of my classroom, so I couldn’t share it. I told them I would and I also realized simultaneously how completely impossible it is to give into ones self-conciousness as a teacher. I can’t count on my fingers and toes how many times I’ve given into that hollow self-doubt and reticence, shielded myself from the monster that would surely come out of its hiding place the moment I came out of mine. but it’s funny being a teacher, because you can’t recede. you cannot turn off with a slight internal whir and go blank, or bleary, or bye-bye. you have to keep going, forge ahead. so when your students ask you to read something you wrote stream-of-consciousness last Tuesday night at 3:30 am, you say “of course I will” and you pretend to be brave because you hope that in pretending to be brave, you will model the bravery you want your students to internalize for themselves, and maybe, just maybe some of them will be brave enough to write without having a topic and write without knowing where it will go and write and share afterwards, and just maybe, maybe you might actually be brave yourself.
If you were a pre-teen girl living in the US in the 90’s, chances are you read Seventeen Magazine. (Okay, that’s not what one would call a “cold, hard fact,” but let’s go with it.) If you were one of those girls, you probably remember the TraumaRama section that inhabited the first several pages of every issue, featuring readers’ most mortifying anecdotes, which made you think: “Thank God that’s not me!” Or, conversely, as was my usual response: “Um, that’s supposed to be traumatic? Try walking a mile in my chuck taylors.”
But despite all the traumaramatic moments I experienced in my (pre)-adolescent life, what happened to me today is probably the worst.
Let’s back up for a moment, though: I haven’t shared this yet, but last Monday, I got a job. Yay!, right? I’m completely jazzed about it—it’s at a wonderful school (albeit over an hour from our house), and I’m pretty much loving everything about it—from the staff to the mission to the curriculum and flexibility. Awesomeness all around.
This week we’ve got lots of PD (professional development) stuff going on, and today was the first day of new-teacher orientation. Though I’ve been experiencing a lot of anxiety about this school year and how little time I have to get everything sorted for myself (I am ALL about organization and preparedness—like, overly so), I was actually feeling good about the whole day.
(You know it’s coming….)
Until.
After we had all of our morning meetings, the time came to go and meet some of our incoming 9th graders and their families at a lunch gathering. So, we filed out of the classroom we had been working in and all took a bathroom break right outside the main office. I was last in line, because I was being a chatty-Cathy, and vowed to rushy-rush so that I wouldn’t keep anyone waiting.
I suppose that was the mistake I made. Because, in my hurry, I apparently didn’t caress the finicky lock to its heart’s content, and as a result, it only half-latched.
I sat down on the toilet, and about 30 seconds later, I heard a voice outside the door and the turning of a knob. I don’t know if I went mute in that moment—either that, or he couldn’t hear me yelling, “no, No, NO! I’m in here!!!!” as I squirmed into a ball to preserve my modesty—but my principal, yes, my principal, was standing at the open door.
Everything moved in slow motion and there was a distinct and harrowing delay between the opening of the door and the moment he realized I was in the bathroom—he was having a conversation with someone in the hall—and perhaps if I had thought more quickly, or, as P. put it a few days ago, if I “actually had reflexes,” I could I have made a jump for it and pulled the door back shut, but I didn’t, and my principal saw me sitting on the toilet on the first official day of my career as a high school English teacher.
I really don’t think it gets much worse than that.
All I could say afterwards was, “I think I want to die,” over and over again. And I did. In fact, I was fairly catatonic for quite some time there. Luckily, however, I didn’t see my principal for the rest of the day, and hopefully by tomorrow we’ll all have been mortified into silence. For now, however, I share with the world the dangers of an improperly locked door, and the calamity that is, and has ever been, my life.
When I moved into my apartment five years ago, I didn’t go into the yard much. It was overgrown and unkempt, as the previous tenants didn’t care for it except to create a space for two plastic chairs where they would sit during the summer to drink their PBRs. They had allowed the space to become an uninhabitable, weed-filled, creature-haven. I still remember the day we cut down all the growth along the fence, the tens of tiny field mice scurrying about, and I, in my panic, trying to block the door to the house so none would enter.
So when I took it upon myself to reclaim the territory, it was with much tenacity that I began—there was no other choice. I pulled hundreds, perhaps thousands of weeds. I bagged heaps of garbage. My hands were calloused and sore, back achey, and body covered in insect bites. I tilled soil and planted seeds. Bought shrubs and perennial flowers and planted them in the freshly turned earth.
I discovered the remnants of a fig tree fighting to survive.
I had never had any experience with fig trees—or figs—before. I wasn’t particularly interested in them. But when I saw the once stocky trunk, now gnarled with the teeth marks of a dog, the shoots emerging from it, fighting for their lives, I found myself inspired.
I learned that the tree had once been large and bountiful—my neighbor to the West, a 90-year-old man we call Doc, told me. It had been like his, but for the color figs (Doc’s white, ours purple). Doc’s tree is enormous; its broad leaves create delicious shade, shelter for mama cats nursing their babes, and, until Doc fell ill last year, hugely plump white figs. Last summer, his daughter told me that though the tree produced hundreds upon hundreds of figs, not one had turned ripe that year. I was not shocked by the news, as she was. I had seen Doc, for three years of springs, summers, and falls, out in the yard every day, pruning and tending and watering and caring. Then, suddenly, he was house-ridden. The figs would not ripen without him, and I understood their reasoning.
our fig tree, 2006
When I came upon that trunk, I was resolved to tend to it; to bring it back to health. By late in the spring, the tree had already perked up; with the additional space, lack of weeds fighting it for the same water, it had sent out growth several more feet into the air. I was encouraged.
That fall I had no figs. Figs were forming, though not early enough to reach maturity before the frost. “No matter,” I thought. “Next year.”
our fig tree, 2007
The next year, P. eagerly helped me tend to my fig tree. We started in early spring, with the same routine—extra weeding, giving it space, monitoring it. I continued to work on the yard; my shrubs grew, flowers bloomed, I hung the prayer flags I had bought on my trip to Nepal, P. and I bought a kiddie-pool to cool us off on the particularly hot summer days. That was the year it became our fig tree. And by the end of September, we ate our first figs off the tree. Just a handful, but they were cherished.
The following year, our fig obsession grew. In April, during P. and my trip to the Balkans, we spotted hundreds of fig trees—both cultivated in city and countryside alike—but also growing wildly, as weeds. We found them growing in the hills of Macedonia, in the cracks of war-demolished rubble heaps in Bosnia, in the backyards of houses everywhere. P. knew enough about fig trees to know how hearty they are; how they can grow simply by having one of their branches placed in dirt. So we took some cuttings. We have fig trees from Mostar and Ohrid growing in our yard now, too, thanks to that trip. That year, we had figs at the beginning of September, and more of them. We shared what we had with my mother, who loves figs, and it felt good. Our garden was growing too, as P. and I cleared more of the yard for planting. We grew tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, strawberries, spring peas, runner beans—P. is a prolific gardener, and helped transform our yard.
In 2009, our yard was worlds away from what it had been just three summers prior. P. and I decided that we wanted to make more of the yard planting space, so we demolished a 12’ x 12’ concrete portion of the backyard to plant grass. We did this, with the help of our friend/roommate Judy, with just one sledgehammer, one crowbar, and our six hands. We carried out the debris ourselves, to a dumpster we had rented and parked in front of the house. In the process, we discovered 5 giant conch shells, a cast iron bathtub, numerous coffee cans and mussel shells, a toy soldier, several rooms’ worth of tin ceiling, lamp bases, piping, chicken wire, and a rusted revolver. Yes, you heard me correctly.
The fig tree grew (and grew and grew), and in, what seems a matter of moments, came to expand over the grass we had just planted. That August, we harvested enough figs to fill us, enough to share with our families and our friends, and celebrated it as victory in figginess. P. made a batch of rustic fig preserves, I made a fig crostata, and we ate and were merry.
our fig tree, 2010
This year, the harvest has been earlier, and far more plentiful than ever before. For the last week, every day, I have been going out to the yard with a bowl (or pail!) and collecting figs from the ever-widening branches, some of which I can no longer even reach.
in the middle.
I crawl into the middle of the tree, stepping lightly over lower branches, moving stealthily towards the ripest figs. P. has been gone for most of this year’s harvest, and it’s become a bit of a meditative ritual for me over the last seven days. I think of others who have come before me.
I think of the old Italian man who planted my fig tree in the 1930s, how he must have labored with the same care P. and I do, with the same care Doc used to; imagine him testing the dusty puce figs for ripeness, checking them for nectar, gingerly plucking them from the tree, tasting one, two, three, bringing them in to his wife, the two of them eating them together, she later cooking with them some recipe that would remind them of their home across the world.
fig harvest 2010, day 1
Because figs are special. They can survive the journey.
fig harvest 2010, day 2
I imagine my grandparents, my great-grandparents eating figs—generations ago in Sicily and Calabria and Naples—as children from the tree, or in the same kind of preserves P. made that time, or baked in dough made by their mothers, or later, in homemade fig wine. I don’t know if they really ate figs like this, but whenever I’m at my fig tree, I feel closer to them in the imagining of it.
I am building memories out of figs.
fig harvest 2010, day 3
And I am also building thankfulness out of them. For everyday, as I stand, enclosed by the prolific branches and leaves and fruit, I thank God from the center of my being for creating the fig tree’s plenty; for creating fruit, for creating figs. Thank God for my bowls filled, brimming with fruit, and the fact that it was grown, in my soil, loved by mine and P.’s hands.
fig harvest 2010, day 4
I think of the water washing away the farms in Pakistan, washing away families’ livelihoods with it. I think of how they may miss the planting for next year, how they will not have plenty, they will not know fullness, they will only know scarcity, need. I think of all this, my heart heavy, and protect each fig as if it were my last. I bake furiously as to not allow even one fig to perish, and when I find that several forgotten ones have grown a layer of fur approximating that of a young mouse, I am disappointed in myself.
fig harvest 2010, day 5
I am learning to be less of a consumer, and more of a creator, conserver. I have made a promise to myself that I will not buy a penny’s worth of anything I do not need, at least for the 30 days of Ramadan, and if I can extend this fast from buying further, I will. Short of food, I do not need anything, really.
I have begun taking cold showers, and have been relishing them. I feel the coolness running down my extremely mosquito-bitten legs and feel relief. I think about the fact that I have running water every day, more plenty that I enjoy without having done anything to achieve it. I see the power of our fig tree—we created whatever we consume there, or, at least, revived it. (I fancy us just one generation in its long, long life.) I see the power in not just taking in this world—I don’t want to be a taker, and my fig tree reminds me of that each and every day. There are ways to give.
At my aunt’s house, having just broken fast, I watch my family eating the fig cake I made. I am thankful for that moment, too.
I’ve been trying, for the last month and a half, to get my sister to post, publicly, what she wrote the day after we found out Data Darbar was bombed, and finally that day has come.
Whereas I found myself unable to put words to the ways I was feeling, she poignantly and eloquently cut through the pain and wrote something beautiful and incisive. I am proud to share it with you now.
saadia says 