The last time I carried a life, I got to hear her heartbeat exactly three times before it stopped. It was my fifth pregnancy. After the final appointment, the one where the surgeon furrowed her brow as she looked at the ultrasound, I walked down First Avenue. It was winter. It was the year after the pandemic had begun. I was feral with grief. I snapped at strangers, cried in the bodega, etc. I’d spent a year getting pregnant, then unpregnant. I’d wake in the middle of the night and remember: heartbeat, heartbeat. At times, I felt absurd for my grief. I couldn’t ascertain what the metric of a mother was, what goalpost had to be met. Had I met it? Surely grief like this – love like this – had to be more deeply earned?
Three years later, I went under anesthesia again for another egg retrieval. At this point, I had a baby, nearly 18 months old. The surgery was on 6 October. The fertility doctor was cheery at my bedside when I woke; I now had a new crew of eggs on ice. I took a Lyft home. That afternoon, dazed on the couch, I watched sitcoms. The next day, I watched the news break: one urgent report after the other, in English, in Arabic, repeating the same details in different order: surprise attack, dawn, rockets, metal fence bulldozed, hostages taken, raids, combatants, dozens killed, no, hundreds killed, 16-year siege. Then I watched a city go dark. I watched water get cut. I watched the first bombs fall. I watched the mothers.
In late 2023, Palestinian children held a press conference in their second language, asking the world to stop killing them. Towards the end, a child says: “We invite you to protect us.” I was a relatively new mother, clunky and unsure, griefstruck at the rising death toll. The invitation was as generous as it was devastating. I see the nurturing principle as also one of the saviors of the human race, Audre Lorde once said, whether it occurs in women or whether it occurs in men. I think we are all mothers in that sense … that we do help each other, that we do respond in terms of survival and teaching. The invitation is a portal, a beckoning: to our mother selves.
