mothers and sons

an excerpt from "the bell jar" by sylvia plath

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

antiphon

i'll admit that i've never read more of "the bell jar" than this excerpt. it may be time to change that, because even this short segment is moving and beautiful, and i find that so much of the literature that i give my time over to has little ability to be awe-inspiring, provoke self-interrogation, or confront the sublime. yet this little snatch of text does just that.

over the weekend, i went with my sister to housesit for my parents so they could go to their employee's surprise birthday party a couple states over. on the way we got to talking about our mom, as we often do, and complaining about her. if you could know her, you would know that she is a person that is strongly-opinionated and unafraid to voice those opinions. over the course of my life she has seemed like an unassailable force, impossible to wear down. one thing that she passed down to me was a love of argument, something that we often do about most anything, just as a way to pass the time. one thing about loving to argue is that you need to be able to remove yourself from the thing you're arguing about, else you risk leaving feeling worn down and upset. it's something my mom and i have mastered, so we are able to spar, but that my dad and sister never have over the last 30 years, so they wade into one of our sparring sessions and get left feeling depleted after because something deep, and core, and personal to them has been assaulted while for me and mom it's never that personal. our opinions are, of course, truly held for the most part, though occassionally we might take a devil's advocate position for a bit of fun, but there is a difference to us between holding an opinion and having it be a deep truth of our selves. my mom was studying to be a lawyer before she married my dad and left that behind to move here, meanwhile my dad has degrees in electrical engineering. he's a bit more prosaic and straightforward than my mom and i, who hold multiple, sometimes competing truths with equanimity. we like to toy with and tease out our ideas and see which ones win, whereas he and my sister adopt a method that works and never deviate.

i'm 30, so i've been out of there home for about a decade at this point, not counting breaks from school and holidays. one thing that i've noticed more and more is that my mom has started lashing out more. she's started to go after things that are personal to me, things about myself and who i am, rather than the ideas i hold, to provoke me into arguments. and she's started proactively roping my dad and sister into these games as well, even though they simply are constitutionally not suited for it. and she has pushed away a lot of people that were her friends throughout my childhood, seemingly all due to this predilection for having arguments with it seems has morphed into picking fights. she seems a lot more lonely nowadays. at once, i feel sorrowful for her, and yet i also do think she's dug her own hole in this. we have the same saying in arabic and it's one of her favorites, "man 7afara 7ufratin li-a5ihi waqa3a' fiha."

so, anyways, i tend to think of the fig-tree excerpt in relation to myself in this moment of my life. i feel unaccomplished and i want to change directions but my indecision stops me and precludes paths, even among the constant refrains of "the time will pass anyways." but while my sister and i were talking as we drove home, i thought about it in the terms of my mom (perhaps a more apt subject for plath's poetry with its rooting in womanhood). my parents have spent their entire lives here working for themselves, owning a store, but my sister was telling me that my mom has never drawn a paycheck from it of her own. that she toiled these 30 years, and that yes there was money in the bank account when she needed it, but that despite frequent requests my dad never gave her her own checks to deposit into that account. she wanted the checks so that she would be able to qualify for social security, something she'd be able to cap off this next decade with, but instead without the checks to support eligibility, she feels like she lived a life not her own, one not recorded anywhere, not in a checking history or even in the annals of the federal govenrment. not even as a tick mark or tally for some bean-counter. i don't know. that broke something in me. my mom is a ferocious woman, and i say that as a compliment. to think that she feels so unseen and unaccounted for hurts me, and in a way that i can do nothing to combat, my own feelings or hers.

after 30 years, i feel like she feels a certain numbness. she gave up all those other figs to take the one that was societally most acceptable. hell, she gave up a fig she'd already grabbed, to move halfway across the world after growing up in the midst of civil war and for what? to cease to exist, to be sublimated into the stories of other people without acclaim all her own? only to fill others with a sense of self? and that makes her lash out and it makes it hard to want to be around her and i feel bad but i also feel no desire to make her feel better (though i feel that's partly a case of not even knowing what i could do for her to make this life have felt worth it). so instead she has taken to a series of para-scoial relationships with what i surmise are arab women in similar situations on youtube and reels. women that vlog and feel like friends that cannot be turned away. a few months back we went to visit her home country, and i asked about these women on youtube. my mom told me that they were mostly vloggers about her age who had children about my age, and that she just watches them without making a youtube account. she told me about some drama her vlogger par excellence was in at the moment, and expressed her wish that even though she didn't have a youtube acccount and didn't want to make one (valid), if she were to make one it would only be so that she could tell this woman to stay strong and to not back down from these bullies that were disparaging her and tarnishing her name.

that hurts. i know loneliness. i feel it now. i don't have any friends. it hurts to see my mom in the same place. i can deal with my loneliness, i worry that she can't. i want to do things to show that i care and help fight her loneliness with at least a bit more communication from her child, but it is so much easier to love the thought of her than the person she is now. i wonder if she was always this person and that i have just grown my own way and our varied intolerances have estranged us, or if we both grew away from one another, each along our own path, though we have ended estranged regardless. and the intolerances are small, like i haven't been able to be home a single time in the past decade without her commenting on my weight, or other things that feel like small nitpicks like that, but they truly ruin the entire trip for me, even if it's the last thing she says to me before i pack up and leave. i don't know how to approach her without hurting myself in the process. can a rose be so beautiful that it is worth gripping tightly in both hands despite the thorns? i love my mom so much, she has really had the biggest hand in making me who i am. i wish that person had the capacity to make her happy now.

coda i: an excerpt from "black dahlia" by angel haze

i don't know / maybe i would write you a happy ending / i would rearrange the pieces to your sad beginning / i would put you far away from the decaying roots that bore you / and let you experience all the ways that happiness could bloom before you / or maybe i'm naive... / maybe i'm just a kd who thought that if she could plant a seed / it would somehow grow inside you

spent so much of my time wishing you were different / but reality is that life can't never be with provision / but if i could wish for one thing, i'd go back and i'd fix it / i'd tackle all your obstacles and kill 'em with precision / and better the intentions of every single person / who'd play a part in you learning exactly what your worth is / i'd shower you with purpose, i'd wipe hate off the surface / i'd reshape all your pain and make it fucking worth it / no more feeling worthless, no more fucking searching / no more of that fraud shit, nobody else could hurt you / yeah, said nobody else could hurt you / and if they ever tried to i'd wipe 'em from the earth too / cuz i know that you hurting baby, i know that you tired too / i know that you been running from everything that's behind you / i know you've been burying everything deep inside oyu / i can see it killing you, wish that i could revive you / but i'm stuck sitting in this time frame / struggling with my demons and playing these stupid mind games / one day it could get better, maybe it could get better / maybe we could change shit, no more inclement weather / know you hated your mom, know it went through your mind / you were just like me, wish that you had more time / to see life from a different angle, wrestle with a different angel / wouldn't lose your wings and fall from heaven lik a cliffhanger

coda ii

in lebanese arabic, we say to2borni. literally "you bury me," but really a plaintive plea for the hearer to outlive the speaker, an exhortation unto the universe to preserve a child, that it would be unjust for a child to predecease their parents. how do we work backwards from that to the concept of a child not wishing their worst trials on their parent, a repudiation of unbroken cycles? why are we both going through the same thing at the same time in two very different points of our lives. if i could figure it out and stop it for her, then could i not stop it in my own life? because otherwise i feel this way now and i'll feel the same 30 years from now.