My Accidental Jihad (5 page)

II

Foreigners

O
n New Year’s Day, a doctor reached into my abdomen and scooped my furry black-haired daughter out in one palm like she was a kitten. Her tiny limbs dangled from the doctor’s fingers as she blinked in the fluorescent light of the operating room, looking as if she’d been rudely awoken from a deep and beautiful dream. I had been expecting the drama of motherhood to begin with a newborn squall, that first sound defining our new roles—her need, my response—but she did not enter this world with a cry. Instead, she blinked and rolled her big brown eyes around the room. Her silence was unsettling; the curtains had parted on motherhood’s first act, but the star seemed to have forgotten her first line. I was momentarily frozen, suspended between before and after. She looked as shocked as I was about our comfortable worlds being yanked out from under us.

I approached mothering with the zeal of a new convert, hanging unbleached cloth diapers out to dry in the sun, pressing steamed organic vegetables into ice cube trays, turning up the volume on Beethoven to broaden her tiny mind. I studied the latest parenting scripture and sat in a circle on the floor with other women who had recently been born again into motherhood, having pious discussions while our children played with wooden toys beside us. We were passionate and uncompromising about our beliefs. Co-sleeping, extended nursing, and toddler hour at the public library were holy; baby formula, epidurals, and Disney were evil. We glowed with the certainty of the chosen ones and spoke in hushed and sympathetic tones about the unsaved—those who had not been able to conceive, whose sad stories affirmed our own blessings.

When I was growing up our yellow Labrador, Sophie, had a litter of puppies. The night she delivered her pups, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the soft click of her paws across the linoleum floor. She laid her wet nose on the edge of my bed, nuzzled purposefully beneath my covers, and snorted. She sniffed a pile of clothes on the floor in my closet and then left as abruptly as she had come. The next morning, when I woke up, I found her at the foot of my parents’ bed with seven tiny seal-like puppies in a squirming pile beside her engorged nipples. She looked exhausted but serene, and licked her new puppies with a steady, focused intent.

She started out as such a dedicated mother, rarely leaving the basement room in which her puppies were contained. When she briefly left them to eat or to relieve herself, she trotted up and down the stairs like she was late for an appointment, and in response to sounds only she could hear, her head jerked back over her shoulder toward her litter. At the slightest yelp, she’d spin around on all fours and leap like a jackrabbit back in the direction of her pups. But as they grew, her once-lustrous yellow coat turned dull and patchy and her furry brow wrinkled as if she were perpetually worried. No matter how many hours she lay in abject surrender, with her puppies clamoring and biting and sucking, they were never satisfied. It wasn’t too long before she growled when a puppy bit down too hard on a raw nipple or snapped sharply at puppies who playfully bit her ears. She stood unsteadily and walked toward the stairs with several puppies hanging from her belly, still latched to her teats. One by one they lost their latch and fell with a muffled thud onto the carpet. Sophie didn’t even break her stride.

In the early weeks after Aliya’s birth, these memories of Sophie came to me after midnight, when I sat for hours in a rocking chair in our living room, cradling my tiny daughter in the dim light of a winter moon. I was flooded with empathy for the family dog of my childhood: I fully understood her surrender, dedication, and exhaustion. The old hardwood floor creaked beneath the weight of my bare feet, which pressed in a rhythm that slowed gradually until I became too exhausted for even that tiny motion of my toes. Aliya was quiet and alert. I lifted her face to mine, my hands encircling a torso so small that my fingers were interwoven along her back. Her body was a soft, useless weight collapsed into a pile on my chest, but her eyes were luminous. Hour after hour we sat together in the dark, hearing nothing but the occasional exhale of our heater or the distant rumble of a car engine. Her commanding presence filled the empty room: an honored but unfamiliar guest had taken up residence in our home.

“You must be so proud,” murmured a friend who stood beside me admiring her pink sleeping face in her bassinet. But I took no more pride in her than I would in a rainbow appearing after a thunderstorm.

Long after the pulsing umbilical cord between us had been cut, we remained closely tethered by a continuous stream of milk and love that flowed from my body to hers. I had an insatiable appetite for her smell, her body heat, the taste and texture of her skin. I curled her into the crook of my arm, squeezed her into my chest, rested my nose on the top of her scalp and inhaled as if breathing in the scent of a flower. “I love you all the way to the moon,” I read to her from a book. And then thought:
To the bottom of the ocean, to the farthest reaches of infinity, around the corner into a black hole, and out the other side.

The first time I left her behind and flew to another city for a work commitment, she was less than two years old. Our impending separation loomed before me, as terrifying as an amputation. I grew as frantic as our dog once did when the door between her and her puppies accidentally swung shut—when she clawed and whined and sniffed desperately at the sliver of light beneath it. But at the airport, as soon as Aliya and Ismail disappeared into the crowd as I made my way through security, I walked through the terminal with a spring in my step I didn’t even remember I had. I felt a sweet relief and a surge of energy, as if a large stone had been lifted from my chest. The invisible tether between us slackened, and I leaned into my new freedom.

An hour later, during a layover in Washington DC, I sat in a waiting area across from a middle-aged woman whose graying hair was swept into a tangled ponytail and whose eyes were puffy with exhaustion. Beside her sat a tiny African girl whose skinny legs barely reached the edge of the plastic bucket seat. She wore a pink jumper that was at least two sizes too big for her, and she sat ramrod straight, staring vacantly into the distance with a resigned dignity, like an exhausted, solitary traveler who had a long ways to go to reach home. When the woman offered a sippy cup from her backpack, the girl accepted it without even making eye contact, as if a flight attendant had just handed her some soda and peanuts.

The woman told me she was returning from Ethiopia, where four days prior she had adopted this tiny, stoic girl from an orphanage. After both her parents had passed away, this girl’s grandmother had been forced to abandon her at the orphanage because she was unable to care for her. She was two and a half years old. Before they had begun the long journey to their new home, the woman said, she’d spent three days in an Ethiopian hotel room listening to this child shriek and howl inconsolably.

“It was great,” the woman said brightly, already displaying that uncanny ability mothers have to extract the positive from even the most trying circumstances. “She rejected me the entire time. From the moment we left the orphanage, she cried—which, of course, was an excellent sign, because it shows she’s bonded with
someone
in her life, so she has the ability to bond to a parent figure. I mean, I would
really
have been worried if she’d accepted me from the get-go.” Her eyes fell, and she contemplated the carpet.

This pair had been traveling for more than thirty hours already, with many more to go before they would arrive on the West Coast, where her husband and three children waited to encircle this girl as family.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” the woman said, reaching over and patting the girl’s tiny belly through layers of pink cotton. The little girl stiffened.

“But these curls—I have
no
idea how to take care of them,” the woman continued, running her fingers over the child’s scalp. The little girl grimaced. When it was time to board the plane, and the woman lifted the child from her seat, she began to cry inconsolably, a haunting wail as if she were grieving the loss of every single face, every single food, every single landscape she had ever loved.

I cringed along with the child when the mother reached out for her, but I was also stunned by this middle-aged woman’s courage and commitment, which drove her all the way across the world to collect this tiny, mysterious girl with her unknown wounds, to carry her back across the globe with the crazy conviction that they would become kin. It was an outrageous risk, an improbable act of faith—yet perhaps ultimately not so different from the journey any of us embark on when we decide to become biological parents, when we resolve to stitch our mismatched lives together to make a family.

T
he first sharp pang of desire hit me in the parking lot of my daughter’s preschool. It was a cold winter day in North Carolina, and as I buckled my seat belt another mother maneuvered her gleaming new Volvo station wagon into the space beside my 1992 Honda Civic. She smiled and gestured for me to roll down my window so we could talk.

She was on my passenger side, so I unbuckled my seat belt, leaned across the seat, and groped for the handle to open the window. I rotated the crank, slowly and painfully, counterclockwise. The window jerked down in spurts, as stubborn and recalcitrant as my three-year-old in the backseat. When I had worked my window into its slot, I sat up, brushing away the hair that had fallen in my face. The other mother cocked her head slightly and said, with a hint of awe, “Wow! I didn’t even know they made cars like that anymore!” If only I’d had power windows at that moment, I could have coolly drawn a barrier between us with a touch of my fingertip.

Later, at the bank drive-through, I admired how the other cars’ windows slid gracefully open, like curtains before a performance. At night, I dreamed of windows that closed effortlessly, saving me at the last moment from attackers. I became convinced that my manual windows were giving me carpal tunnel syndrome. If only I had a car with power windows, life would be good.

But how would I convince my husband that a new car was an urgent necessity? We had discussed purchasing one when Aliya was born. In the first raw weeks after her birth, when I was too scared even to carry my infant downstairs for fear of falling, I’d insisted we needed a safer vehicle. But Ismail—the same man who went to our daughter’s crib throughout the night to check on her breathing and murmur a prayer over her sleeping body—balked at the suggestion that buying an expensive car was part of being a responsible parent.

In the mud hut on the coast of Libya where he had been raised, families collected water from a common well and filtered the larvae from it through empty flour sacks before giving it to their children to drink. By the time he was a teenager, the sound of his mother wailing in labor was as familiar to him as her haunting moans of grief; she had buried five children. Three faint gray lines were visible at the center of Ismail’s chest—the last traces of a tattoo his mother had given him when he was a child, slicing his skin and filling the wounds with ash, to protect him from evil spirits.
Th
at
was his health insurance.

In the suburban tract housing development where I had lived in Southern California, we displayed
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
stickers in our windows and children didn’t talk to strangers. Though the names of all the developments rapidly colonizing the inland hills were Spanish, the only Mexicans we children knew of were the ones who migrated north through the canyons, moving in quiet packs in the dark. We knew these Mexicans were real because when we ventured into the ravines, farther than our parents permitted us to go, we sometimes found their tattered blankets and the charred remains of their campfires. We feared these dark, dusty apparitions and made the same mistake as many of our parents did: we confused poverty with evil.

During my pregnancy, Ismail and I had traded tales of our childhoods, captivating each other with descriptions of our “exotic” backgrounds. I described earning my pancake-flipping badge at summer camp; he recalled reciting the Qur’an to a blind imam at the local tribal mosque after school. We reminisced about our first jobs: mine, at Baskin-Robbins at age sixteen, to earn money to satisfy a voracious clothing appetite; his, at age five (for no money at all), stocking the shelves of his father’s tiny shop in the village market. We imagined that we had escaped unscathed from the hazards of our respective childhoods and would now build a bright new life together, one that combined the best of American freedom and Middle Eastern tradition. But Aliya upended all those idealistic thoughts.

Some aspects of American parenting thrilled Ismail—such as the first-class university hospital, five minutes from our house, to which our health insurance gave us easy access. But most middle-class parenting rituals mystified him. He could not understand why I spent hours on the Internet, looking up recalls on baby cribs and car seats. He questioned my using hypoallergenic detergent on every cloth item that came in contact with our daughter. He refused to plug in the baby monitor I’d purchased for our small home. When I came back from the store with the entire series of
Baby Einstein
videos, he seemed skeptical of claims about the beneficial effects of classical music on developing minds. He was deeply suspicious of the idea that being a good parent meant making the right purchases; that with enough money, we could protect our children from the pain and ugliness of the world.

When it came to cars, Ismail felt the best way to reduce risk was to drive less, that a good car was one that was paid for and reliable. Both of our vehicles met these criteria. Besides, my husband loved his car. He shook his head scornfully at other drivers, wondering aloud why more people didn’t own a vehicle like his. When he was feeling exceptionally magnanimous toward Aliya, he would tell her that maybe, just maybe, he would give it to her one day.

His pride and joy was a 1986 Toyota Tercel. Its paint was chipped, its cracked vinyl upholstery was held together by duct tape, and remnants of bumper stickers from the eighties still clung pitifully to its rear end. I should have taken comfort in his display of loyalty. Instead it annoyed me. When I parked this car amid a sea of Volvo wagons and SUVs at my daughter’s preschool, I felt a burning shame.

According to the commercials, a new car came with an overhaul to the buyer’s self-esteem—but not for my husband. Looking at his reflection in the gleaming paint job, he saw only a materialistic sucker mired in unnecessary debt. In his mind, to value something that was old and flawed was a sign of integrity. In our consumer-driven culture, which promised to erase all signs of age and decay for a price, it was also an act of defiance. His car had more than two hundred thousand miles on it. Its market value was irrelevant, because he had no intention of selling it. He was committed till the bitter end. When it could no longer exceed fifty miles an hour, he adjusted his driving route accordingly. When the air-conditioning died, he drove stoically through a steaming North Carolina summer. Not even the August heat wave that melted a videotape to his dashboard would make him consider a replacement.

When Ismail talked about his car, his voice softened, as if he were talking about an old friend, one who came into his life long before I did. It made me uncomfortable; Ismail and this car shared a bond I could not completely understand. And I knew that I could never ask my husband to choose between the two of us—if I did, I would be a sorry, lonely woman. But I was not asking him to give up his car. I wanted to replace mine. He listened carefully to my argument. He looked skeptical as I described my parking-lot shame, my power-window dreams, and the repetitive-stress injuries to my wrists. But he could feel the force of my desire. So instead of trying to talk me out of it, he agreed to begin shopping for a new car.

We found ourselves in a vast used-car lot, scrutinizing a midsized sedan as if it were a work of art.

“Do you love it?” Ismail asked me. “Because if you do, let’s get it.”

I walked around the car one more time, trying to determine whether this was the one that would banish my shame and quell my desire. I looked under the hood. I sat inside and examined the interior. It met all my criteria. But nothing about it—not even the power windows—made me feel anything close to love. All I felt was a growing awareness that I was going to get what I’d asked for—and that it would cost me more money than I’d ever spent on a single purchase in my life.

“You decide,” Ismail said. “It honestly makes no difference to me.” He made a sweeping gesture across the row of cars before us. “All these cars look the same.”

My eyes landed on a late-model foreign sports car with sleek lines and a gleaming hood. Next to it, a rusty American car with a crumpled fender bulged out of its parking space. The first auto brought to mind a drive down a winding Tuscan road at sunset, en route to a mountaintop wine tasting. The second screamed claustrophobic American poverty: sitting in a traffic jam on the way to Wal-Mart, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts. To Ismail, though, they were both just metal boxes on wheels. In that instant, I glimpsed the lifelong challenge of our marriage: I assumed we saw the same thing when we observed the world, but our interpretation of what we were looking at would never be the same.

We bought the car. Thousands of dollars, representing years of savings, flew from our hands in an instant, and in exchange I got a used car that seemed safer and smelled faintly of a family I didn’t know. On the way home I tested the power windows, watching them glide up and down. In my new car I no longer felt as if I was in exile from the American middle class. I was able to slip unnoticed through the gates of affluence and back into that neighborhood where most of what glittered was borrowed: our houses, our cars, even the clothes we wore. In my rearview mirror I could see Aliya strapped into her car seat, her round face turned to the window, contemplating those speeding metal boxes, the sea of asphalt and steel, the endless storefronts of strip malls. “There are two slaves in a consumer society,” writes priest and activist Ivan Illich: “the prisoners of envy, and the prisoners of addiction.” In my spacious new car, with traffic pressing in on me from all sides, I felt trapped.