A Love Song

"Mother and son", I said.

I repeat the words to myself trying to get used to them and understand that I'm really referring to myself. I look at myself in the mirror expecting to see my own mother, but I still look exactly the same like the girl I've always looked like since middle school. I am now a mother though..

"Once you see his little face, your whole life will be rearranged.", said the cab driver on my way to one of the last follow-up visits a week before my son was born.

His head is the size of the palm of my hand. He whimpers and fusses, I pick him up. He is confused for a second and then he calms down, throws his tiny plump arms around my neck and starts looking curiously around. I walk around the room hugging him tightly and smelling his hair. He is kicking and moving his head in that way that a bird does. He can't move himself, eat or clean up unless I do it for him. The fact that he needs me for his survival gives me extraordinary strength.

"Here, let me take him for awhile.", said my friend.

A little mixture of me and the person I dearly love more than anything and chose to spend the rest of my life with. My little one. A little me? A little fragile me; the real me. As my friend carries him, I look at his face and I see mine, then my husband's, then my brother and sister's. How come he has a little bit of all of us? It makes him so familiar, as dear as them all combined. I feel like I've known him all my life.

"Your baby loves you and he can now show it.", said the baby app on my phone tracking the development of my son day by day.

What's the absolute favorite moment of your day? When he opens his eyes in the morning looking panicky, I place my face in front of his and give him my widest smile. His face relaxes and he smiles happily back at me and starts to kick. He stretches and yawns and keeps smiling at me. I wake up for that everyday.

"Children begin by loving their parents. As they grow older they judge them: sometimes they forgive them." said Oscar Wilde.

I know I can be his super hero for sometime. In his little inexperienced eyes, I'll seem like I know everything, can do everything. But as he grows older he'll start seeing the real me. He'll see me do something and think to himself I won't do that when I'm her age. He'll spot all the faults in my personality. He'll assess the life choices I made and judge them. I wonder how much time I have to fix and better myself as much as I can? I've never wanted with all my heart to become a better version of myself everyday than the day before and now I want it for you. I want you to like me when you get to know me, may be be proud of me, and -dare I dream?- even look up to me?

"They have their own little personalities already. Some of them want to be held all the time and others don't like to be touched. Your baby loves to be held and hugged." said the nurse in the hospital a couple of days after my son was born.

A blank new page. He might have few lines written already -I don't know, maybe more than few- but me and his father will still have the greatest impact on who he becomes. What If I foolishly say or do something that traumatizes him forever? What if I work too much and he thinks that I love my work more than him? What if I don't work and he thinks I've used him to achieve my own dreams through him? I can't even begin to list all the mistakes I might do without knowing that I'm doing them. I might even think I'm doing the right thing. He wants me to hold him a lot, he seeks my attention, he waits for me to look at him and make a funny face. I am studying, cooking or on the phone and I catch him looking at me with anticipation. I feel like I've failed him somehow and I wonder if he felt the same. He is small enough to forget and forgive me instantly the minute I am with him, but what when he is old enough not to?

"I can't protect him.", I told my doctor.

I try to do the best by him everyday and still I feel I can't protect him. I can't control everything and as he grows older the things I can't control will keep adding up. I know I have countless shortcomings in my relationship with Allah, but I pray everyday that He would take over and protect my baby for me. For him.

I don't love him because he is part of me for I don't love myself as much. Come to think of it, I don't love him. Love is an understatement. There is no word that describes that thing I feel for him. I've always read about a mother's love and I've never understood. I even feared that I won't be able to feel it or that I won't want to do all "the work" that comes with being a mother. I can only say it is a switch that has been turned on with his birth, lighting up all these emotions I never knew I could feel before. A feeling that's a gift of mercy from Allah to every newborn who comes to life, to have someone who loves him unconditionally no matter what he does or doesn't do, someone who would give an arm, an eye, a whole life and more for him.

I Love you with all that's beyond the word. I always will.

Who Is There?

I used to hate it when somebody begins writing a blog post with “I haven’t written for a while”. It made me think “wow this person really thinks somebody cares or even has noticed that he/she hasn't written for a while”. And then I stopped writing for over a year, and I feel like I have to start the post with this ridiculous statement I've always mocked. Not because I want to explain it to whoever is reading this, it is rather because I want to explain it to me.

I am going through a “zoom out phase” if I may call it so. When you've living among so many details you can hardly notice any of them or make out where you stand from them even if you think you did. They influence you, become part of you while all the time you regard yourself as an isolated entity from them. But when you’re no longer among them, it is a different case.

I couldn't write for so long because I was overwhelmed by the details. Last time I wrote was back in 30/6 " Strolls through the land of nightmare" and I knew very well I was writing for nothing, but I had to express my grief over my lost dream and send it out somewhere. Everybody was moving, talking saying the most vile things I thought the people I've always known might ever say. I couldn't recognize them; the cruelty, the hate, the thirst for blood was just too much specially coming from people you've loved and always known and never thought capable of it. So many innocent souls were lost, killed mercilessly on their own homeland without anyone stopping to mourn them. Their family and friends were brutalized by their very own family and friends instead of hearing words of solidarity and condolences. Cruelties that were the stuff of fiction books only were witnessed just from my living room balcony right before my eyes. That marked the end of my dream in a very bold black line. It was no longer home and these people were no longer my people, they were different scary monsters that I could never forget the words the things they said and did, and sure well the dreams of a future for anybody were all over. People seemed to forget and move on, some made unspoken amendments among themselves and only the families of those gone remained out there hung on what had happened. But the ix up stayed. Right was wrong and wrong became the new right. It was the real life version of "Ninteen Eighty four". There was no point in writing long blog posts sensibly talking any sense back into the people because to them now it was a boring useless story of the past, I could only vent every now and then through a facebook post. There was no point discussing any other thought or idea because it was ridiculous, what's there that is left and matters or is worth talking about anymore?

All ideas seemed empty, repeated, a luxury that we are not entitled to speak of with everything that we have lost and have become.

I've wanted to leave as a last resort to restore myself back. To get away from all the madness, make peace with myself and build a new life. I got what I wanted but not a thing remained the same around me. Now I have to say I may always say the opposite but I'm a person who loves the accustomed, the things I'm used to, the familiar surroundings and people. I like constants and continuity and I hate change although I always pretend to be the opposite or seek the opposite. Too many changes happened too fast and here I am with no familiar stone around me or about me. It's a catch, my new life makes me feel like a stranger and so does my former life. I ind no other way but to go to back to the question I wanted to answer a long time ago but never felt a pressing need to find an immediate answer. To Be. Now if I needed to find a constant the constant could only be myself. So I need to find out what makes me ME? what defines me? I need to go back and define the details that have been my norms for my whole life the way I see them now that I'm away and "zooming out" the picture enough to see the whole of it. I need to re-identify myself in relation to these details before I can settle down with the changes in me and around me. I need to write it down and live by it day by day until I am through.

That's what I need to do.

Strolls Through The Land of Nightmares

Here we are trapped at home again. It's not that it is that unsafe to go out, it is rather to go where and do what and for what. So that's it, you, yourself, the news and some times the live scenes too.

I stood on our balcony and watched the quiet street in the early morning. You would hardly suspect that instead of the few people walking about slowly and the builders in the nearby construction site, there had been thugs carrying swards and trying to beat up a man to death in front of the screaming viewers from the buildings on the street just some hours ago. It is hard to believe that it hasn't been the first time this quiet street witnesses such violence. The residents are used to such scenes most of the Fridays for many months ago. They are also used to finding notes stuck on the entrances of their buildings on the next Saturday morning from the quarters of the political party at the end of the street saying "We are sorry for what you have to go through. When we located ourselves in your neighborhood we didn't know that being among you would cost you all of these troubles."

The pet shop in the next building is closed, of course. The owners display the pretty Shirazi cats in front of their store along with some little puppies and birds, but hardly any of them were sold although they had been sitting there for so long. I had to leave my pet there for last week and I was a frequent daily visitor at the store. I remember looking at the store owners and wondering why would they -who evidently look like they have little to get by- consider pets as a business in such a country during such times? I remember looking at the beautiful animals, pitying them and envying them at the same time because they have no idea what's going on.

My surgery books lying on my desk reminding me of the tons of work I have to do to go through them. I picked up a book and read one of the surgeries that we have been studying repeatedly during the past week. Going through the procedure and its alternative options, I thought of how long it took the surgeons who developed its numerous steps, of their trials and errors that cost them morbidity and even mortality of their patients, to arrive at the final most ideal shape of the operation. Of how it is even likely to develop more or even get replaced by a newer operation. What a breath taking art! I thought of the passion of such surgeons/ artists and of their dedication. It's hard to think they cared about anything else in the world other than their work to be able to device such life saving beauty. I wondered how many of us here had such care and passion. How many of us here had them but was battled and defeated by corruption and frustration and lack of resources. I thought of how how I had been separated from the ones I love all my life, one after the other, because anyone who has a dream has to leave. I wondered what does that make of us all.

I thought of every time I went home with unwashable ink staining my fingers foolishly thinking I've contributed, I've shared in deciding the future of my country and consequently in deciding my future, but then every time some one erased my vote. The referendum on the constitution was a fraud, the elected parliament was dissolved and the opposition is rallying for the fall of the elected president and dragging the country into violent confrontations on the streets. I know I would never vote again. What's the point anymore?

My TV and computer screens are full of images of public figures starring meditatively into the horizon and uttering words, destiny shaping, stirring angry crowds desperate for the simple rights of basic life, uttering them words with ease, with a laugh, with minimum feeling of responsibility towards the impact of their words on lives, on the future. The hissed hate from both sides tinged with a thirst for the blood of their opposers. The mad fury in the eyes of people during political arguments. The aggressiveness towards a political group that has deepened into aggressiveness towards a larger majority of the fabrique of who we are. To know that some people are afraid to walk through the streets with a beard or a face veil in a country of a majority of Muslims. I blame every politician I see on my TV screen, every single one of you all from all currents. Feel the pain, do you?

While all of us sit in front of our little computer screens typing words out into the digital globe in a false hope that anyone would read us, would hear us out, or a killing prevented by our pleading words; both fighting teams are out there on the streets, taking away our right to have a say in our futures by enforcing their say by the threat of blood. I can go of writing forever of our pains, of how we have been denied even our barely tolerated simple lives, of how I see the dream we all saw back in 2011 fade and escape further everyday. And the only One left who I can trust is God, and to Him I pray for an undeserved delivery from all of these evils. 

 

The Musings of Life in A Soundproof Bubble

I woke up this morning with this gut feeling that my world will be alright today. For awhile there have been a back to back series of trials of patience from God, and I was caught in the middle and couldn't cope properly. A priceless gift from God though is to be given the ability to observe your own behaviour. To be able to consciously observe the way you react to inevitable events and modify your reactions little by little till you can finally arrive at a sane peaceful attitude towards the events. That's not an easy thing to do but I believe it is possible and I believe it is teachable, but no one can teach you how to do that but yourself.

I was starting to think things will be fine today because I've decided that it is in my power to decide that things will be fine today. Sipping at my coffee and reading the news, the train accident came up. Another train accident within a couple of months' time. Continuing through news about the accident and commentaries I realized this will be just a reliving of the first one. Everyone will jump up at the opportunity to make something of the sad event for themselves. The media will broadcast heart-breaking episodes of interviews with the families of the victims full of insensitive painful questions directed at the aching family members aiming at bringing them to tears in front of the cameras so that the channel would have higher viewing rates and sell more commercials. The politicians will use the event to show the incompetence of the president and the government. The public will watch the ongoing game between the opposition and the government, they will divide and take sides, throw accusations at each other, fling their work aside at their jobs while they discuss over tea with their work colleagues how everybody else is not doing their jobs. And then everybody will gradually lose interest in the show and go back to the sufferings of their own hard lives.

We are all caught inside that fragile bubble that has soundproof walls. The bubble has been driven at full speed towards absolute destruction for over thirty years and we have tried suddenly to press the brakes and stop. We are bound, fated to continue with the force of our inertia towards the same destruction target and the inertia is feeding off the selfishness of all the inhabitants of the bubble, off their greed, off their inability to trust each other. We don't realize that the soundproof walls are making us invisible to the rest of the world. That with the exception of the crows watching us to pick up the goods whenever they get a chance, nobody in the whole globe cares at all about the worthless millions that have been burning for countless decades in their own misery in that sad centre of the world that is the Middle East, reminiscing that day hundreds of years ago when they were a powerful nation worth being called a nation in the first place.

Truth that you are taught that each and every human life counts but reality says that it doesn't. Avoidable unnecessary deaths take place over the country everyday with numbers that may exceed the victims of the accident. Everyday. But nobody cares unless a mass of hundred souls dies at the same instant in front of TV screens making it too vulgar or too embarrassing for the rest of the us to pretend that we haven't noticed. To think of the poor helpless figures I see at the hospital everyday who have no choice but to seek help at the only affordable hell spots all over the country. I think of the daily stories of deaths because of incompetence or lack of resources or skills of the healthcare attendants or sometimes their recklessness and negligence. To think of the dangerous killer roads with drivers who do not compel to any traffic or safety rules creating that charade which kills tens everyday in single scattered accidents that don't attract any media attention and thus go unnoticed. To think of the builders on construction sites and workers in factories who work with zero safety measures. To think of the sight of the smashed poor living-dead all over the streets shivering in the cold rainy days. People haven't died just today, people are dying everyday, every minute, while each and everyone of us have been busy trying to find their own way out of all of this.

In the real world, in my country, you have to be a well known important figure so the tragic unnecessary end of your human life would count. Otherwise your life has to end along with some other hundred lives so that anybody inside the bubble would notice.

When will the driving inertia run out of energy? when do we stop? We all know theoretical correct answers but none of us knows any practical plans for the solutions and those who know the plans have no idea how to execute them. And least of all I don't claim any knowledge of that.

With a national scene like ours which is nothing short of a daily mad circus, you need to learn an essential survival skill, that is to draw very clear distinct limits between your limited personal world and the rest of the world. You need to accept that fact, do whatever that is in your power to give help, concentrate al your efforts your energy and emotions on doing the job that has been assigned to you right, but you need to move on. Grieving at every event will be a life of continuous mourning. The world as we know it through the news screen is never alright and always miserable, and today it will have an extra shade of misery added, but that doesn't mean that your personal limited world doesn't stand a chance today.

Of Controls

I believe that most of the time you have a very sharp insight into a choice that you're about to make. You can tell what is exactly the right thing you're supposed to do, except that you can see it for only few seconds before you realize that it looks very difficult or just not appealing. Before you have a chance to start a potentially painful struggle against your reasoning powers, some defence mechanism is turned on in your head that blurs the previously very clear facts that led you to the right deduction and leaves you completely convinced that you're in a confusing situation and that you have no clue what to do. The thing is that you're not feigning ignorance now, you actually do believe that you don't know. At that moment your defence mechanisms have done their deluding job and have set you free. Now you can dwell on all possible options and pick one of them blindly not fearing that you'll blame yourself later for what you've done, because you'll be able to tell yourself that you didn't know any better then. But if you can recognize the scam your head plays, if you can detect the truth in these few seconds of awareness and hold on to it before it gets blurred...

I believe that we don't arrive where our actions have led us but we rather arrive where the hidden motives behind our actions did. That guided by the wrong motives even the right can be wrong. The fear of taking all the pains of a difficult errand, of thinking very highly of yourself all the time for doing the difficult right thing, of going to sleep with a smile of satisfaction with the achievements of your day, while you've shut yourself off completely from confessing the "why" behind them. But if you can turn this fear of arriving at the wrong place while you've felt so secure to the safety of your destination all the time, into the power to wake up to the knowledge that God looks into your heart and soul and can see the truth about them even if you're pretending to yourself that you can't see it, if you can really wake up to that....

I believe that the will to change to the better is cumulative and gets stronger every time it is opposed and defied although it seems like it has been broken and vanished. You will want to change, and your  repeated failures will make you think that may be you don't have the strength or the state of mind it takes and at some point you'll just stop trying while in fact this very failure that made you stop could have shown you a new path inside yourself so that the next day you would  know how to take that path and fight you. But if you can persist for longer, if you can have full faith that The God who can see into your heart won't see a real yearning for the good and then let you down or push you away...

It's because of this beleif that setting the facts, the motives and the will straight means that I've arrived at some place where I've taken full control over my life and placed it in the hands of God. If I arrive there, my greatest fear of the possibility of purposelessness or worthlessness of my life will be soothed to peace. I'll know that if I arrive there I will still fall but at that time my falls will be more of the course adjustments that I needed to be set on the right way instead of being the drift currents that pull me away. It's because of that tempting chase of peace, of the dazzling beauty of that place, that'll wake up everyday thinking life worth awhile, I'll take a deep breath and I'll start again..

The Right Fool at The Right Time

There comes a moment in rarely any person's life when they realize how little their opinions really matter and they decide to shut up.

Now I don't know anybody who has come to realize this fact yet. And even though I pretend in front of myself that I've finally reached that degree of wisdom and peace with myself and the world, that I've risen above all the foolish fever of having an opinion that I would cry my heart out to prove right on matters which are beyond the scoop of my full understanding, just at that glorious moment while I congratulate myself for being smart enough to understand that nobody cares what my opinion is on the constitution or the constituent assembly or the strikes, just at that moment, somebody says something that suddenly doesn't seem right to me, and before I can stop myself I blurt out my objection, and the next thing I'm right in the middle of an idle debate muttering to myself that I'm not really as smart as I thought I was. What on earth did I ever learn of politics or law to be able to form a correct opinion on such a matter? On what basis other than my natural human ignorant arrogance did I consider my opinion right enough to defend it? Then I think that I needn't be that hard on myself, it is just human nature, I should take it easy on my already mortified self anyway.... etc.

It's not an easy matter though to speak of only what you know, an impossible errand if you come to think of it. We are set to automatically try to figure out where we stand from any debated matter that we hear of, without necessarily asking ourselves why we chose that particular side. Things just "seem" right to us in that certain way. Why remain silent and bored when I can always spend hours fully entertained discussing with full conviction things that I know nothing of? It's the time of revolution and we all have a right to speak up our ill informed uneducated minds. After all if we really do think before we speak, hardly anybody would speak at all, let alone if we speak only of matters that we properly understand, and truly few are the things of which one can say "I properly understand" with a clear conscience.

The right to remain silent. How little appreciated, how little fought for it when compared to all other rights which are meant to preserve the dignity of a human being and protect him from looking completely foolish among his other fellow humans.

That could be a relatively harmless human nature if it hasn't been for the critical times. Times when already the air is fully charged with tension and one word is enough to set everything and everyone on fire. History has always been made this way. A fool with marvelous powers of oration speaks (a power which makes a fool particularly dangerous), and happens to speak of something that deeply touches people's life at a time that happens to be a critical time, what he says "seems" right to the audience and a mass movement is on the move. The right fool at the right time, that's all what it takes.

It's amusing though how the exact opposite is true. When it comes to matters of taste when there are no rules and we have a certain right to have an opinion based on just the appeal of things to us, we usually prefer to shut up. You are reading a book, a poem, or hearing some music, or looking at a painting that is widely regarded by people of sense, culture, taste and education as a master piece. The problem with these people is that their opinions are regarded as a sacred law that only a simpleton would dare disagree with. You are sincerely turning  "the master piece" upside down trying to find out what is so mind blowing about it but you can't help seeing it as meaningless or stupid or artless. But do you have the courage to declare your humble opinion against theirs, even to yourself? In this case you'd think they must know better. The majority of people will probably end up questioning the validity of their own opinion and quit their views to adopt the views of "those who know better".

How to tell if you have a credible opinion or not on any given subject? No one but you can really know. So pray for the wisdom to know, and the power to control yourself when you know you don't know!

The Big Meltdown

To talk -or even worse, to write- you need to concentrate, and that's where all my current problems arise..

Any human wouldn't be holding his brain up to impossible standards if he asks it to, sometimes, focus on only one thought at a given time. I mean that's the least you would expect of an ugly looking fleshy convoluted substance connected to all sorts of wires and tubes that you are very nice to waste the only spacious room in the only head you have on accommodating it, giving it all priorities of protection, nutrition and survival over all the other put together substances that make you you. After all what you do for it, you would expect it to show minimum gratitude by doing that little thing called concentration, but no, that mass of ungrateful proteins and fats won't. At first I thought it was mental exhaustion because of 3 months of exams and intolerable stress. Maybe my brain had a right to break down, go on strike and refuse to perform any complex function properly for at least another compensatory 3 months. But now I know I won't easily get away with just "won't perform a complex function". My brain is refusing to simply "function" at all.

Concentration can be materialistically felt as it happens. You can feel all parts of your brain holding up more tightly as if some cement material dries up to bring them closely to each other. You can almost sense the rapid firing of signals as they whoosh across it. You can almost hear the extra amount of blood your brain is ordering as it vibrates through the vessels. You are very conscious of your own self fully present inside your head. You are fully conscious that you are here.

That thrilling awareness inside your head! The confidence that comes along with it in your own judgement, your own processing of all input data and your ability to completely trust the deduced output. Knowing that you can hold a pen and write a complete page that won't look ridiculous or incoherent at the end when you're reading it. The command over your speech, over your feelings, over your gaze that becomes targeted in purposeful movement and not just aimlessly shot everywhere.

That feeling is not here anymore. Loosening is the word. I can feel the loosening meltdown in my head. The cells are hanging out in the swimming pool of fluid surrounding them (another privilege that brain has) as if they have no job they should be doing. I can't remember when was the last time I felt that way, may be because that was really long ago, and may be because the meltdown loosened my memory too. I didn't give up though. I told myself that if brain can't do it, may be I can tempt some of the other organs I accommodate to do it if I offer it the privileges that brain has. But that apparently is only another loosened thought produced by the molten cells, it turned out that I don't hold the right to redistribute the privileges and that brain is to continue to have them whether it decides to function or not.

So I finally decided to embrace the new me. That one who can't read 4 pages in a row in any book, can't finish writing a single article, can't see herself through a conversation to its end, can't rely on the output coming out of her head for daily use for fear that its processing has taken a wrong turn in the molten tracts in her head. May be if I stop fighting brain, it would eventually feel ashamed and go back to doing the job it was created for doing.

Until then, from the meltdown, greetings..