Mama soon struck a deal with a local tailor to take up his extra work, filling our apartment with the familiar hum of her Singer sewing machine. She started with simple hemming and mending jobs, then got an order for traditional tatreez embroidery, which was followed by a few more such commissions. I had watched my mother embroider now and then over the years, but I’d never paid much attention to it. To my young eyes, embroidered caftans belonged to another generation, and I foolishly thought them unrefined compared to modern European clothes. But in Amman, in the haze of my exile and idleness and through the lens of loss, the spectacular intricacy of tatreez crystallized as I watched my mother create gorgeous caftans, and I finally realized hers was a masterful testament to our heritage and her own artistry. She would spend hours upon painstaking hours hunched over her lap, needle and thimble pulling and pushing threads in and out of fabric, creating patterns that told the stories of our people in a pictorial language conceived by Palestinian women over centuries. Mama was fluent. She knew which patterns came from which village, what they meant, and how that meaning might change next to another pattern. She’d tried to teach me when I was a little girl, but I had wanted no part of it.

Now, in the Cube, I recall the day she gave up trying to teach me. She said, “I don’t blame you. If I had a chance to go to school like you, that’s what I would have done instead. You’re a smart girl. Someday you’ll have a desk job, not like me, who only knows how to embroider a past we cannot recover.”

Mama was more skilled than most, and before long she had carved out a niche in Amman embroidering wedding thobes—the most delicate and expensive tatreez commissions. One such dress would ordinarily require six to nine months to create, but our financial situation pushed Mama to work even longer hours, producing one every two to three months. Each of them was a work of art, meticulously embroidered to tell stories, and it pained me to see them sold.

Her first customer was a bride who wanted traditional tatreez designs on silk, an impossibly difficult material for embroidery. She specified that the design speak to the place of her heritage in Palestine and to that of her groom, and she wanted my mother to copy designs from the qabbah, shinyar, and radah parts of a tattered caftan that had belonged to her mother’s great-grandmother. But Mama suggested combining the old and the new, incorporating actual pieces of the ancient caftan’s tatreez into the bridal gown. The woman agreed once she saw Mama’s drawings, and the final product was stunning.