My mother died two years ago. She sent me away because she knew she was dying, though I learned this later.

I am the youngest in a family that already had one boy, Jalal, and two girls, Latifa and Tihani. My mother was diagnosed with cancer just after my sister Tihani was born. It was caught early and my father sent her abroad for chemotherapy. The doctors said that she would make a full recovery. Tihani is six years older than I am, and in the time between our births, my mother miscarried four babies. Then she got pregnant with me. Between being physically drained from the miscarriages and her cancer and already being the mother of three children, she was a tired woman when I was born. She was never in good health and always suffered from one thing or another.

She adored me most—after Jalal—but she left much of the work in raising me to my oldest sister, Latifa, who was always a little slow. Latifa would take on all chores and tasks with great seriousness, admirable in an employee, unbearable in an older sister. If my mother had told her to throw me off the roof, she would have done so.

In dealing with me, she either tried to enforce my mother’s rules exactly or tried to teach me how to do her chores. She had no sense of what I could and couldn’t do at what age. When I was four (she was twelve), she tried to teach me to iron. I burned my hand and one of my father’s shirts and she yelled at me as though I had burned the house down. This incident started a cycle: Latifa would take care of me, then would do something so awful that my mother would take over. She would indulge me and cuddle me, and tell me stories and teach me embroidery and other things I can’t imagine her ever having done with Latifa, who resented me more and more.

And then I would see my mother start to fade: fall asleep in the middle of her embroidery, curse when she dropped something, with words I had never heard anyone else use. (My mother had a distinct way of cursing herself when she was sick: “God damn your stupid, useless, jackass mother.”) I tried to stay out of her way, but invariably Latifa would come to the rescue and take care of me, only this time a little angrier and more resentful than the time before. I learned that the only salvation from Latifa was avoidance, which is how it came to be that I spent a lot of time alone reading, a source of embarrassment or concern for almost everyone in my family.