I stand up and face the camera, posing for it, then walk to the mirror to admire my new outfit. I look to my mother for approval, but she is looking elsewhere. My father captures a few moments of my catwalk before losing interest in me and returning to her. He zooms in as she removes a stray hair from her nightgown sleeve. In that moment, she is unaware that he is filming, that anyone is watching, that this simple gesture is being recorded and will exist in perpetuity. Her face is movie-star gorgeous; her eyes piercing, her nose and cheekbones sharp, her top lip resting on her lower lip in that casual non-smile.

Yet despite her striking appearance, she seems absent.

While watching the scene, I feel a tremendous sadness at her beauty. I feel despair for her misspent youth. In the video I am seven years old, Karim is five, and she is twenty-eight.

Until now, it’s never occurred to me that my mother was—my mother is—a child, forever stunted by her own traumas. I reconsider everything that was inflicted upon her. That she grew up under military occupation, that she was married by twenty and pregnant the following year, that her husband’s ambitions undermined her own and further displaced her, casting her into exile with a fragmented sense of home. All of her present power—her fearful rage, her enviable status, her unrelenting beauty—fades against this reality.

In this Sunday-morning scene, there is no sign of cruelty. My mother smiles shyly when she realizes that my father is filming her. She asks him to stop recording, and he does. The screen cuts to snowy static before giving way to blackness.

I sit staring at the screen, feeling ashamed. While my mother is the one who is beautiful, she doesn’t feel the need to be seen.

Anouk touches my arm and asks if I’m okay. “You seem elsewhere,” she says, and I am. I am lost in my mother’s possibility, in what could’ve been, caught between her frustrated potential and a desire to fulfill my own. I lament the disappointments that have come from surrendering her approval to pursue my own desires. I lament what she’s given up for me. Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal. I will carry sadness for her pain, and also for mine. In receiving love from others, it will always be hers I crave most.

I look to Anouk, and I kiss her. She kisses me back. There is something to protect here, something else to long for. I then look to the screen and catch our reflection before turning it off, making room for the two of us.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

For so long I have used the fantasy of writing these acknowledgments as a reward for finishing this book. Now that the time has come, I find myself daunted by the amount of gratitude I feel.