Page 206 - A Woman Is No Man

seemed as though she saw mothers everywhere, smiling wildly as they
pushed strollers, a glow emanating from their faces. She wondered how
they found it so easy to smile. The happiness she had felt at being a mother

when Deya was born was so far away she couldn’t even grasp it. A dismal
feeling loomed over Isra now, a feeling that had only intensified since Amal
was born. She had thought that the meaning of her daughter’s name, hope,
might grow a seed of hope in her heart, but it had not. She woke up every
morning feeling very young, yet at the same time terribly old. Some days
she felt as though she were still a child, other days as though she had felt far
too much of the world for one life. That she had been burdened with duty

ever since she was a child. That she had never really lived. She felt empty;
she felt full. She needed people; she needed to be alone. She couldn’t get
the equation right. Who was to blame? She thought it was herself. She
thought it was her mother, and her mother’s mother, and the mothers of all
their mothers, all the way back in time.
When Isra first arrived in America, when she first became a wife, she

hadn’t understood why she felt so empty. She had thought it was temporary,
that she would adjust in time. She knew there were many girls who left their
families to come to America, having children when they were still children
themselves. Yet they had managed. But lately Isra had finally understood
why she couldn’t manage, why she constantly felt as though she were
drifting far out to sea. She understood that life was nothing but a dark
melody, playing over and over again. A track stuck on repeat. That was all

she would ever amount to. Worse was that her daughters would repeat it,
and she was to blame.
“Let’s watch a movie,” Deya said in Arabic, her high six-year-old voice
drawing Isra out of her book.
“Not now.”
“But I want to,” Deya said. She walked over to Isra and pulled on her

bleach-spotted nightgown. “Please.”
“Not now, Deya.”
“Please, Mama.”
Isra sighed. Once she’d realized that Aladdin was adapted from A
Thousand and One Nights, she’d gathered her daughters in front of the
television, a bowl of popcorn between them, and watched all the Disney
movies they owned, longing to find more moments of connection that

brought her back to her childhood. Maybe she would find the story of Ali