PERSONAL STORY | MENTAL HEALTH | COMPETITION ENTRY
Mother’s Day and a Birthday
A grieving daughter grieves again
Yesterday was my late mother’s birthday, in a sense, a date given by me because she didn’t know her birthdate — her brothers and her husband too didn’t know.
My mother’s childhood was great as well as unusual. Nobody remembered her birthdate. Grandmother had passed away early. As the only female child, she was loved and was precious to my grandfather and uncles. However, women’s rights and education were nowhere on the horizon.
She struggled with the usual problems a motherless child goes through.
Having suffered asthma and other health issues early in childhood, partially orphaned and deprived of the compassion only a mother can give, (uneducated when it comes to basic schooling, with a little knowledge of Arabic), she was married off at 18.
She lived her life with great dignity as a married woman despite all the struggles she had to endure.
We did not have the tradition of celebrating birthdays and anniversaries for whatever reasons my father had. I wanted to start it.
The day I asked for the date, my father tried to guess her birth year by calculating their ages during their…
