Shelf Life Page 11
By the 1960s, the standard shifted from home to hospital births. The process was streamlined for maximum efficiency. There were an increasing number of cesarean section births, including my sister’s and mine—my mother, like so many others of her era, had little say in the matter. And it’s only gotten more pronounced: in Egypt today, a whopping 52 percent of all hospital births are cesarean sections (as opposed to around 30 percent in the United States according to the CDC).
“I was so thirsty after I regained consciousness. I begged the nurse for water. She just looked at me and said, ‘Do I look like a fucking water wheel?’ I was alone, your father was traveling, I was scared, and I was at the mercy of that pest.”
“So what happened?”
“The next nurse who came to check on me was kinder and I was able to ask her if you had any birth defects. I was forty-one years old. Few women gave birth at that age. All my friends had their children twenty years before. And there were no ultrasounds. Things could’ve gone badly.”
“Not because you drank and smoked, but because you were over forty?”
“Exactly.”
“You didn’t even know if I was going to be a girl or a boy?”
“Folk wisdom held that mothers pregnant with girls got more beautiful, so I knew I was having girls.”
Children rebel against their parents. My mother’s class and generation had eschewed written guidance on pregnancy, whereas my generation was eager to know. That might explain the success of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, first published in 1984, which paved the way for other maternity books. Throughout Diwan’s early years, I witnessed an incredible surge of guides, manuals, and planners for how to wean, feed, potty train, put to bed, dress, raise, and discipline children. Some staked out specific markets by age group, number of children, and gender. All capitalized on this relatively new trend in global publishing. I cautiously stocked these books, developing my section, while trying to balance the perspectives they offered with the perspectives I’d grown up with. Could the modern obsession with having the perfect pregnancy really catch on in Egypt? It felt like a capitalist perversion of this basic experience of human life. I watched as the banality of parenthood transformed into a spectacle that justified the purchase of specific clothes, gadgets, and now, books.
When my mother had raised Hind and me, almost fifty years earlier, there were no disposable diapers, special colic-preventing feeding bottles, toys disguised as educational tools, or maternity clothes designed to flatter and conceal. The industry didn’t exist yet. My mother, a seamstress by training and a die-hard devotee of sixties fashion, made her own dresses—maternity and mini. She also spent countless hours making reusable cloth diapers, which she then boiled to sanitize between uses. Even as the landscape began to shift around her, she remained steadfast in her beliefs. After Hind gave birth to Ramzi, her first son, my mother told the attending obstetrician that beer was the best stimulus for milk production—tried and tested by the ancient Egyptians. Later, while visibly pregnant with my second child, Layla, I sat down to dinner with friends at a New York bistro. I ordered a beer. The waiter declined to serve me. When I told my mother about it, she was appalled. Mothers of her generation saw no reason to change themselves just because they were embarking on a new phase of life.
* * *
When I was pregnant, people were always entering my space, touching my bump, offering unsolicited advice. “Breastfeed for the first two years!” “Don’t breastfeed!” “Formula is liquid garbage!” “Stay active!” “Don’t overexert yourself!” I became fed up with all these contradictory remarks, the gadgets and guidebooks, which promised to empower me but really just made me feel claustrophobic. Maybe my mother knew more than I gave her credit for. I wasn’t completely sold on her old-school ways, but I also knew that contemporary consumerism and perfectionism were no better.
“What about Dad?” I asked her once, in earnest.
“Ramzi?” my mother replied, now herself surprised. “Pregnancy isn’t a man’s concern.” But of course this has changed. As I researched books to include in our Pregnancy and Parenting section, I kept seeing titles geared toward men. Titles like From Dude to Dad: The Only Guide a Dude Needs to Become a Dad emphasized the transformation inherent in “becoming” a father (the implied transition from “cool” to “less cool”—from “dude” to “dad”—wasn’t lost on me). Other titles promised survival and salvation, like The Expectant Dad’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know and Diaper Dude: The Ultimate Dad’s Guide to Surviving the First Two Years. The motif of the diaper (absent from titles geared at women), and the dude who wields it, attempted to infuse new paternity with humor. Another popular book, Commando Dad: How to Be an Elite Dad or Carer, imagined fatherhood as a battlefield, an appropriately testosterone-filled terrain. Of course, there were other books that attempted to induct men into this new phase of life less comically. But regardless of the tone, my mother and her generation found the mere existence of these books, and their underlying assumptions, bizarre. In the end, I didn’t purchase books about fatherhood for Diwan. Stocking books about pregnancy was already enough of a gamble. I’d save my time and resources for titles that would sell.
* * *
Like so many of us, I often act without understanding why. Knowledge comes after the fact. While paying for my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I muttered a forcibly casual remark to the cashier about how it was for a friend. Even as I said it, I didn’t realize how much I wanted to distance myself from someone “expecting.” I needed to figure out how I was going to acknowledge, or deny, my condition. Would I lean in to a new persona as pregnant boss? Or would I ignore my changed state? I quickly decided that I would work even harder throughout my pregnancy to set a good example. Perhaps I was privately afraid of what was happening to me, and I wanted to minimize it in the eyes of others. Of course, my body had its own plan.
When I hired new staff, I always asked them the same character question: What are your aspirations for your children? Answers ranged from “I want to raise a good Muslim,” to blank stares, to “I want them to emigrate to a country where they have better chances.”
There was another question I always asked: “If you were to join Diwan’s family, would you be able to work the evening shift, or just the morning one?” We were open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., closed only on the morning of the first day of Eid al-Adha, so shifts were an issue. I also asked because I had become so used to Egyptians’ demanding lives. Most of my male staff worked two jobs to raise their income, or took computer science courses on the side. Scheduling became nightmarish when we needed to move staff between the two stores to cover holidays or sick days.
“I can work as long as it is daylight,” the female candidates would often respond. I knew the subtext: Respectable girls don’t come home after dark. If they do, their neighbors judge them, and that judgment earns them a reputation that diminishes their odds for a good marriage. Also, being out of the home in the evening meant taking public transportation, where women were subjected to a near-constant barrage of harassment from drivers and fellow passengers. I was familiar with the compromises women made under patriarchy: they competed for their family’s resources, subordinate to their brothers; they helped with the housework and took care of elders; they were limited in where they could go and who they could see. On top of all that, as my male coworkers liked to remind me, it was more financially advantageous to hire men. This is partly because Egyptian labor laws grant women ninety days of paid maternity leave for their first two children. Men have more working hours, especially since the basic concept of paternity leave is nonexistent in Egypt. It struck me as ironic that the very laws that attempted to guarantee women their rights—like paid maternity leave—also exposed them to discrimination. Even though hiring women could be a pain in the ass, I chose to do it anyway because I am a woman and I pay it forward.
I was uncomfortable with the assumptions that our culture made
about women: that motherhood would, and should, eclipse any other responsibility. In my case, it hadn’t. When I was first pregnant, with Zein, I worked up until the day before I was scheduled to go to the hospital for my cesarean. I returned to Diwan three weeks later, eager to ignore the catastrophic instability of motherhood, eager for the order of the shelves, and eager for the familiarity and security of work.
* * *
Some of these feelings only came to light through a conversation with a total stranger. In 2008, I was interviewed by a women’s magazine on having it all, “it” meaning a successful career and a family. My actual situation was far less glamorous. I was divorced from Number One, juggling two- and four-year-old daughters—and a six-year-old Diwan. We’d just opened our third location, in Maadi, a suburban district ten miles upriver from Zamalek. The neighborhood was replete with lush green spaces. Its affluent inhabitants included a sizable expat population. As a litmus test for the location, we’d opened a small stall in the recently constructed Carrefour City Centre Mall. When that was a nearly instant success, we started looking for a brick-and-mortar space in Maadi, eventually settling on Road 9, the local equivalent to 26th of July Street. The area was known for its pedestrian traffic, so we took the first store we saw, despite its placement at the dodgier end. We gambled on our brand name, hoping it would pull people off the beaten path. But a few months after opening, we were second-guessing ourselves. Foot traffic was erratic and didn’t reliably lead to sales—the expats seemed to prefer borrowing or exchanging books to buying new ones. And that was even before the full impact of the global recession on multinational corporations, many of whom housed their employees in Maadi. We were struggling to allocate staff and move merchandise among our three stores.
I’d agreed to meet the journalist at Maadi, in the new café. She had dyed blond hair and thick makeup. She was swaddled in a tight floral top with a black skirt. She arrived early and got on my good side. As soon as we ordered our cappuccinos, she began with the usual set of sterile questions: Where had the idea for Diwan come from? What were our biggest challenges? What was it like working with my sister and my friend? How did we resolve our differences? And then, she asked the inevitable: “As a woman, how do you reconcile the demands of home and work?”
“I don’t.” I swallowed. “I never will. I wouldn’t trust anyone who claims to have done so. No one asks men how they balance the demands of their families and their children with their professional lives. I’m a guilty working mother. I miss so many baths and diaper changes. My children’s nanny is always there. On some days I get home so exhausted that I don’t want to play with my daughters or read to them as they go to sleep. But I made my choices. I want my girls to grow up in a home where their mother works. I am a single parent, and I am proud and grateful.” The journalist just stared at me, startled.
I’d been truthful with her, but not entirely honest. I didn’t describe the depth of my angst. I failed to mention my inability to choose the right diaper cream. Or that I scrubbed the white line the cream left under my nails to remove any trace of contact. Burping Zein was a grand undertaking. I felt humiliated every time her burp evaded me. I held my breath while pressing the snaps of Layla’s onesie together, praying as I worked my way to the bottom that I hadn’t missed one, which would have forced me to start all over again. I dreaded the cries that I couldn’t assuage or decipher. Even my triumphs, like sealing a soiled diaper symmetrically, felt pathetic to me.
My discomfort preceded motherhood, beginning when I was pregnant. I had become distanced from my body. I gained almost thirty pounds and my feet were heavy, like two soaked sponges. I grew even clumsier. I wish I could forget the day I had a meeting in Zamalek’s café when I had a terrible bout of morning sickness. I excused myself from the meeting, ran to the bathroom, thanked God it was empty, and hurled myself at the toilet, just in time. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had the time or foresight to take off my glasses and scarf. The glasses fell into the toilet in mid-vomit. The scarf was equally doused. I tried to salvage both, and then returned to my meeting, hoping that the smell was in my head. Times like these made me resent the images of maternal bliss I saw on the covers of pregnancy books. Where were the faces ridden with malaise and alienation? Where was the discomfort and dissatisfaction of breastfeeding? Why did nobody warn me about the additional guilt of harboring these feelings at all? On the nanny’s day off, I used to take Zein to Nihal (whose kids were now teenagers), so that someone else could bathe and feed her. I didn’t want to be left alone with her, to have to face my own incompetence. A decade later, I read The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, a novel set in Burma, which describes the protagonist’s mother as having come into motherhood “empty-handed.” Even though I had endless books and my own mother by my side, that descriptor seemed to sum up my feeling completely. “I’m sure your kids will be avid readers,” said the journalist, trying to lighten the mood.
* * *
I wonder if there’s a way I could have claimed pregnancy, and early motherhood, as my own, rather than constantly searching for advice, validation, and belonging. Maybe it is just an inherently unsettling experience. The only thing that made me feel like myself during those years was stacking books, arranging them on our shelves with care. I would forget my children, my failing marriage, the leak in the bathroom ceiling, the ironing I had to send to Akram (the laundry man who worked out of a shack on the corner of Bahgat Ali Street). I would surrender to a kind of transcendence that felt like drifting, surrounded by the abundant shelves, the ample conversation, the snippets of laughter. I belonged in Diwan, in a way that I didn’t in my own home with my daughters. Even though I’d brought them into the world, I sometimes felt that their very existence diminished and threatened mine. Parenting continually brought my weaknesses and limitations into stark relief.
Part of my distaste was due to the expectation that childbearing would be the ultimate fulfillment of my womanhood, my crowning achievement. The assumption that selfless love and infinite sacrifice defined and delineated the meaning of my life, and the lives of other women. In that suspended state of purgatory, we were meant to leave ourselves behind. Bearing children signified success—never mind how they turned out. Despite everything I had strived for, how hard I had worked to create Diwan, I received the most lavish praise for becoming a mother. It reminded me of being congratulated for my marriage. I wondered if people married for love, or if marriage was the prerequisite to parenthood, the anticipated result for which we were preordained. My marriage had been intentionally childless for seven years. Were those years meaningless? No. They were happy and they were productive. I started Diwan during those years.
* * *
Back when Zein was two and Layla was eight months old, I’d turned to the shelves of Pregnancy and Parenting. My marriage to Number One had come to an end. I needed help seeing a way forward. Despite the massive catalog of pregnancy and parenting titles, hardly any addressed divorced or single parenting. I ventured to other sections for inspiration. Self-Help had a few books on happy marriages, but none on happy divorces. I retreated to novels. Maybe I should have stocked Pregnancy and Parenting with Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, in which a fetal Hamlet overhears his mother’s deeds and plots his revenge from the womb. Or with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where fertile women become breeders owned by wealthy families. We could travel further back in time to Greek and Roman mythologies, which acknowledged the pain and chaos of love, marriage, and parenthood more than any contemporary guidebook.
Of course, the family unit structures most novels. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy’s memorable opening line inspired the so-called Anna Karenina principle, put forth in Jared Diamond’s 1997 nonfiction book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book argues that it’s the absence of negative traits, not the presence of positive traits (à la Darwin), that guarantees a species’s survival. The same could be said of marriages. We assume that happy marriages survi
ve, and unhappy ones end in divorce. The persistence of a marriage constitutes a success, while divorce is a failure. Why? It seems to me that many divorces qualify as successes, while some intact marriages fail—to satisfy, to grow, to strengthen.
* * *
Why had my marriage failed in the first place? The tipping point occurred just forty-eight hours before I was due to deliver Layla. (This was a few weeks after I’d cussed out the street harasser and stunned my staff into silence.) It was Friday, and Fridays in Cairo always felt like hangovers. The pace was slow. The sounds were muted. I waddled down 26th of July Street holding Zein’s hand, trying, and increasingly failing, to ignore the bolts of pain darting up my left leg with every step. Hind’s silver station wagon pulled up alongside me. She waved Zein and me in. Even though my home was just a few streets away, it felt like miles, and I was glad for a ride. I buckled Zein into Ramzi’s empty car seat in the back and took my place in front, next to Hind.
“I can’t take much more. Get her out of me.”
“She probably feels the same,” said Hind.
“Don’t you remember your last two days before delivering Ramzi?”
“Some things I’ve made an effort to forget.” Hind, clearly eager to bring our testy exchange to an end, pulled up to my building garage, even though I usually entered the building from the front.
I remember noticing immediately that the apartment was eerily quiet. Zein let go of my hand and ran to her room, the patter of her footsteps fading. I made my way farther down the corridor to our bedroom. I didn’t call out his name. I just pushed down the door handle. He was leaning against the green iron railing at the bedroom window, holding the phone to his ear, with his back to me. I didn’t call out. I didn’t move. His tone was mellifluous and sweet. I wasn’t trying to listen, but I could hear everything. More than the actual words, his sweet tone, the looseness of his pose, hurt. I covered my ears, but it was too late. A hollowness set in. I looked to the floor, certain that my guts had fallen out and were piled in a heap. Finally, I asked him in a parched voice to stop talking. He turned around. He told her he had to go.