elemental

 

This past week, the wind blew in from the desert. You could hear the Empty Quarter in the air on Wednesday, feel the hot breath of nothingness down your neck. My mother got out of town just in time. I don't know how my in-laws are going to make it when they come at the end of May.

We had a terrific sand storm on Wednesday morning, obliterating most of the lagoon and the towers a block away. it was the kind of sandstorm that blew a fine layer of sand up your pant legs as soon as you stepped foot outside, the kind of sand storm that shows where all the leaks in your windows are with a pool of powder-fine particulate on the windowsills. The wind outside was high and insistent and like a breath of fever: hot, moist, unforgiving.

We went out anyway.

We went to this fabric shop called Indian Heritage, two doors down from what expats call 'the Blue Mosque', a tiny little treasure tucked away in the fabric souqs near Al Faheidi Street. The men were called to prayer while we passed the mosque, so my mother didn't take any of her fantastic photos... I'll have to get a snapshot of it instead. The prices aren't bargain basement, but the silks are exquisite. They have a natural striped silk i'm dying to take home and fondle, but not for 60 Dh/yard. Which is still a great price, but i'm not willing to pay for fabric i'm just going to drool over.

What they have in abundance are shawls, gorgeous hand-embroidered shawls. the duponi silk bedspread I bought there last year is no longer in evidence (bought it for 200 dh, that's 60 USD, more or less), but if you are a fabric junkie like I am, there's no better place to go.

I am in search of fabric for my guest room curtains. I know exactly what I want, I saw it at this shop a year ago. Of course it isn't there anymore. But I will find it. I will.

 

I carry my child in a Maya Wrap. He's 3 years old and I still tuck him up into the sling and away we go. I've never been much of a stroller person, unless I had too much gear, or we were going to the grocery store and I needed that basket underneath to stash my culinary loot. And although Sharjah is a bit more sympathetic to foot traffic than Dubai ever was... strollers are more hassle than they are worth. Combine that with the unfortunate fact that we loaned our last stroller to someone who didn't know how it worked, and she broke it... suffice to say, the Pitame either walks, or I carry him. It's amazing. Especially when he is out of sorts, if he pops into the sling he is immediately better, and often takes a nap up there while I wander around.

No less amazing is the reaction I get when this long-legged boy of mine is cosy up against my neck and hanging in this instant mama hammock. We live in a country where eye contact is unusual, and open stares just don't happen. But when I wear my kid, there is this ripple effect of women looking and smiling and whispering and pointing, the men and fathers stare openly, and the nannies look jealous. ;-)

I wish I could turn everyone on to the wonders of baby wearing. I am dismayed by what I see as child raising here. Children are left with the maids, who have no authority, control or respect, who openly resent their position and seem to hate the kids in their charge. I have seen children beat their maids, maids scream at their children; I have watched the faces of entirely detatched maids carry a heartbroken toddler with total disregard for the child's emotional needs. I have seen kids hurt themselves or others while their caregivers talk amongst themselves with their backs turned to the unfolding disaster.

A perfectly lovely couple we knew, locals, locked their maid in her room at night to keep her from running away. The maid hadn't seen her child in three years, although Emirates law requires that maids be sent home once a year or once every other year, I disremember which. And Amina was a kind woman, kind to the little boy she looked after, quiet and unassuming. She had a rotten tooth that was not being tended to. She did not get a day off, not even Friday. And these were 'nice' employers. it makes you wonder what happens to the poor maids who don't make such a lucky draw in the maid lottery.

Maids here make on average 800 dh/month. That is just over $200/month. They get room and board, most of them, though some are required to buy their own food. Some are allowed a phone call home on their employers' dime.

If and when we get a live-in maid, I worry. Our maids room is little bigger than a closet: you can't get a single bed in there and close the door, and there is no room for a wardrobe. We'd have to get a sleep chair from Ikea, a single chair that folds out into a single bed. You can't even fit a sleep sofa in there. There are no windows, though she does have her own small bathroom with a shower stall, etc.

We're in a social bind because we can't find a reliable, available babysitter, and when we do have a sitter, we have to be home by midnight. Our son sleeps through the night, so a baby monitor is sufficient for a sleeping maid. But what of her? Who should she be? I want a single woman, or at the very least, a woman without children back home. I don't want her to resent my kid because hers are not with her. Younger or older? Widowed? Who knows? But she has to be willing to learn how to care for my son, with patience, love, and respect, or she'll find herself back on the plane to where ever she was born.

A child who has been carried close to his or her mama, or another caring person, since birth, has certain expectations of the world. The Pitame's needs have been met, time and time again, and he's a very secure little chum. He knows when someone's not playing nice, and even reminds his mama and papa, from time to time, "You have to speak nicer to me." Can you see him with one of these angry maids? I think not. 

desert heat

the wind is blowing in from the desert, and the temperature is rising. And in from the desert blows a million aches and agues, sand-borne pains and fevers, new and insidious every time the winds shift.

this is the third night i've spent in my son's bed, watching his fever wax and wane, helping him to blow his green-snotted nose, quieting the fever dreams and finding his water bottle. He whispers,"I love you mama. Sorry I'm sick," and I pet him and rub his back. I tell him I'm sorry I can't take the sick away. We have conversations at three in the morning, snuggled up in his boat-like bed, face to face, knees to knees, or his hot little feet perched upon my thighs in a sleepy position that echoes how he used to sleep when he was a baby, curled towards my body, feet propped tight on my thighs, nursing in his sleep, content and fat bellied. I used to be able to tell you what his temperature was when he nursed while he was sick, to within a degree or two.

He is a big boy now, over 100 centimetres tall, and still he is my baby boy, my feverish one, sometimes over 100 degrees farenheit, which feels even more alarming because he's usually such a cool-bodied boy. In his sleep he'll roll towards me and grab me tight, his hot hands and burning face all over my poor sleeping mama body, and then he'll roll away, murmuring all the while, some warped dream about snow mixed in with the puzzles we did today, of dog and pig and sheep and zebra. I smooth his short hair away from his brow, change his sweat soaked pajamas when the fever breaks at dawn, and pray that this passes quickly, with Omnicef and juice and love.

 

Such a hard thing, to surrender to this helplessness, even in the small trials of life: to do all that we can and yet have to wait for nature to take its course, for God's mercy, for medicine to work its wonders. There is comfort in love, there is love in comfort, and I sleep with my son to be there when he needs me, to give him the comfort of knowing I am there, each time his feverish body shifts and looks for his mama. I am there. I will always be there.

Some criticize the closeness my son and I have. Some will probably criticize that I stay near when he is sick, or that I snuggle him to sleep at night. But I say, look at him. What better gift to give a child than someone he or she can trust, absolutely? I would hope that every mother and every father does everything in their power to foster such a relationship with their children. I won't wait until I have grandchildren to try to get it right. I don't understand parents who assume they have time to fix it, time to get to know their kids later. There is no later. There is only now. Learn who your child is before it's too late. Know how to be close, let them teach you how to let go.

I received an email from a mums group I've joined here in the UAE, touting what seemed to be a positive parenting seminar, and it made me laugh. When I was having such trouble with my Snickapotamus (because of wheat, caused nasty behaviour problems), I reached out to these women to ask for advice. To a woman, they all recommended I watch the Nanny 911 show on television.

Um.

I don't have a television, and if Time Outs and 1-2-3's worked with my son, I'd be using it.

Now these same ladies are all jumping on the seminar band wagon. Cracks me up. I guess the Nanny just isn't working for them, either.

sweet dreams, mama, he whispers to me. sweet dreams. 

Can your mama come out to play?

 


My son has great taste in mothers. As he races around the playground with his beloved Hussam, his first best friend, I drink coffee and chat with Hussam's mother, a woman of incredible intelligence and knowledge, of deep calm and sweetness. I bask in her brightness, nourished at last after a lonely, hungry year and more, half a world away from my family and friends for the first time in my closer to 40 life.

Friendships travel a twisting road here in Dubai; there are so many ways in which 'otherness' gets in the way. For all that Dubai is being touted as the "Switzerland of the Middle East", when it comes to friends, everyone takes sides. Sometimes all the openness in the world cannot bridge the cultural, social, economic and patriotic divides that run through the shifting sands of this country like its relatively benign stike-slip faults. For example, no one in full Arabian dress, of purda and hijab and burqa, has ever sought me out and befriended me, nor are any of my friends labourers or members of the 'service class'. Somehow, my Indian friends are all Londoners by self-definition, Muslim, and beautiful. My other Muslim friends come from Jordan and Turkey and Palestine, intelligent and fierce and burning bright with life in their simple colourful scarves that do not hide their animated faces, just their luxurious hair. Sweet Russian ladies with their darling Greek mothers-in-law: "Me no talk English so good... Me in Sharjah 15 years now," proud of all her babies and grandbabies... and you want to hug her and learn to talk just like that.

Oddly enough, I've made few inroads into the Jumeirah Jane culture here, though one would think the Caucasian connection might mean more white friends... but the Jumeirah Janes are here on expat packages, with generous allowances for housing, school and transportation, maids and cars, a villa on Jumeirah Beach, time on their hands for full manicures and pedicures on Sundays... Huzzah for them, no bitter fruit here, it's just too difficult to relate sometimes, when someone with all that begins to complain that everything here is too expensive and and and my small family moved here on a wing and a prayer, chasing the promise of something better down the road, but with little in the way of luxury for the here and now. It's a monetary divide that is difficult to cross. By contrast, my best Christian (as opposed to Muslim, though I'm not sure of her convictions on the existence of God) expat friend, from New Zealand, is in the same pioneering spirit boat as we are, and we can talk freely about the difficulty of making ends meet. I have met only one American since we came here a year and a half ago: an older, wacky, artist type lady with wild light socket hair, from Texas -- complete with drawl.

There is also the fear of investing any great affection in those you meet and befriend; the population here is largely transient, subject to transfer at any time, as was the case with our favorite Corsicans, who abandonned us for Houston last summer. Any friendship here is founded on a great leap of faith and forebearance. What gives these friendships a chance to grow is our children.

The ladies who add sparkle to my day are the young mothers my son brings to me through his friends at school, at the park, on the playground. He doesn't care who prays to whom, what language is spoken at home, what colour skin one boy or another girl sports. Indeed, his classroom is an extraordinary display of the entire monochromatic spectrum that is human tint, from palest cream to that beautiful ebony skin that drinks in light and glows with a secret. And so we meet, the mothers, over our children, for our children, who run drunk with delight in discovery, the joy of friends for the first time, the childish crushes on this kid or that to the exclusion of all others. We make time for our children to get together, we share a coffee or a biscuit, we talk about our kids. We might fall into step on our way to those places frequented by women with little ones: the playground, the grocers in the middle of the day, the ice cream parlour. We make first contact with other mothers through their children, with a kind word or a casual gesture of ruffle-haired affection. The children play together effortlessly and the mothers edge slowly nearer to each other, working in tandem to keep play happy, keep it peaceful, keep it safe. By the end of the day, we might know each others' names, and will have made tentative plans, perhaps, to meet again at the park soon. But friendship? Having the kids running in and out of each other's homes? That step takes courage and time for a shy expat like me.

One afternoon I watched in some amusement as a young woman in abaya shepherded a gaggle of children towards some indeterminate destination. My son and I were, without a doubt, on our way to the canal to play some football and with luck insh'allah, find a new friend. As my little boy scooted along on his push car, now fast now slow, now all over the sidewalk, I kept an eye on this other mother's progress. At first moving tangent to us, they soon tacked back on a course that put them on our path, walking behind but catching up, as my son doesn't have a license to drive. With good reason. We fell into step, laughed at the children's antics, and by the time we had reached the canal, my wee adventurer had fallen in love with all the new children, from nearly teenagers to nearly toddling, and we became part of the gaggle. The evening fell and I sat, on the steps of the mosque, in obvious delight with this charming open woman. We talked into the dark, chatted until our kids were exhausted -- she had borrowed her neighbor's children to accompany her and her one year old son to the canal.

The Eye of the Emirates lit up, white against the purple ink of a newly darkened sky, and still we talked. The call to prayer pulled the neighborhood to the mosque, and we watched the children left outside to play, and talked about marriage, and love, and children. She was married at 15 to her first cousin, happily in love with him for ever before, though this was certainly forbidden, and a dangerous thing to do. She goes to University now, perhaps all of 18 or 19 years old, from Palestine. And she is my delightful friend, to call up for a cup of tea and a rendez-vous at the play park with the kids, talk of adventures in Dubai and a summer of gathering the mothers we know together with the sprouts to play indoors and laugh the heat away.

I have great wonderful sparkling beautiful vibrant women friends again. It's nice to look younger than I am, al hamd'allah. Cause you know, I don't wear the traditional garb here. I'm on display, short hair and all. 

Virus

Where is Norton Antivirus when i need it? Why can't I just reformat MY hard drive and kick this virus to the curb?? No, I've got to tough it out, antibiotics won't hack it, cause it's a VIRUS. It's a cough that turns my lungs inside out, makes me run to the bathroom in case I vomit or pee, has me up into the wee hours of the morning trying not to cough and failing miserably. My kid pats me on the back when I'm bent over double, and says with supreme, three year old confidence, "You're ok, mama. You're ok."

Yeah, babe, I'm ok. I'm just not breathing well right now. Got to make this bitch go away. It's been a house guest too long!

all natural

  

the King of Everything's Easter Hat

 
 


We made the hat yesterday. I'm impressed with his art abilities. He can draw suns, clearly what he set out to do, with a circle, and lines radiating outwards. I need to learn how to draw so I can teach him how to see... but that can come later. I'm terrified of drawing, so I don't do it with Nico so often.

I'm so blessed, having grown up with a creative mother. I've got hoards of art things I've saved since we moved here, raffia from a package, a bunch of art papers I bought from the castoff bin at Pearl that moved with us, bits and pieces and odds and sods. The daycare suggested we simply decorate a sun hat... but I took a piece of green construction paper and made him a little cap, and we went to town. We talked about spring along the way, what it means, and we picked out birds to be our hat theme. A yellow sunshine to begin the project, then some trees, some birds, some flowers, and a bird's nest on the crown.

He is in heaven today. Very proud of his hat. His father went searching for a basket for the kid, and came home with an orange purse decorated with raffia and butterflies. Goes with the theme, but our kid's wearing a pink plaid shirt to school today, and while i'm not adverse to stockpiling blackmail materials for his adolescent years, that was taking it into the realms of... over the top.

He loved the purse, though he opted for a Peruvian bag my fabulous friend the future masseuse gave me, and I put his bucket from his cleaning trolley (don't ask) in his school bag, just in case. Honestly, i nixxed the bag because I love it. It's mine. And the opening is too narrow to shove loot into easily when you're three. Really. That's it. 

Day one on Neurontin

The UAE is strange. Most anti-depressants are banned or very difficult to obtain, but you can walk up to the pharmacist and get almost anything you want without a prescription from a doctor. Birth control pills run about 20 dh a month, less than $7 a month and are stocked on the pharmacy floor. You can get antibiotics, medication, you name it. I'm not sure you can buy isopropol alcohol, but my latest experimentation with ineffective cough medicine found me chug-a-lugging something with ethanol in it. Didn't work a lick, and I spent last night moving from couch to bed to computer to kitchen to couch again. I chose to look on it as some well-deserved time to myself. A time to think and dream without a three year old whining, "You're not nice to me, you will not let me eat sweeties!"

Now, I talk a good talk, but leaving my home, my family, my friends, to move to an alien culture with no support group is hard. It's damned hard, and I've been suffering from panic attacks and anxiety, coupled with two years of sleep deprivation thanks to the King of Everything. On a recent trip Stateside, I had the great fortune to find a woman who prescribed a sympathetic course of medications to deal with these problems. Unfortunately, one of them was banned from the UAE. We discussed alternatives, and I was given the green light to begin using amino acids to manage the panic/anxiety. She recommended Neurontin, an expensive, by prescription only gabapentin that in theory should help with the anxiety, but if it were unavailable here in the UAE, I could take GABA and manage the difficulties that way.

Walk into any Whole Foods store and you'll find an aisle dedicated to vitamiins and other magical concoctions guaranteed to boost your intelligence, morale, sleep, health, longevity, vitality, sexuality, and all the other -ities that we need to keep tip top. Including a nice shelf full of amino acids like GABA. I bought a small bottle of GABA before I came back home, but figured it would be easy to find.

Nope. No health food store, GNC, pharmacy or Natural Centre has GABA without being combined with something else. And those inferior offerings are not at the dosage I need. In desperation I asked the pharmacist, "Can I get Neurontin without a prescription?" She smiled and led me right to a glass counter stocked high with little white cartons of just the thing I should be taking. 160 dh, and I'm out the door.

I don't make a great guinnea pig. I don't like taking medicine (the therapist said, "Why don't you like taking medicine? Don't you believe you have the right to feel better?") and the pile of vitamins, suppliments, and aminos I'm currently taking makes me feel like a Pez dispenser on rewind. But I can't find my beloved GABA, and after a week of feeling like a Hell pancake, I'm ready to begin the beguine again.

This stuff should really only be available on prescription. And I'm not sure I can go through with it. One 300mg dose and my eyeballs are tracking like a cursor with a speed setting too slow for the monitor, I'm dumbing down to Jello level and all I want to do is lay suppine. Not good for a girl who uses her brains and her hands for a living; if I don't concentrate, everything becomes disassociated. The feeling is enough, in and of itself, to cause panic... but somehow, it's just too hard to raise that much of a fuss.

And i'm supposed to be taking this three times a day?

Arabic coffee 

Religion down to its commercial parts

My son's nursery school is having an Easter party tomorrow. Children are instructed to wear festive clothes, bring a basket or small bag, and decorate a sunhat. There will be a candy hunt through the nursery tomorrow, so parents are asked to forego the usual lunch box and instead send a sweet or savory dish to share. And a bag of sweeties.

I'm cringing. I'm so against this whole thing, for the sugar aspect of it, for the nominal Easter theme, it's just so...

and then the proud mother in me says, Now Nico can wear that lovely outfit my aunt and uncle got him for Christmas, and we'll make a funny hat to wear out of construction paper when he wakes from his nap. And and and

he'll come home sick as a dog from all the sweeties, will have probably eaten at least three things with wheat in them, and I'll have a raving loony on my hands for the rest of the week. I wonder what the Arabs are thinking about the note they found in their childrens' back packs this week?

the evil that is hand soap

Take heed, all you first world countries, with your Clorox Cleanup and your Dettol. Throw them out! Let your babies eat dirt!

When we arrived in Dubai, we were warned that the first six months were going to be dicey: newcomers always seem to spend their first half year here sick. I think it only took me four months to run the gauntlet, and a miserable four months they were. I would lie in bed at night and could feel some new sick descending upon me from the air conditioning vents. My first trip to visit friends in Abu Dhabi, I felt awful. My husband accused me of being a party pooper, and everyone wondered why I was such a distant snob, but fact was, I was running a high fever and had no business sleeping anywhere but my own bed, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. At night I would get the chills and then soak the borrowed bed with my sweat. When we finally returned to Dubai, a quick glance at my tongue was enough to send me to the pharmacy for antibiotics. Strep. Don't need a culture, thanks, the white rocks on my tongue are proof enough. Then my son and husband caught it, too. Pass around pack, family size bucket o' antibiotics, drugs for everyone!

I was surprised, as time went by and the illnesses got nastier, that I'd never had any of this yuk as a kid. I brought walking pneumonia with me to Paris for Christmas, and expelled a quantity of nuclear green phlegm of a colour and viscocity I was quite frankly fascinated by in a morbid sort of, oh wow, I didn't know it could get that colour sort of way. I was disgusted by my body's lack of grit, its inability to shake off these sicknesses -- I had always been a healthy person, more or less. Why on earth was I catching all of this now?

I blame Dial soap. I blame Madge and her 'you're soaking in it' Palmolive with its softeners and dish cleaning strengths. I blame Chlorox and detox and botox and box tops. We're just too damned clean. Perfectionists. Americans kill off all the germs before they have the chance to infect us and make us stronger. Children here play with garbage they find in the parks, straws and lids and cups and whatever else they can use to make their fantastic sand constructions. Americans don't even have trash in the parks. Americans put their trash back into whatever plastic bags they have on hand and cart it out with them. Americans would bag up their trash if they'd picnicked in a landfill. Woodsy Owl taught us 'give a hoot, don't pollute!' and an entire generation of children was inculcated between episodes of Aquaboy and singing along to Schoolhouse Rockwith the compulsive desire to put our trash in the proper recepticles.

Over the months, we could feel ourselves getting stronger. We learned to recognize the onset of various aches and pains, what sore throat was cause for alarm, which one could be evicted. Apparently, the men's lavs resound with operatic human purgings not confined to the toilets. The ladies rooms are not nearly as frank in their expulsions. Men hawk, spit, heave and retch after every ablution in an effort to rid themselves of the funk that might just kill them. You'll see men driving down the road, slowly, door open for a leisurely spit. It's not rude, here. It's healthcare at its most basic. And they are right, you know. There is an illness here that starts with a sore throat, and a gob of something lodged behind one tonsil. You've got about 24 hours to locate the bug and spit it out before all hell breaks loose and you're lost to fever and pain and delusion for days. Yes. You can spit out sick if you catch it in time.

This past week has been a refresher course in misery for me. I've had the stomach bug crossed with some sort of upper resperatory infection and a swivelling head that puts an English Beat song running nighmarish through my brain, turning me into a swivel head, with a brain that crashes resoundingly into the surfaces of my skull every time I move my eyeballs. I've eaten nothing but ramen noodles for four days, hacked up a lung, and shuffled with an old woman's intensity from bed to toilet to kitchen. I've been sick. My son has turned shaman, blowing on my head to make the bo-bo's all better, patting me and telling me it's going to be all right. I know the contents of his doctor's kit intimately, and have received innumerable shots (this will hurt mama, but only for a little bit, he tells me). I have wept in pity for myself and forced another sip of water past lips that want nothing to do with the finer arts of self-preservation. I've watched how the artificial light changes in the city through the night, and spent those lonely three in the morning coughing bouts on the sofa in the living room, wondering how many more days I've got to suffer. Just as the stomach eased up, the fever, with its aches chills stabbing pains, began. I threw my hands up well, i didn't throw my hands up that would have knocked me back into bed and probably caused me to pass out, I staggered around the mall and watched my son play in the snow from the other side of the glass. Cause I might be sick, but I'm not delirious. Much. I know better than to go play in the snow when my tiny little Prada purse is too heavy to carry.

So, while I have felt justified in yearning for a glimpse of myself, deathly white, in antique silk and lace, elegant and helpless on the divan, a wan hand pressed dramatically to my forehead, coughing delicately into a monogrammed kerchief, I am instead covered in ink and little pieces of paper as my three year old and I create a scary forest filled with monsters and wolves (poor, maligned wolves). I should be in bed. Really. Life however, has decided that I've been flat on my back long enough, and my motherly duties wait for no virus.

At least I'm no longer too proud to spit. And my kid can eat all the sand he wants. I don't want him to have to get sick like this. That which does not kill us... wasn't killed off by anti-bacterial soap in the first place.