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.