Life in Arabia

Good things

2006-09-03T11:51:00.000+04:00

Even though I'm moving back to my home town, I'm still looking for reasons this is a GOOD THING, and not a venture fraught with unknowns.

And so my thoughts turn to the rituals that made growing up a bit more magical. The first thing I'm looking forward to introducing to my son? The Apple Harvest Festival in Pennsylvania was one of those yearly rituals in my family. I'm looking forward to introducing my son to the fun this year. Considering how uncertain the future is right now, both personally and in the world's scheme of things, it's a comfort to have these things to look forward to.

Apple butter. As a kid, it was hard to convince me and my cousins to try it: dark, almost black, and thick but grainy, not smooth and shiny and bright like jams and jellies. But my Grandma made such a big, happy noise about it every time she took a bite, we all had to try it, too. Soon, we were all making big, happy noises every time the old-fashioned Mason jar of ooey gooey goodness came out of the fridge.

I don't think you can buy commercial apple butter, at least, not at your local Safeway supermarket, that's for sure. Perhaps the organic food stores carry it now. We would just stock up on the stuff every time we traveled to Pennsylvania -- family reunion, Hershey's Park, and the Apple Harvest Festival. Stop at some Amish store along the way and buy the hand-canned, home made butter, wrapped carefully for the car trips and nestled gently in some safe nook in my grandparent's not quite an Airstream trailer.

We'll pick up a jar of apple butter this year, along with a bushel of Jonagold apples. I've never tried the apple pizza, as I've always filled up on funnel cake instead. Perhaps this year I'll break out of the traditional pattern. But just a little bit.

Phone Home

2006-09-01T01:23:00.000+04:00

Walking off the airplane into the heat and uncertainty and ending that is Dubai, I was greeted by this reminder that sometimes, what you really need is your mom.

Especially when her name is Kate.

It reminded me that, no matter how many thousands of miles away from her I am, I can always give her a call. She'll answer with a, 'Hello, sweetie! What's happening?' and whether I dissolve into tears or giggles, she'll always listen. She won't always agree, but she'll always listen.

The King of Everything and I are moving back to DC. It's not necessarily what's best for the papa, but it's the best for me and the Boo at this point in our lives. I can best provide for him there, in the city I know best, with the support and love and infrastructure that is there. A one bedroom apartment in Dubai is running nearly $2000 these days. I'm sure I can swing a two bedroom, easy... NOT. The only plusses in Dubai's column are the French school's rates and the fabulous dentist we found. DC's side is overflowing with a richness of experience and friendship that Dubai hasn't got.

Been spending time with my friends, as I'll not see them again in all likelyhood. Add another piece to the heartbreak. I love this place. I love these people. I don't want to leave, but at this point in time, I've got to go. I can't guarantee my child's wellbeing here.

I am extremely ... there is this great big hole where all my future dreams once lay. I wonder what will fill that hole up again?

c'est trop bien!

2006-08-26T08:16:00.000+04:00

The Pipotame (aka, Progeny) really made great strides with his French this summer. He loved his French summer camp, though I didn't hear the kids speaking French very often. But one day he came out of his classroom gurgling, 'rrrrruh rrrrruh rrrrrruh' with a perfectly French 'rrr' sound, and I knew we had it made.

Three weeks in Corsica/Paris with his older sister sealed the deal. By week two, he was running around exclaiming, 'oh, c'est trop bien!' (oh, that's too great!) whenever something worthy of childish delight occurred. He ran with the village summer kids and was accepted. He tried to communicate with them in French, and absorbed any corrections we made to his grammar without a blink, but he rarely made the same mistake more than twice. Pretty great for a three year old.

The French have a pretty strict view of how children should behave by a certain age. When he was 1.75 (that's one and three-quarters years old, for you traditionalist writers out there), we were in Paris for Christmas. Nico and I had severe upper respiratory infections (can you say, walking pneumonia, mama? I thought you could. At least the Boo was just snotty), so we went to the doctor's. Nico didn't want to see her, and was clingy and a bit loud about the whole thing. So she proceeded to read me the riot act about how he was 'too spoiled' and I needed to cut the apron strings right then. When she finally wound down, I protested that he wasn't even two yet. She looked at the forms we'd filled out, and hemmed a bit. She retracted her statement and allowed as how his behaviour was perfectly acceptable, but that by three, I should make sure he's grown out of it.

Oh please.

But at least she looked momentarily embarrassed about it.

So folks would raise their eyebrows at some of his antics. My inlaws and husband were less than sympathetic to his tantrums in the first week. I tried to explain to them: he just left his American grandparents, we had a long flight over and missed our plane to Corsica (very upsetting for the Boo, who wanted his papa), and now he's jetlagged and thrown into a culture where he must speak a language he has never used for communicating, in a completely new place, with a whole new set of rules and tons of people to deal with. He's a little overwhelmed!! Cut him some slack.

The inhabitants of the village stopped raising their eyebrows once they found out he was only three. See, my guy is big, and composed, and coordinated, for his age. His great-grandmother H. thought he was four or five. Most folks do.

He started pretending to talk on his toy telephone. In French. He talks in his sleep. In a mixture of French and English. When he doesn't know a word in French, he says the English one with an over the top French accent.

But the best was the elevator. At his mami's apartment in Paris, the elevator is this antique, glass and wood closet with double doors and a little green fold down seat. And every time we went out, I asked him to do what the little black button said to do: appelle l'ascenseur. And every time I said that, Nico did what I asked. His little boy voice would pipe up and call out, 'Ascenseur!! Ou tu es?'

Because I'd asked him to call the elevator.

Humans amaze me

2006-08-24T00:30:00.000+04:00

I recently had reason to ask for help from a community of women I once knew in DC. The response was overwhelming. Generous beyond all hope. Encouraging and uplifting beyond all reckonning. Everything I needed was offered, without strings, without admonition, without judgement.

All I want to do is be able to return the favor some day.

We leave Paris tomorrow to go back to Sharjah. The boo starts school at l'ecole francaise. He's speaking a mixture of French and English in his sleep now. He has lost his little American accents and gargles the french rrrrr in the back of his throat like a native. I've eaten my fill of crepes and french baguettes, dined with the scintillating Tour Eiffel in my sights, and had some of the most difficult conversations of my entire life in the entirely benign and charming atmosphere of the quintessential Parisian Cafe. I have taken my amino acids religiously, and have knelt at the altar of calm and serenity in stressful times. My heart is clear, my head is full of possibilities, and I'm dreaming of Thanksgiving already.

Thank you. Thank you.

Summer in Paris

2006-08-22T02:43:00.000+04:00

An extraordinary delight, the Jardin de Tuileries is a great place to stop after stuffing your head full of all things ancient and artsy at the Louvre. One final, near perfect day in Paris en famille, I took the kids to the Louvre to see the mummies (cats and crocodiles and sheep, o my!) and the sarcophages. We toured the whole of the Egyptian exhibits, then stopped for un sandwiche au jambon et fromage, un petit gauffre nature (that's plain old waffle with a bit of sugar ifyou know what I mean) for each of the petits; a juice for them, a cafe au lait for me, and a balcony view of all those tourists secretly searching for the Rosetta Stone to unlock all the myserious allegations of The Davinci Code. Then off to the Jardin for some car zooming and some bungee trampoline jumping... a magical flight through the air, a perfect cone of mango gelatto, an exhausted wander back up to the metro.

The Louvre was my son's first experience with a museum where he didn't know what was going on. Usually, we go see dinosaurs, or mammals, or space ships and planets. He didn't know what to make of all that Egyptian stuff. Time for another trip to the bookstore, methinks.

Would that there were more days like these. I don't want to have to become an expert on some other sort of life.

goodbye Tomino

2006-08-17T21:19:00.000+04:00

Well loved and dreamed, the village is behind us now, a postcard from Paris under rainy skies.

I am liking Paris again.

The Louvre is amazing as always.

corsica

2006-08-13T13:33:00.000+04:00

the best thing about the village is that the children run free. No cars. Few bumps and bruises at the end of the day. Even a three year old can go where his heart takes him.

He's not my baby any more. I'm so proud to be his mama.

broad brush strokes of a place loved

2006-08-10T01:14:00.000+04:00

The ascent to Tomino is not for the faint of heart – or of stomach. Viscious switch-backs fold the road upon itself in a zigzag reaching ever higher towards the summit. The terrain is unforgiving, and unforgivingly beautiful, and your eyes are drawn ever to the view that lurches and swoops beyond the windows. Everywhere you look the ground is terraced with low, rambling walls of shale climbing the hillsides, shaded by groves of old, twisted olive trees or abundantly draped with grape vines. There is no bright green to greet the eye with gladness; a fine powder of thin soil covers the rocks, brushes the leaves, dulls what the sun would polish to a high shine.

The village: piled willy nilly on top of one another, tiny villas wedged into every available space, stacked on the hillside like a pile of suitcases waiting to be filled. The sunlight leaves no doubt as to shadow and light, edges slashed clean and clear, no hazy middle ground.

Children scattering before you, intent on their sun and stone games, running wild through avenues so close that two outstretched arms brush the villas on either side, dancing through the inscrutable politics of childhood played out on the streets of summertime.

Everyone complains about le mistral, a force of nature recently descended upon the mountainside, fury whipping the Mediterranean into a whitecapped frenzy, the flowering laurels bending to the ground, a flaxen-haired gamine playing with her tati’s pashmina, arms raised, exhilaration in a makeshift sail on the wind, flying along the ground that feet barely touch. The habituants of Tomino trade easy stories back and forth about these mighty winds that come and go in a matter of days, but leave an indelible imprint on the old timers’ memories. They complain about le mistral in the same even-mannered tone with which they lamented the heat the wind had vanquished: weather bashing as the village sport.

tomino. cap corse. starving eyes and wild heart to drink them in.

summer time

2006-07-31T19:53:00.000+04:00

My little guy loves making fence music. Whenever he sees an iron fence, he has to find a good stick to make a little fence music. We also have fun looking for loose manhole covers that rock from side to side, or metal grates to jump and bang on. But mostly it's about the fence music.

Between our little apartment and summer camp were three blocks of perfect fences. We'd have to leave early to get them all played before camp started.

Tomorrow we go to Paris for a quick change to Orly Oest, trying to make a flight in under two hours. It's about an hour's ride between the two airports. I am not panicking about this, no. We'll make it. Somehow. I hope my poor little guy is up to being dragged through the airport at breakneck speed.

Insh'allah, the next time you hear from me will be from the clear waters of the Mediterranean in sunny Corsica. Insh'allah.

Escape to the beach

2006-07-26T02:03:00.000+04:00

We got the chance to run up to Lewes with a dear old friend and a lovely new one. Nothing quite like a weekend at the beach… well, except perhaps a week at the beach. The house we stay in when we go to Lewes is my friend Mine’s sister’s, full of old advertisements and antique toys, comfortable furniture and good beds. They don’t rent it out, which makes staying there SUCH a treat. The King of Everything ran around the backyard chasing fireflies, then dropped off to sleep while the girls went grocery shopping. Grown up time. My kid and I have been staying in an efficiency apartment while in DC – very rough on us both. No privacy, and I either go to sleep when the kid does at 7PM or sit hunched in the dark over my computer or a poorly lit book, listening to him shift and sigh in his sleep. At the beach, he was upstairs in a lovely room while I sat downstairs listening to music and enjoying conversation with grown ups, people who didn’t require that I repeat myself fifteen times in a row every time I was asked a question.

Beach culture in the States is quite the state of mind. The journey to the beach is a part of the experience, naturally. Families and friends gas up their cars and go, driving eight, ten hours to get to the shore of their dreams. Luckily for us, it’s only three hours, tops, to Lewes. On the route down to South Carolina, the signs begin for South of the Border a good hundred miles before you ever set eyes on Pepe or the insanity that is this home grown roadside attraction.

On the drive to local beaches, it’s the farmer stands that attract attention. Local sweet corn, hefty heirloom tomatoes, sweet peaches and watermelons are good reason to stop and stretch. Out the window, the view offers a crazy quilt of soy and corn fields, buffalo and more conventional cows grazing in pasture, a gaggle of goats straying right up to the roadside to catch a glimpse of the cars whizzing past. Ruined barns and double grain silos compete with quaint farmhouses for the best, most picturesque view… if you’re a photographer, plan to stop often.

We were serenaded by thunderstorms all night, and rain threatened to stop play in the morning, coming down in morose sheets, grey and lacklustre. As soon as there was a break in the weather we were off to the state park and the beach. Cold water. Very cold water, but there were plenty of surfers riding the waves, little kids fighting over beach toys, and grownups of every description thankful for a respite from the daily grind of their ‘real lives’.

Beach culture. Beach weekends. The stuff of life in workaholic America. Sunday brunch at the local dive. Wander down to the corner store for a newspaper and a cuppa, then sit and people watch on some gingerbread porch. I fantasized for a moment that Lewes was my town, the beach my life. It’s a sweet dream. If ever I am allowed to be a homebody, stay at home mom, a Salt Cod home on the beach could be my little slice of heaven. Sigh. Back to reality.

soothing the beasts

2006-07-26T02:01:00.000+04:00

Magical places.

During this trip to my home town, the Pitame and I were happy to go to the Western Shore (that’s on the Maryland side of the Eastern Shore) near Solomon’s Island to visit friends who have known me since I was a little girl. There are some places on this earth that are truly magical; oh my, was it a treat to watch my son realize that Old Spout was one of those extraordinary places. On a high bluff overlooking the Bay, my son sank, mesmerised, into one of eight white loungers strewn along its length to catch the view. He sat, statue still, and stared at the sails weaving their picturesque way across the water. He stayed that way for ten minutes, absorbed, elsewhere, soul-filled and waiting. My father sank quietly into the chair next to him and put his arm around the little guy. It’s a memory for forever, etched into my mind by a calm of thankfulness for such a gift at this difficult moment in my personal timeline.

Old Spout is an old farmhouse, built in the 1700’s and added to twice in the hundreds of years since. You enter the property through a cathedral arch of birch trees sheltering a path of yellow gravel… there is no hint of the beautiful view behind the house. It’s just a friendly yellow farmhouse with wisteria and a porch swing. But there is magic there. True magic. The farm’s sweet water well was one of the last places sailors could fill their casks before putting out to sea: the well is still there.

We swam in the black-bottomed pool, perfectly warm, cool and refreshing, and just the right size for a tired mother and an adventuresome child. Brilliant blue sky punctuated by white, careless clouds. A perfect day for floating on your back and letting your thoughts sink below the waterline.

After a lunch of crabs caught fresh from the water (imagine that, living off the land), sweet corn, farm ripe tomatoes and cold soda, the kid found himself hanging out on the sunporch with my father and our family friend, a man of a certain age with no children of his own and little experience with small people. When finally I checked up on the guys, I found my father asleep on the chaise longue, while the kid and the friend were in an animated conversation about jungle animals.

Magic place. Boxwood mazes and crepe myrtle trees. Birds of prey making off with snakes writhing in their talons while grumble bees make slow work of an old, wooden birdhouse. Plenty of space to run, play hide and seek, look for shark teeth, or simply lay on your back and feel the earth tilt beneath you.

Magical places

2006-07-21T19:28:00.000+04:00

When the spirit moves you

2006-07-11T17:52:00.000+04:00

It’s almost too hard to keep coming back the US for these long trips. It seems I’m destined to miss wherever I’m not. My lovely lady friends keep in touch, sending emails and text messages, I know I’m not forgotten there. Thank goodness! I miss them all and will spend so much more time with them in the afternoons when we get back to Sharjah. Did I write about the fantabulous BG yet? Another woman it’s taken months to see again, after a spring picnic with she and her husband, and the ever present Pitame. We sat on the public lawns of her compound and enjoyed Turkish delights of the non-sweet kind, tomatospicy rice and dolma and sautéed chicken livers. The Pitame played American football with her husband while we lounged on the blankets and talked about our original homes, our mothers, our lives. I wandered a bit away when she heeded the call to prayer that afternoon, and then we talked some more. Then there was that long spell where I had no car, so visiting in Dubai became difficult. And she had some health challenges to overcome, which limited her mobility, as well. But we kept in touch by email and knew someday, insh’allah, everything would work out.

While my mother in law was visiting, I took her and the boychild to Mall of the Emirates, as she wanted to treat the kid to an afternoon in the snow. I was close to my friend, well, closer to where she lived than I’d been in a long time, with time all to myself, so I rang her up. Huzzah, she was available!

In she walked to the coffe shop, resplendent in a colour of green I adore but haven’t the guts to wear, bright bright bamboo green… with a hint of orange mesh scarf following her forehead beneath the green of her overscarf… orange eyeliner the exact shade of the peeking scarf, and the long covering gowns of a modest Muslim woman in brilliant, joyous, amazing green. “YES!” my heart cried in delight.

She gave me these adorable slippers her mother had made – that fit perfectly, of course. And a small, sparkling square of cloth of great significance. It’s the cloth that women use to cover their hands while the henna is drying. As part of the wedding ceremony, the bride is lavishly decorated on her hands and feet with henna, in swirling floral patterns and solid henna fingertips. If you’ve never had henna applied, it’s an exercise in patience and luxury, as you can’t do much for hours afterwards. No chasing children, no serving tea and coffee, no washing dishes. The longer the dark brown henna paste stays on the skin, occasionally moistened with a secret mixture of water, lemon and sugar, the darker and deeper the design will be. Since some traditions say the bride shouldn’t begin domestic duties til the henna from her wedding is faded, it’s in her best interest to make the design stick. At the wedding ceremony, all the women dance with these small cloths, waving them in the air, trilling that blood-stirring ululation with covered mouths and revelling in the fact of their being. And true to my friend, it’s a brilliant, shiny, hot pink piece of cloth. No drab cream colour for her, no.

So I’ll go out dancing with my friends here in DC one night, that tiny scrap of happiness waving in the air above our heads. I will wish I were dancing with my lady friends in Sharjah and Dubai, while wishing I could somehow have all my women friends dancing together. Wouldn’t that be joy enough to move the world?

simple pleasures

2006-07-05T00:48:00.000+04:00

Do you remember balsa wood gliders and rubber band planes? Do you remember how carefully you poked the pieces out of their sheets? Did the planes actually fly, back then, or did we just have such fun putting them together and making the effort that the results, however mediocre, seemed sublime?

I still love balsa planes. And slinkies, and marbles, and jacks. String games and jump rope. And all those simple, ancient games... well, not slinkies, we know how old those are. The game of marbles is over 3000 years old. Knucklebones, played in ancient Egypt and all over the world wherever it was civilized (and i'm sure well before that), was the precursor to our rubber ball games. String figures were made by indiginous cultures the world over, sometimes in competition, sometimes as illustration to a song or story. Jump rope was first documented in Medieval times.

Nintendo, eat your heart out.

Yesterday we went to one of the parks of my childhood and tried out the planes. The Kid was thrilled, for about fifteen minutes or so, and then he wanted to go play on the equipment. But I was bathed in the diffuse, kind light of nostagia and happily fiddled and futzed with the planes, long after the boy had lost interest in them. Thanks to D. for the brilliant idea. It was great to feel like a kid again, and not just the mother of one.

Who's afraid of advertising?

2006-07-05T00:39:00.000+04:00

I want that.

I hear this hundreds of times a day... because my son is watching commercial TV for the first time in his life. Every commercial, he says, "I want that!" Sometimes the advertisement has hit its mark and he wants the product, the fruit juice, the Lysol, the Swifter. But sometimes he’ll say, “I want that house”, or “I want that little girl!” But what’s always apparent is the need, the message of want, that commercials inspire. Its chilling. My three year old is a consumer junkie, hooked into the endless cycle of acquisition.

There is an interesting movement in the US; groups of folks vow to not buy anything new except for food, underwear and socks. Everything else comes from thrift shops, swaps, Craig’s List, dumpster diving, however it can be done. I’m sickened by the amount of money I’ve had to spend just on the ‘basics’ here in the States. My friends bought a fixer upper house and found all the fixtures second hand, for little or nothing. Unforutnately, the free kitchen cabinets came just after they’d given up and gone to Ikea… but I really admire their perseverance, their dedication to leaving a lighter footprint on the Earth. I wish there were something like that in the UAE. There are a few thrift stores in Dubai, mostly for clothes. I’ll get all of Nico’s Dubai clothes at a little thrift store near my Aunt’s house before we go, and spend about 1/10th of what I’d normally spend on new clothes, for beautiful stuff you’d never know was already worn once around. Living in the UAE is still much less expensive than here. The traffic is just about the same…

What we do have here that just thrills and excites me is culture. Free museums. Free shows. DC is a testing ground for pre-Broadway shows, so the best of the future best comes through here. Small theatres are thriving. The Smithsonian is the best of America, an institution that embodies the generosity of this nation. Beauty and knowledge for free. Would that our colleges could be like this! And let’s not forget the hundreds of camps for children my son’s age and older, filled with amazing experiences. We’ve enrolled him in a French Language immersion camp half days beginning next week. The biggest reason we left the UAE for the summer is because I couldn’t find a camp for the Pitame. I can’t imagine an entire summer stuck indoors with an active, intelligent kid. I don’t know how other families do it. I wish Qanat al Qasba would dedicate itself to its original goals. There should be a summer camp there, and an ongoing after school program, for kids with an artistic bent.

You know. Something better for the kids to do than watch television.

chicken pops

2006-06-26T22:45:00.000+04:00

Life is hard, and then you get attacked by hundreds of little itchy blisters -- 264 to be exact -- and you can't get on the plane.

Which is of course, what happened to us two weeks ago. Actually, the chicken pox happened to us two weeks ago. I think it was two weeks ago. It was such a long, hard time that it could have been a year ago. It certainly felt like it lasted a year, and I wasn't the one with the pops! The day after the belle famille left for France, my King of Everything was invaded by hostile forces. They were deceptive, starting off innocuously enough, just a few on his shoulders. No problem, I thought, we can have this licked and still get on the plane to Washington on the 15th. But by the third day, I had to admit defeat and call in the heavy artillery. Camomile lotion everywhere. The doctor assured us that, while this was not a mild case of chicken pox, it was not cause for alarm. We cancelled our flight and booked a new one, sent a flurry of official looking doctor's notes to the airlines and kept our fingers crossed.

What I can't wrap my head around, even now, is the mind dulling boredom of being stuck inside the house with an active boy for ten days. Ten days.

I never want to be inside again.

rain starts play

2006-06-26T03:39:00.000+04:00

strange how odd the familiar becomes when you've left it behind for a while. The utter disconnect between sleeping and waking, confronted by father sky in all his unbridled passions, thunder crashing around the windows as though to ravish me in my sleep. Just a thunder storm, waking me in the dead of night, prickling skin and disquieting my bones. Thrilled and disturbed, an edge carved on my emotions that wasn't washed away with the morning's well-wrung skies. Leaving me raw and flayed for the day's journeys into paths at once familiar and entirely new. Unsettled. Rattled in my soul.

We don't have storms like this in Dubai. I miss them.

It has been raining nearly every day since then, thunder and lightning offering music to dance to, my child clamouring to go outside to play in the rain, as sky drenched and wrinkle pruny happens not at all where we live, scoured by sand and a sun in thrall to itself.

My son teaches me things i'd forgotten I'd ever known, like the unbridled joy of walking through a rainstorm, not caring for clothes or appointments or appearances.

I picture my lady friends in Dubai playing in this rain.

Family

2006-06-17T08:47:00.000+04:00

I spent the afternoon at a friend's house. She and her girlfriend made me lunch, a huge affair of rice and potatoes and chicken and pasta and laban and salad and enough such and sundries as to render the table useless for eating, it was so laden with food. My friend is looking listless and sad these days, and I'm worried for her. Leaving for the summer is hard -- will my friends still love me when I come back, or will they have found some other, more constant companion to hold their hand?

It is so hard to live away from the safety net of family, childhood friends, the community in which you grew up. My friends and I constantly talk about our mothers, cousins, uncles, best friends 'back home'. So many of the women I know in the UAE can't go home. Think Palestine. Think Iran. Think Iraq. Think Somalia, think the Sudan. Interspersed with the contentment of day to day life with a nice home, a healthy child, a loving spouse, is the constant tug and ache of those we left behind.

These women I am getting to know miss their family. I miss my family. I hope, when I return from my international tour, that I can be family to these women whom I hold so dear.

And I hope they will become my family, my home away from home.

Self Confidence

2006-06-12T14:00:00.000+04:00

Even swathed in layers of black, you can tell which women have it. Even utterly unadorned, their presence is unmistakable. I'll find myself turning to admire, in passing, women who possess the space they inhabit. It's not about what they own. It's about what they've got. They've got it.

I can fake it. Perfect belly dance posture, the torso elongated, ribcage isolated, long neck, a deep breath taken and held. Walk that way. Move through the world that way, proud, tall, conscious of the flesh you inhabit, grateful for it, entirely present in the gifts you were given. If I walk that way, I can believe for a moment that i've got it.

But I've never had it. It was never taught to me. I learned other lessons. Obedience.Intelligence. Logic. But never self-confidence. Is it too late to learn? Can I become another woman in the second half of my life? I think about the women with whom I went to school, like Alex Kuczynski, Style writer for the New York Times, and marvel at her. It helps that she's a six foot tall goddess -- but Alex always had style and self-confidence; an easy wit, a sly sense of humour, a ribald and glittering disposition. She was always so perfectly there, in her school chair with that small attached writing table, singing "Don't Go Back to Rockville", loud and laughingly, on a late spring day before English class. And look at her now, New York Socialite, author, columnist, cause celebre in her own right, married to a smart, rich entrepreneur and able to ship her entire entourage to Idaho for a weekend retreat. Lesser mortals are actually disgusted that the Divine Mz. A. would actually raise her glass of Pinot Noir and gleefully declare, "Orgy! Orgy! ...oops, wrong weekend," I have to laugh... it's so quintessentially Alex, and anyone maligning her is simply in possession of a bunch of sour grapes. I marvel at the kind of woman she is and think, but of course. This is the life she was always meant to possess.

What life was I meant to possess? Bereft of confidence, it's hard to tell who I might have become. Singer, perhaps. Published writer, oh very fine. Artist? It could have been. But my reticence has won the day; I'm no go-getter. I should learn how to pretend to be that vivacious, outgoing, confident woman until I get the hang of it. Fake it til you make it, baybee.

I listen to my son say silly things like, "I don't know how" when I ask him to do something simple: put on his shoes, put away his toys. I hope it's because he doesn't want to do it, not because he lacks the confidence to do it. How do we teach children confidence? Especially our girl children? Too much of the 'good job, good kid' praise and you raise a child with a Pavlovian reflex for praise. Too little aknowledgement of a child's accomplishments, or worse, too much criticism of his or her actions, and you create an adult who is unwilling to try, terrified of failure. Confidence is a quiet lesson for parents to impart: recognize accomplishments with simple reinforcement, encourage efforts with simple faith, and commiserate failure with simple honesty.

What does this mean, in real life? Well, my son has a temper. We've been working to give him the skills to manage that temper, and one day, as I watched him play with another child, I noticed him getting angry. To my amazement, I saw him stop, take a deep breath, and the anger went away. Did I jump up and down and squeal about what a big boy he was? No. I gave him a big hug and said, "I saw what you did just now, sweetie. Do you know what you did? You took a deep breath and made the angries go away, all by yourself. What a wonderful thing to be able to do!" and he beamed like a headlight. I try to let him know I see his successes, sometimes with nothing more than a, "Wow, look at what you did!" -- allowing him to own his own success and share his joy in his accomplishments without looking to me for approval. I don't tell him I'm proud of him; I was always too dependent upon my parent's approval. I do, however, tell him how proud I am to be his mama, and how lucky I am that he chose me.

Harder still is to allow him to fail sometimes. We want the best for our children, we want to protect them from pain... but pain is necessary, in non-lethal doses. So my kid's allowed to try, allowed to fail, allowed to brush off his own knees, have a good cry, and try again. No "I told you so's!". No criticism. We do not call him a crybaby when he is unhappy and wails. We do not pressure him with the awful choice: "Are you a big boy or a little boy?" We do, however, sit down after the tears are dry and try to figure out what went wrong, what tools he has already in his possession to succeed the next time. We allow natural consequences to teach life lessons as much as possible. We give him love and comfort for life's disappointments, and then help him right himself for the next adventure. We honour his emotions. We have faith in him. I hope this teaches him to have faith in himself.

I am an adult

2006-06-07T11:54:00.000+04:00

I recently hit a big number in birthdays. I'm much closer to 40 than I am to 30 now, and feeling a bit awkward as I survey the sum of my parts. In my heart I'm still 16, though my body's showing its wear and tear, through having a baby and quitting smoking and being a professional chef for a while. Spiritually I'm in my early 30's, with a new optimism on life and maturity, while there is an emotional 8 year old cowering in the corner at every loud noise and harsh word.

Well, the almost-40 me woke up on her birthday a few weeks ago and realized with some disgust: I'm too old to be this afraid of the dentist.

I haven't been to the dentist in 17 years. That last time, I had my two bottom wisdom teeth removed. I can remember a silent scream welling up and sticking in my throat for the hours (years, lifetimes) it took him to extract the two teeth, with the horrid noise and invasion of the whole process. I haven't been back since. Not for a cleaning, not for a filling, nothing. I let my two top wisdom teeth decay up there, rather than go get them removed. I was positive I had major damage all through my mouth, and would have to have root canals, and scalings, and all sorts of positively medieval tortures whenever pain drove me to the dentist.

Since we're about to go to America for six weeks and France for three, I was determined to get my wisdom teeth taken care of beforehand. I sent out an embarrassed email to the local mother's group and a flood of emails came back; so many women are, like me, terrified of going to the dentist. Many of them recommended various local dentists and some emails simply asked me to pass on the recommendations if I found one I could stand. Several recommendations came either from the dentist herself, or from a dentist's wife; I disregarded those as not objective enough for my terrified self. One dentist's name was recommended more than once, so I chose her.

It took me a week to gather up the courage to call her -- and of course, she was going on vacation and wouldn't be available until the 17th. I'd shot myself in the foot with my dilly-dallying. But lo and behold, yesterday afternoon her office called and asked if I could come around 6:30 that evening and in a fit of courage I agreed.

I warned her. She smiled and laughed and said she would not hurt me. But oh do I hate having my teeth cleaned. To my amazement, the trouble with my two front bottom teeth was tartar, not decay, and the frightening blackness between the two teeth was a filling, not a cavity. Talk about blocking out an experience, I don't remember getting a filling there. Considering I stopped going to the dentist when I was eight, went once when I was 16 and again when I was 21... you'd think I'd remember a filling. It must have been a horrible experience. My mind keeps trying to wrap itself around the memory, only to slide off, puzzled and perplexed.

My husband sat with me the whole time, he who is equally afraid of work done on his own mouth. My gums are in good shape, my teeth cleaned up nicely, albeit stained from coffee. My body ached from the strain and tension, tears leaked from my covered eyes, my Walkman valiantly tried to choose songs to keep my spirits up. It kept picking songs by Bowie and The Tears, my beloved Suede's newest incarnation. I have a new appreciation for the music. My hands clenched tight around tissues, slowly releasing tension whenever I remembered to breathe.

My greatest discomfort, besides novacaine, is the noise dentistry makes inside my head. Once the cleaning was done, I could relax and let her pull out the two teeth with incredible calm and surrender. She had listened to my horror stories of novacaine hurting more than the procedures did, and used something else to numb my mouth past the point of caring. She let me take a break whenever I needed to, and only once did I bite the suction thing. She spoke kindly, calmly to me, with the most wonderful brown eyes, dark enough that pupil and iris were one and the same, crinkling merrily most of the time, softening with concern whenever I expressed the tiniest bit of discomfort. She joked about my 'sexy mouth', such tiny lips! Apparently, whatever kind of mouth I have is shit for dentistry but much prized in the Filipino community. At once point I thought she was going to have to brace a foot against my ribcage to get the last root out, and started laughing when it was unwise to do so... She thought I was crying, poor thing, and I had to have them take all the equipment out of my mouth so I could explain.

She kept the use of the drill to a minimum, for which I am eternally grateful. I'm a new woman today. I am resolved to go back to her when we come back from our summer exodus, and have my cavities filled. I am resolved to having my teeth cleaned every six months. I'm looking forward to a healthy mouth that I will gift with white teeth sometime next year.

I'll be one year shy of 40. I think white, healthy teeth will be a fine birthday gift.

homesick?

2006-06-06T08:53:00.000+04:00

In a week and a day I go to America for six weeks with my son. This summer is painfully hot, already breaking the mercury and sending us gasping from one side of the street to the other. It's the time to creep from shadow to shadow, shade to shade, sleep the day away and come alive at night.

When your kid is a morning person, this just isn't going to happen.

We all piled into the Jeep for a final adventure before the summer crushes down on us. We drove to Kalba, then to Fujairah, where we stopped at the lovely Hilton for lunch. The Pitame boy ran into the ocean fully clothed. We ate hot lunches and drank cool fruit juices and talked about tsunami aftershocks as we watched a pitiful, rogue wave make off with someone's abandonned shoes and socks. We took the new road (116) over to Kalba and the old road (88) back from Fujairah, oogling the fruit stalls as we went. Two positively beligerent vendors tried to charge us 40 dirhams for a couple of mangoes, so we laughed and made our way back to the Jeep. NO wait wait. Take. Take. Eat. And they were cutting fruits and shoving morsels into our hands, practically into our mouths. Eat. Eat.

Which is how I discovered Chikus, or Khakis, these little, indeterminate brown ovoids with a surprising taste of pear and fig and date all rolled around on the tongue. For 25 dirhams we left with our mangos and chikus, and had a nice ten minute respite from driving while we waited for the Jeep to cool down. And learned a timely lesson in patience, for if you try to eat a chiku before it's ripe, all the spit in your mouth will be sucked out, and you'll be left with a bitter, sere taste that's difficult to expel. Wait til they are soft, and gently yeilding.

Part of the rythmn of life is in the foods that we eat. I'm an avid watcher of the produce aisles, coming gleefully home with sacks of blood oranges, or pomegranates, or strawberries in their proper time. I look at what is on offer here in the UAE and though I'm sometimes tempted, I don't buy the peaches from Australia. They are always out of season here, and the flavourless rocks everyone's trying to sell me just don't compare to the sweet, juice down your cheeks peaches I used to buy in America.

So I am homesick for the ritual of food as I knew it when I grew up: watermelon chilled in a stream and eaten on newspapers during July's family reunion, pomegranates around the kitchen table, chatting with my mother,at the end of the year. Red plums so juicy you couldn't eat them in polite company, around the beginning of July, and peaches whose scent transported you to heaven from a kilometre away. Blood oranges to stave away the worst of February's bleak, longest of nights, and strawberries off the vine in early June. And mangos. When I was a kid, as soon as mangoes showed up at the supermarket, my mother and I would glut ourselves, joyfully sticky and laughing all the while. But then they started showing up all the time; rather than spoil them, we waited til their season was again upon us before digging in.

Good things are worth waiting for. Especially here, where almost all produce is imported, it's crucial to wait and choose with the seasons. Shop locally, or pick those fruits and vegetables that are imported from as nearby as possible.

Because really, everyone should have a home made peach cobbler. And cherry pie. And apple fritters. And... chikus. Dragon fruit. Longans and lychees. Mangosteens.

vous etes invites!

2006-05-29T07:45:00.000+04:00

We went to dinner chez amis the other night. My belle famille is visiting, and as they have friends all over the world, they have friends in Dubai who quick quick! organized a dinner party in their honour. Mme. P is a delightful, beautiful, charming woman whose poise, style and grace has me a bit in awe. She is a woman who includes you in her beauty, taste, and generous spirit, rather than putting you in awe of her talents. This, in itself, is a rare gift.

Mme. P's guests are always lively and intelligent, worldly and well-read. Last dinner we enjoyed there spiralled off into the conversational stratosphere of Iranian culture and pre-history, with interwoven threads of Sumeria and Ur, Innana and the complicated political tapestry that is UAE history...

As is usually the case at these gatherings, ladies outnumbered men. So many husbands are always travelling, we often have to abandon the traditional man/woman seating expected at European dinner parties. I found myself seated between a woman acquaintance from my home town and an extraordinary lady whose company I have quite enjoyed at these gatherings on other occasions. She had just come from London and was on her way to Iran, visiting a son in Dubai on the way through. She was so still, so ponderous was her manner of speaking... in direct, thrilling contradiction to the passion with which she spoke of Iran, the beauty of the country, the richness of its culture. I alternated between listening and looking, at her deep brown eyes, at her skin that glowed and danced and offered itself as an ornament of finest nacre while the rest of us wander around in our ordinary flesh...

and interestingly enough, she was hoping to begin a study of an archeological project in Iran, but reluctant, considering the country's uncertain future. She wondered aloud whether it was worth beginning something she might not be permitted to finish...

so much of our rich past is being destroyed in the name of what... Progress? Superiority? We live in shifting times, the world's boundaries unstable beneath our feet. When there is so much to occupy us, so much to capture our imaginations and fire our passions, why must we waste so much time fighting over a difference of opinion? Why do we need greater weapons of mass destruction when we do so well with hammer and gun and hateful words? I really would like the chance to grow up and become one of these women I so admire: my mother, my mother in law, Mme. P, this delightful dinner partner. I want to be that woman for some younger mother to enjoy.

Handremi

2006-05-24T12:49:00.000+04:00

My friend came towards me with an extra sparkle in her eye. "Today we will teach you something new," she said with a smile, and procured two new playing decks from the plastic bag around her wrist. "It is called handremi, you know this game?" I confessed that I didn't, and idly shuffled one of the decks of cards. It had been a long time since I'd played a card game. She mixed the second deck into the first. I definitely have not played handremi.

Fourteen cards, dealt carefully two by two to each of us. No Las Vegas slide for this lady, no. A fifteenth card was turned upwards and left on the top of my pile. The remaining cards were left face down on the table, and the top card turned over, the King of Clubs, and poked, protruding, into the middle of the deck.

Double decker poker without the bids, really. And a twist, because there is always a twist. The object of the game is to build suit runs and matches in your hand, at least three in a series. That random card sticking face up in the deck? That tells you which Ace is wild, and only the ace with the same suit as the up card is wild. Aces high, face cards are counted as ten points each.

As I was given the fifteenth card, I discarded first. Everyone picks from the deck, never the discards. I watched the cards I wanted pour out of her hand and considered dismay, before I remembered we were playing with two decks.

There are two ways to win. In the lesser bid, a player can lay down all matches and suits in her hand if the total points add up to sixty. If she chooses to do this, other players can add to her combinations when the game is over, so don't forget to play that hand when you discard.

Handremi is the big winner, and this is when all your cards are suited and matched. You must have every card in your hand matched, unlike gin where you can lay one down.

The double decker card fan is a must, by the way. Practical and infinitely chouette.

siren song

2006-05-23T23:18:00.000+04:00

I didn't realize it was a mimosa tree until I looked into its branches and saw the Dr. Seuss flowers popping up everywhere. The fragrance was entirely different, you see.

My mother taught me what mimosa was. She would tickle my nose with the baffling blooms: like fairie broomsticks, each bristle white to begin, then moving pink to the bamboo green dot on the tip. But beyond its appearance, its bouquet was what was truly extraordinary.

The afternoon I auditioned for Peace Child, I was walking home, my head full of dreams, when this scent, this compelling aroma wafted across my path, and it hit me full on like a single, impossibly high note going on, and on, and on. I scanned the usual places, tree boxes and front yards, for the source of such ambrosia. My mother had showed me a mimosa blossom once before and I'd never found such a tree again, but here, unmistakably, and blocks away from where I'd first scented it, was the object of my heart's desire. I followed that bell-clear note down two city blocks before I spotted it: a lone, white pink blossom fifteen feet up in a mimosa tree. I stood beneath its canopy for a good ten minutes, breathing the air.

Why the region's eBay copy-cat might not make it in the Middle East

2006-05-20T15:31:00.000+04:00

I love buying things online, even though I rarely ever do it. I did buy a lovely, brushed stainless steel teapot from Souq.com, the region's answer to eBay. But, unlike on eBay, Souq.com users don't seem to understand the concept behind auction buying.

Case in point. While poking around on the souq site today, I stumbled upon this exchange:

Question by kevcapoz(new):
What a geat table- what is the diameter of the glass? March 12, 2006 - 11:45

Answer :
It is 3ft Dia.. March 13, 2006 - 06:47

Question by expatmom(new):
Can you please indicate the price you are looking at (privately to my email if you wihs) and if it suits me I will take it. March 23, 2006 - 12:19

Question by renie(2):
UR PRICE IS BIT HIGH.. CAN U COME DOWN TO TWO HUNDRED FIFTY?? March 29, 2006 - 07:30

Question by renie(2):
i wanna check out the item, can u pls call me on landline (deleted) - dubai. if it is ok i wanna pick up the same today itself. April 13, 2006 - 04:53

Question by veerapinto(1):
can these legs be seperated or are they joined together April 17, 2006 - 08:55

Answer :
Yes u can April 17, 2006 - 09:08

Question by veerapinto(1):
can i just have those 3 men. I dont require the glass. what will be the cost of these 3 men April 19, 2006 - 05:26

Question by stylokaron(new):
Can you please indicate the best price. I am really intrested in it. May 11, 2006 - 12:17

Answer :
it will be higher then the 750.00 if ur intrested then u msg me back for the price May 11, 2006 - 15:13

Question by shoppin_queen(180):
nice table - but can i be cheeky & ask where did you buy the chair in the background as its exactly like what i'm looking for ! thnx May 14, 2006 - 17:25

Answer :
it is not a chair but a part of a 7 seater sofa are u intrested? May 15, 2006 - 18:08

Question by shubha_bhatiya(2):
i can pay 800. final price if condition is good. I am not able to bid more ( limit of 3 bid).

send me an e-mail if you want May 15, 2006 - 18:09

Question by shoppin_queen(180):
hi, possibily interested - i take it that it is for sale then ? can you send me a private answer with details of the set then & the price you would be looking for.
thnx May 15, 2006 - 20:02

Answer :
my final price will be 900 May 16, 2006 - 18:00

Question by shubha_bhatiya(2):
ok 900. but will like to see first. May 16, 2006 - 18:42

This is just wrong on so many levels. It's not an auction, it's a glorified rummage sale. Can you imagine, someone asking an eBay seller to come down on the price? And the buyer offering a final price? And what happens to souq.com's revenue stream if the users start haggling like they were standing in the... well, the local souq?

Not to mention, I've seen countless pieces on souq.com concurrently listed on other, local sites as for sale. What would happen if someone won an auction, only to find the seller had unloaded the piece on someone who found it through another channel?

And everyone is missing the point of an auction. It's the opposite of haggling, really. You want it, so does she. You bid. She counterbids. You raise the stakes. She wibbles, but come in with a higher bid. Can you match it? Do you want the piece that badly? And so it goes, til the auction ends, and someone is declared the winner.

But here in the Middle East, the stated price is never the final price, not outside the shopping malls. You walk into a shop, or down to the quaint souq (Arabic marketplace), and you browse. You spot the perfect, genuine pashmina, but you play it cool, fingering five other items, making mildly disapproving faces, little moues that say, "I'm just slumming it, I'm dying of ennui at The Avenue, dahlink, and had to see how the other half lives." You ask how much, and act shocked at the price. You make a counter offer, half the price the merchant quoted, and see what he says. You make a great pretense of leaving the shop and walking towards the next one, hoping the merchant will follow you and shout another, lower price, closer to what you'd secretly hope to pay... and so the dance continues, until you either agree or walk away. But once you agree, do not reopen negotiations. Bad form. Accept a cup of mint tea or a coffee, if offered. Smile. He's made more money than you'd guess at the sale, and you feel you've walked off with a great bargain.

So what will it be, folks? Bid it up, or talk it down? Cause you can't ask folks to bid up and then let them bid you down.

Lemon Blueberry pancakes with Strawberry sauce

2006-05-19T12:19:00.000+04:00

In case you hadn't guessed, I live in the Middle East. It's not easy to get all the ingredients I need for the recipes I create. Cottage cheese, for example, costs about US $2 for four, perhaps six ounces. SIlly. I could make my own, but... who has time? Some of the ingredients I use here are not quite one or the other. Labaneh is somewhere between sour cream and cream cheese; I have to drain it to use it for cheese cake. I've even used paneer, an Indian version of cottage cheese, that is much harder than the stuff Europeans and Americans are accustomed to.

The pancake recipe I've developed is infinitely forgiving vis a vis its contents. At best, you will have a fluffy, tasty pancake that leaves no wishing for what you can't have; at worst, a delightful, spongy, dense pancake that is fully filling, and great with jam for a snack the next day.

4 eggs
1 cup whole milk cottage cheese (you can use cream cheese, yoghurt, or ricotta if you don't have cottage, or your favorite non-dairy equivalent)
4 Tbs. melted butter (substitute coconut oil if you wish)
2 Tbs. lemon juice
2 tsp. lemon zest
1 Tbs. brown sugar or honey (optional)
1 tsp. vanilla extract (gluten free)
1 c. cooked millet, quinoa, amaranth or a combination thereof
1/2 c. millet flour
1 c. Doves Farm Gluten Free Plain White Flour Blend

OR

1/2 cup chickpea flour and
1/2 cup rice flour

1 c. (more or less, to taste) frozen blueberries, preferably the small, wild blueberries

In blender or cuisinart, combine eggs, cottage cheese and butter. Blend well. Add lemon juice, lemon zest, and cooked grains. Blend until cooked grains are broken and blended. Add sugar/honey and vanill, pulse until well mixed. Slowly add flours. Mix well. Pour batter into bowl, stir in blueberries.

On hot, buttered griddle, pour 1/4 cup batter for individual pancakes, and cook like wheat pancakes. You're going to have to clean your pan in between, and rebutter, because the blueberries will stick.

These are delicious with syrup, or fresh fruit, or frozen berries heated until warm. I chose to use frozen strawberries this time. Delish.

These pancakes are great for everyone, not just those with celiac or wheat sensitivities. They are high in protein, use complex carbs, not simple carbs like white flour, and are tasty.

who am i kidding?

2006-05-16T14:58:00.000+04:00

Dubai is a no-man's land. Local population stands at just 26% of the total number of bodies crowded up against the Persian Gulf. If Dubai stands as an example of how Islam and the West can get along, we're in deep trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for

Prostitution
Public indecency
Perilous roads
Peonage

Is opening up this sliver of paradise worth the degredation of what is beautiful and right about Islam? Speaking as one who is no scholar... just as a woman who hears the rumours...

I am curious to read the Vanity Fair article from this month's issue.

150 | DUBAI'S THE LIMIT In little more than two decades, a mind-boggling metropolis has risen from the sands of Arabia—the ever expanding, hyperkinetic swirl of towers, theme parks, mega-malls, luxury hotels, and enterprise zones that is Dubai. In the swankiest restaurants and darkest corners of the tiny emirate, Nick Tosches discovers what has fueled the unparalleled growth of this Las Vegas on steroids: the royal house of Maktoum's version of the American Dream. Photographs by Robert Polidori.

A friend who pointed me to the article was quite taken aback by what it has to say -- apparently, it's a salacious little rip on our Las Vegas meets Disneyland home away from home. "You live there?" Sure, I know which Spinney's has the Russian prostitutes and which, the Asian ones. I know the hole in the wall in Ajman where you can get illegal booze at your own peril -- illegal beer and wine is just a bad idea. who knows how long it's sat in this springtime in Hell heat? I know Dubai is a key spot in illegal drug trafficking ports and strategic location offer it up as a key trafficking hub for all sorts of seamy underbelly type things, including drugs and terrorists... But look at it another way, and Dubai is a place where I can walk away from a stroller full of shopping bags, baby gear and a purse, and it won't get stolen. Where people give my child a big friendly smile and a toussle on the head. Where I am safe walking the streets at night. Where I can sleep without fear that a bullet will come crashing through the window. Yeah. Those are fears for Washington, DC, home of the brave, land of the free to remain prisoners of their own society.

I'm sure whatever Vanity Fair said, it's part of the reason why we moved from Dubai to Sharjah. There's an emptiness to Dubai that wears on you after a while. I mean, how many shopping malls do we really need? My husband and I finally had to go into an African and Eastern to find out what it was -- a liquor store. And there is little that is human to the scale of Dubai: the buildings are too 'too', the roads are terrifying, the sidewalks aren't meant for walking.

We are all of us expats; some are here as political refugees, some fled their home countries because the fighting is fierce and opportunity few. Some are vague pioneers in the capitalist Wild Wild Middle East, trading covered wagons for airplane tickets, prairie for sand. Some just woke up one morning, finally listening to a little voice inside that had been whispering, "I wonder what it's like to do something different?" Some pay for the priviledge of sweating to death to make the dream come true.

I wonder how shaky Dubai's foundation really is: if the spark of revolt jumped from work camp to work camp, we'd be engulfed in angry, abused men in a matter of hours. If the rest of the world becomes disenchanted with the oddity that is Dubai, will they stop coming? If the expats give up on skyrocketing housing costs, shrinking packages, huge school and living increases... if they give up and go home, what will be left? Can Dubai cross this dune, or will it have to recede back into the sands?

Apples and oranges and Dragonfruit, o my!

2006-05-16T10:50:00.000+04:00

One of the things i love about living in this part of the world: the fruit and veg section of the local grocers. Thank goodness Carrefour finally posted pictures of various Indian fruit and veg, with the thing's name, or i'd still be wondering what most of it is.

I still don't know what most of it is for.

When we first arrived, my husband had a bowl full of mangosteens waiting for us to try. Lovely brown round bellies full of fruit pods that were sweet, white, voluptuous on the tongue. I was in heaven, and instantly added it to the roster of fruits I can't live without. In season, of course. Lytchees, an entire stand full of the dusty crimson-coloured fruit, are an excuisite treat; this past Christmas season found us camping in the Empty Quarter somewhere past the Liwa, contentedly roasting marshmallows and passing round a bag of ripe lychee fruits. Note to self: do not throw lytchee seeds into the fire. they explode.

The melons here have me all mixed up. Rock melons are canteloupes I think, and sweet melons are like honeydew, but not... because they look just like canteloupe on the outside. imagine my surprise when I cut my first sweet melon open and discovered pale green flesh and a sweet, slightly smokey flavour. Peaches are in from Jordan, now, but they didn't make the trip: overblown, smashed, but flinging peachy goodness at our nostrils as far away as the yoghurt aisle. Watermelon from Iran is the sweetest I've eaten since Maine. Al Ain strawberries are small and intensely sweet.

But the fruit that has me stumped is the dragonfruit. Lovely to look at, it was terrifically disappointing when all was said and done. It has no flavour. the seeds are somewhat amusing, and i bet it would make a dramatic looking sorbet, but as a sit down in the kitchen and find yourself in heaven kind of fruit, it just fails.

Though I hear you can grow a lovely succulent if you plant the seeds. Seems all this dragonfruit of mine is good for.

I am a Peace Child

2006-05-14T09:45:00.000+04:00

In 1982, i believe it was, I had an extraordinary opportunity. I was young... I won't tell you how young, or you'll know i'm not young anymore... and a friend of my mother's was hired on to do costumes for a new musical being staged in Washington, DC. The first round of auditions had come and gone, but Lady Kate, as she was called, had spoken to the creators of the show and gotten me an impromptu audition. I stood in the middle of a borrowed living room on a small street in upper Georgetown and sang a capella, probably something from Cinderella, a children's opera my elementary school had done the year before.

My life almost changed that night. I could have been a star.

Instead, I was cast as the understudy to the lead, not the lead girl, alas. I had the voice, she had the resume - and she was cuter than I. It was *this* close. But there was an acting troupe of ten children who carried the plot and I was at of those, and happy to be there. What a thrill. What a dream come true. And on a cold day in December, we played the Kennedy Center, for One Night Only, the American premiere of a show called Peace Child brought the house down.

In a darkened theater, a lone voice sang out, "Come into my joy, come into my pain/Come you'll be a friend of mine, I'll be the same..." and into the house streamed hundreds of children from regional singing groups and schools, waving bright kerchiefs and streamers of colour, singing the refrain of Peace Child. From the balconies and the back of the hall we danced towards the stage and surrounded Suzanna York, the narrator of the show.

What was Peace Child? It was hope. It was a story about a Russian girl and an American boy who save the world by meeting and realizing, our differences aren't so great, if you get to know one another. Based upon the ancient tradition of sending a Peace Child to warring villages, one who can negotiate for peace in the event of discord, a child who lives among the other peoples and protects the peace.

There will be a reunion next year. The boy who played the lead, Marco Clarke, died of AIDS at a very young age. I think he was in his early 20's. Such a brilliant, bright eyed child when I knew him. Sweet boy. I wonder what the rest of us have done? I'm casting about in my study for my program of that night. It's here somewhere.

I'm wondering if the Peace Child initiatives might be something to do here in Sharjah? As the Cultural Capital of the Middle East, shouldn't we? I wonder if Peace Child can return to its original message of citizen diplomacy -- it focusses mainly on human rights and sustainability, now. Will have to talk to David about this, i suppose.

I was reminded of this night in my life because of an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Peace Child has profoundly shaped the way I think about people and the world. I am a product of the 80's, of nuclear proliferation, Cold War, AIDS and the threat of total annihilation. Lenny Bruce would have loved the 80's, he could have brought back his, "We're all gonna DIE!" routine. But Peace Child gave me hope. I do think there is a common ground. I do think people of wildly different backgrounds can learn to tolerate each other, even love each other. I think of the women I know, here, who wear abayia and laugh and share coffee and stories and card games with me while our children run happily amok. I am blessed by the gentleness of their questions, of their desire to understand. I am sweetened by their kindness. I wonder why we cannot do this the world over? if we spend half the energy we use for hating on positive change, instead, what could this exhausted world become?

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about Yemenis using poetry to combat terrorism

O men of arms, why do you love injustice?
You must live in law and order
Get up, wake up, or be forever regretful,
Don't be infamous among the nations

now, that's my kind of fighting.

It's too hot to go to the beach

2006-05-13T15:23:00.000+04:00

Friends called. Picnic on the beach at Mushrif Park, 4PM, be there. So we grabbed our handy-dandy, prepacked beach bag and wandered off on our usual Friday meanderings: sale at Marina (separate gripe about how they operate), Mall of the Emirates for a little play for the little one, lunch and relaxation for the husband creature, and groceries for our bbq on the beach.

Neither of us had planned to swim. The Petit Pitame, on the other hand, had woken up that morning, heard the news that the beach was on our adgenda, and prompty whipped out his swim trunks to wear under his blue jeans. Cause he's that kind of kid. I don't like wearing a bathing suit on the public beaches here. Too many lonely men veering towards me in the open sea. Very disconcerting to look around and realize you're in a ring of men who have loosely congregated around you. And i'm no blonde beauty, neither. My husband didn't feel like swimming for whatever reason husbands don't swim. I'd worn a skirt; I could wade in the shoals with the kid. No problem.

It's becoming beastly hot out. Too hot to go to the beach, not that anyone in cooler climes could possibly imagine that. Too hot to swim?

But there we were, on the beach at the end of the day, sweating bullets, lugging picnic supplies through the sand to our friendly encampment. The husband complained that he hadn't brought his suit: "Didn't you save me from myself?"

No. But the beach bag did. Lo and behold, a plethora of bathing suits were to be found. Even one for my mother. And an extra one for the kid. And one each for silly mothers and fathers who think they can go to the beach and not swim.

So there we were, sneaking one last dip while the light lasted: a vague pinkness smeared across the sky above the Gulf told us where the sun had gone. I turned back towards the beach and smiled in gratitude... there was the full moon rising above the beach, cresting the palm trees, bringing waves and sweet nightfall and a refreshing breeze.

what goes around, comes around.

2006-05-13T14:19:00.000+04:00

The King of Everything is channeling his great grandfather. Its the dark socks.

the inlaws are coming! the inlaws are coming!

2006-05-08T08:34:00.000+04:00

ma belle famille will be here at the end of May. I hope I have better luck feeding them than I did when my wonderful funny drink of water for a parched soul mother was here.

You see, when the weather turns, when the winds blow in from the desert and the heat and humidity compete for gold medals in the Hellish category, any thoughts of food fly out the window. We'd eat a light breakfast of some fruit, perhaps one of the Nicopotame's special wheat-free pancakes, the recipe for which is endlessly changing (last version had paneer in it, yum!), and some Easiyo. So much easier to make your own yoghurt when you have the right equipment. I'm about to experiment with making camel's milk yoghurt!

So I'm thinking what to feed my other family when they come to visit us. Definitely this heavenly lamb with apricots I fell in love with last year, though it's far too sweet, and needs to be reworked a bit. It's too hot for my favorite Indonesian version of stone soup, with the season's best vegetables, a viande or poultry of some sort, and a rich, thick coconut curry to hold it all together. Frozen mango shells brimming with a yoghurt/mango/honey puree for a cool snack or dessert. What else can I feed them?

I'm going to look at my favorite recipes and see if they can be reworked for the crock pot. That way, I can cook this week and the next, then just defrost something exquisite.

And of course, roast beef with a mushroom/thyme sauce, pan-seared haricots verts with garlic and olive oil, and a deceptively simple potato galette is always a winner.

Shopping list calls. Here's the unmodified version of Lamb with Apricots for your culinary pleasure:

Lamb and Apricot Tagine

3 Tb olive oil
450g/1 lb lean cubed lamb (or beef)
1 cinnamon stick
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 pinch cayenne pepper
1 Tb plain flour
200 g/7 oz dried apricots
600 ml/1 pint rich lamb stock
juice of 1/2 lemon
4 Tb clear honey
50g/2 oz. lightly toasted, slivered almonds
handful of coriander leaves

couscous to serve

Heat oil in large, heavy based saucepan and cook lamb over moderately high heat for 5 - 6 minutes, until golden all over. Add all spices and toss and cook for 1 minute, until aromatic. Add plain flour and toss lightly to coat. Add apricots and pour in stock and lemon juice. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer gently, covered, for 25 minutes.
Add honey and season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook, uncovered, another 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until sauce has reduced and thickened slightly. Stir in almonds and coriander leaves. Serve over couscous.

it should be easier

2006-05-07T14:15:00.000+04:00

My son's got a wheat sensitivity. I made this discovery by the power of deduction the last time we visited my parents in Washington, DC; it was a bit of a 'eureka!' moment, after day upon day of a child who should have been cast as Regan's long-lost brother in Exorsist: the Sequel. My sweet, funny, smart, agreeable boy turned into a possessed monster, complete with spitting, cursing (Well, in three-year-old-speak, 'Go away! I don't want you here!' is cursing... thank GOD he doesn't know the 'H' word. No, not Hell, but Hate), biting, scratching, screaming and generally trying to figure out how to make his head spin all the way around on his body. One morning, in a rush, I handed him a baggie of Cheerios and we hopped on the metro to meet my mother at her house. By the time we got there, he was cranky. I thought he was hungry, so we poured the rest of his Cheerios into a bowl, added some strawberries and milk, and had a proper, alebeit late, breakfast. Half an hour later, all hell broke loose, the lightbulb I conveniently happen to have floating half a foot above my head turned on, angels on high were heard to sing, AHhhhhhh! and i smacked myself in my proverbial third eye and shouted at my mom, "IT'S THE WHEAT!" all the while laughing and cackling and scooping my screaming spitting biting light of my life into my arms, dancing around the living room.

Well, my mother lives two blocks away from that bastion of good taste, Whole Foods, so we were set for the duration of our stay. They have gluten and wheat free down pat.

Coming back to the UAE was a bit trickier. But if I don't stop here, i'll have written my whole article about food allergies and published it here, ruining any chance I might have of getting it published in a paying forum. So, cut to the chase.

I know it's impossible to avoid all the over processed foods we have here, there and everywhere. Did you know, M&M's have wheat in them? the shame. It's true. You wouldn't believe what isn't gluten/wheat free.

But I'm living in a part of the world that has not, historically, depended upon wheat for its starchy cravings. I should be able to wander into the stores and find a wealth of alternatives. Perhaps. I've found rice flour, it's true. And glutenous rice flour. And brown rice flour. In three different stores in two differnet Emirates. I buy cornmeal at Spinney's and potato flour at Geant. I've found Quinoa at Carrefour, and Amaranth at the Organic Foods and Cafe, no luck yet on unpearled barley but I'm holding out hope. I've found Iddly frozen in the supermarket, and might tinker with a recipe to make them sweeter. But it's just so hard. I have to drive the length and breadth of Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman to keep my pantry stocked with wheat alternatives.

So today i'm going to try whipping up some crepes using glutenous rice flour. who knows. it might work. But i might have to run around the proverbial chicken to get all the ingredients i need!

whazzit?

2006-05-01T20:29:00.000+04:00

I don't do homeopathy. Blame it on my good old industrial lifestyle, raised in the country that convinced the world that formula was best for babies... I don't do natural remedies to what ails me. Either it goes away on its own or i'm taking pharmaceuticals, can I hear an AMEN? Because I admit it... I don't know how to say Ayurveda, it sounds like some new age lounge group or something. A pan of oil poured over my forehead will do nothing but make me greasy. Really. Skeptical white girl.

Course, when you look at the calendar and see that holy green goop, Batman, it's been a month since this cold started and golly gee, nothing's moving up there, your teeth feel like they are going to fall out and your eyes are bugging out of your head... it's time to try something.

Not that i'll go to the doctor's, no! I've got Amoxycillin, 500mg bo tid (that's taken orally, three times a day. I'm reluctant to take it, just as I'm reluctant to admit I'm about to take a powerdrill to my sinuses. It's sitting in its little Pharmacy bag, nestled up against a box of Panadol Sinus, which didn't do a thing to relieve any of the might as well pound the right side of my head against the wall pain i'm going through right now.

Because you see, I'm secretly hoping the green tea and ginger I've been consuming all day will work its wonders. When I was getting mastisis while nursing my son, someone told me to make a compress of mashed ginger and apply it to the affected area. Sho nuff, the ginger drew the infection out and I was right as rain in a day. So this morning, I made myself a compress, two actually, of ginger for my sinuses, smashed fresh ginger wrapped in gauze, and pressed it down on the offending cheeks.

the left side did nothing, the right side blazed like the dickens. Oddly enough, it's the right side I'm having trouble with. Coincidence? I think not. I was careful not to get any ginger in my eyes, but my right eye stung like crazy, anyway. Because the sinus infection has moved to my eyes. That's right, folks, I'm a mess.

I drank ginger tea all morning, adding hot water and more ginger every time my little pot was empty. I lay with the compresses on my cheeks above my sinuses til the King of Everything came home from school. Wonder of wonders, it's working. For the first time in a month, something comes out when I blow my nose. I've got something like a sense of taste back.

Maybe next time I won't be so easily dismissive of natural remedies. Cause you know, there's always a next time.

the other side of the mirror

2006-05-01T09:04:00.000+04:00

I used to be liberal. I used to go to rallies, protests, events. I waved a coathanger at the first pro-choice rally in DC, high on the shoulders of a friend of mine, high on the sheer mass of people there to be passionate about something. (and don't think you know my views on abortion because of this. you don't. Though I will give you one hint: I believe in choice)

I got older. I decided that I couldn't change the world with protest. I could only teach my child, and the children around me, to be kind, to be compassionate, to be considerate. I'm on a personal crusade for manners, now. I'm a centrist. I believe in family, and the power of humanity to strive always to be better. I don't believe the politics of left or right to be correct. I don't follow a party line.

Now I live in Dubai. There are no politics. The monarchy tells us what to do. If we choose not to do it, fine, we can go home. Now, for someone like me -- white, female, happy not to drink or experiment in a life of crime beyond taking a few extra Splenda packets from Caribou -- this just isn't a problem. I don't have a mother and father, a wife and three kids, my sister's oldest boy, all depending on me.

What Dubai doesn't want you to focus on is the fact that this city-state, like all great nations, is founded upon slave labour. And the real kicker? these slaves are paying brokers back in their native India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, to be put into bondage. These workers make a pittance, pay for their own lodging and food, live 15 to a flat, and work through the summer when I get to run away to cooler climes. They make $200 - $400 a month and owe thousands of dollars to these brokers back home. They can't make ends meet. Of course they are rioting. They aren't paid much... but then again, they aren't actually paid, most of the time. The companies tie up the workers' pay for months. And if they don't like it? they can go home. Striking is illegal. These men haven't got the money for legal fees, so due process is duly denied. In the interest of 'national security', the development companies are hiring scabs to continue working. What are these displaced workers going to do? They can't go home. they can't work for another company. They are stuck.

When the Burj Dubai is finished, are we going to look at it in awe? Or are we going to think of the labourers who lost their lives due to shoddy safety standards, heat stroke, and heartbreak? Are our manicures and days on the beach really worth this? Dubai has the potential to be a miracle nation, and the wonders going up all around us are staggering. I love it here. I won't join the work strikes in solidarity. I don't want to be kicked out of the country. I toe the ine.

Had an evening out with a lovely couple on Saturday. He's an urban planner, and regaled me with stories of getting repeatedly fired from the same company for encouraging the Mexican workers to unite and strike for better wages and conditions. The owner of the company kept hiring him back. Street theatre, I suppose. I wonder how this man, new to Dubai, is going to survive working with his crews. He's just balls to the walls crazy enough to try to organize them.

I do what I can. I pay my babysitter well, and always a little bit extra. I don't haggle very well in the shops. If it's a good price, and I can afford it, and it costs less than it might if i were home... I pay. I leave a small tip in the coffee shop for favorite servers. I give alms to folks on the street. Some expats tell me I shouldn't treat these people well, they will only take advantage of me and think me weak.

from this article on MSNBC:

"We're here to earn money, not for happiness," Amin said. "No one comes to this country for happiness."

Animosity on the rise
Most of the hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers are from India and other South Asian countries, with strong union traditions. Episodes of unrest began last year over living conditions, low pay and hazardous workplaces. At Amin's site, two Indian painters had died a few days before, when ropes holding their platform aloft snapped. In the worst outburst, as many as 3,000 workers rioted in March at the site of Burj Dubai, wrecking cars, computers and construction equipment.

Amin and Miah's complaints echoed others: The company seized their passports when they entered the country, their pay comes months late, complaints can lead to deportation and they make too little to offset the $175 they pay every month for rent and food.

"The law doesn't protect us," Miah said. "The government looks after the companies, and the companies don't care about us."

love song for an artist

2006-05-01T07:59:00.000+04:00

I've been thinking about family. I miss my grandfather more than anyone knows. They don't know how much I miss him because I'm unable to articulate it. He died May 20, 2005 after an incredible, simple, incredibly simple life. Such beauty and elegance as you never thought to find in a mobile home. See, when my grandparents retired, they bought a little land in the middle of nowhere Virginia, close enough to all the grandkids that we could come visit on the weekends, far enough away that folks weren't always tromping through their living room. They had a great Airstream trailer, though it wasn't an Airstream, it only looked like one. It might have been a Streamline; it looked like an Airstream to me. they parked it on the lane opposite the cosy mobile home they plonked down in their woods, and we kids spent summers running around pretending to be Indians, swatting mosquitos, and running free. What a blessing!

At any rate, they didn't intend to stay in the mobile home. Some day they'd build a house. The mobile home was just a place to hang their hats when they weren't off trailering around the US in the wintertime. They went all over the US, and especially loved Corpus Christi down in Texas. I'll have to go there some day. In a trailer.

This is what I wrote for his memorial service. My mum asked for a copy...

My grandfather's hands were amazing. There was nothing they couldn't create, not a thing he couldn't fix. When he retired, they became the hands i knew and loved best: the hands of a silversmith. Cracked from the pickling solutions, with the black from polishing paste ground deep in the fissures, scrubbed clean, but never white, by lava soap at least half a dozen times a day.
My grandfather's hands created beautiful jewelry, flipped pancakes, baited fish hooks, built watches, rebuilt bikes, crafted brand new limbs for little kids, bandaged our scraped knees. His hands were full of grace. When he talked, they mirrored his conversation with the same spare precision as the words he used. Grandpa would lean towards you, hands open, fingers just slightly apart, making a gentle point, more often than not with a sparkle in his eyes and the beginnings of a smile around his mouth. Contemplative, those same fingers would steeple; deep in thought, those hands would fold in on themselves, fingernails lightly touching back to back, the whole works tucked chest high, tapping a rythmn, comfortable.
Grandpa would walk by you and his hands would reach out to pat your leg, squeeze your shoulder -- a gentle 'i love you' is what those hands were whispering. You had to listen to Grandpa's hands to really hear him talk, because so much of what rarely fell from his lips passed easily through his fingertips.
I think about all the things that he accomplished: working for the CCC, developing the artificial limbs program in Walter Reed, then on as a prosthetician at DC General, and becoming Fredericksburg's official silversmith. I think about the children whose lives he made better when he gave them a new arm or leg, i think about the love he had for his wife, the five children he raised, the grandchildren he shared so much of his time with, the great grandchildren he adored, and I am so proud of him, of what he created and accomplished with those two hands.

***

love you

elemental

2006-04-29T07:52:00.000+04:00

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

2006-04-23T22:44:00.000+04:00

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?

2006-04-11T22:03:00.000+04:00

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

2006-04-11T00:44:00.000+04:00

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

2006-04-04T09:19:00.000+04:00

the King of Everything's Easter Hat

2006-04-04T09:04:00.000+04:00

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

2006-04-03T20:38:00.000+04:00

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?

2006-04-03T15:21:00.000+04:00

Arabic coffee

Religion down to its commercial parts

2006-04-03T14:46:00.000+04:00

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

2006-04-02T12:32:00.000+04:00

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.

Coffee, tea, or ?

2006-03-29T07:45:00.000+04:00

In another life, I was a potter. I taught pottery, working as a teacher's assistant at the Art League, for years, in addition to running the kiln room or glaze team.

Last month, our things from the States arrived, and I am again blessed with beautiful handmade mugs and bowls, vases and urns, other wonders of time and knowledge.

I had to stop when I was about six months pregnant, unable to bend to the wheel without vigorous protest from he who would become the King of Everything. Afterwards, there was little time and less access to the tools I needed. Sometimes I would put my wheel in the back yard on a lovely spring day, the babe toddling around the yard, threatening to swim in the fish pond. But not enough. Never enough.

Then I had to go and move to the desert. No clay, only sand, and I'm not about to declare myself a glass blower. What's a girl to do?

Well, hang out in Sharjah, where art is happening, and meet some people, make some friends, press the point that I'm dying to get back into the studio and teach and create. And patience pays.

There are now whispers of two possibilities, whispers only, the suggestion that perhaps a business proposal is in order, a quiet word that i'm on a very short list of folks to head this fictional program. I'm trying not to get giddy but oh, to get my hands wet again? heaven. I can't wait to get dirty.

Perspective

2006-03-24T23:49:00.000+04:00

This rough draft essay has been temporarily removed because it's been sent to a publication for consideration. Insh'allah, I'll post a link here someday to the final article.

his pictures are worth my thousand words

2006-03-20T13:30:00.000+04:00

Brian McMorrow has posted some beautiful pictures of the UAE.

including this one:

of the Blue Souk across the Khalid Lagoon from our apartment.

Solenopsis geminata

2006-03-14T19:56:00.000+04:00

Round these parts, folks just call them "medium sized ants" and then curse. Violently.

One of my greatest reliefs in moving from our villa in Dubai to a flat in Sharjah was a respite from the medium sized ants that had taken up strategic defensive positions on the villa's ground floor.

My first, negative experience in Dubai came about a week after my son and I had landed and rejoined the Husband Creature. It was still beastly hot in October, but there was a cool oasis of green grass and shady trees just a short distance from our temporary residence in Bur Dubai. Walkable if one went the long way round to stay in the shadows. 'Pitame, not yet two, was trying to play cricket with the big boys and I watched, sat crosslegged on the luxury of green grass in the desert.

Suddenly, a tiny spot on my lower left shin was sending Times Square sized billboard messages of extreme distress to my bewildered brain. Fire! Plague! Poison! Murder most foul! I'm hit I'm hit! Mayday mayday! I stared at my hysterical leg, which seemed to be trying to escape itself, and was at a loss to comprehend how such a tiny round bump could be broadcasting such excruciating pain.

"I think I might have to go to the hospital," I said to my husband, trying to sound nonchalant. Of course, it seemed a complete nonsensical non-sequitor, coming from the lips of a woman recumbant on the lawn in seeming bliss until a nano second ago. I just couldn't articulate the agony. Searing, yes! Radiating, yes! Hot needles, stilettos, traveling all the nerves from there to up here yes yes yes! Minute, yet heart stopping. Literally. I could feel my heart skipping around in there. "I think I may have been bitten by a spider. Hurts like a sumnabitch," was my maleloquent explaination. I mean, really. Until you've been bitten by something like that, you just don't understand.

After an hour of rubbing, spitting, cursing, and searching the grass for that spider, the constant, internal shriek of pain that made me wish for amputation was replaced by a hefty pulse of breathless agony every five minutes or so. Nothing swelled up, turned green, or fell off, so we decided to scale back the emergency room panic to emergency room standby.

I hardly slept that night. The pulses diminished over the next two days... and just when I thought it was safe to come out of the apartment, WHAM! another nasty bite -- on the nape of my neck -- revealed my arch enemy: an ant. One measly, nasty-looking ant struggling between my two fingers could render me utterly incapacitated, whimper every time that wicked pulse of pain shot out from my poor neck. Or wherever the hell else those foulmouthed louts decided to strike.

Imagine my dismay when we found our band new villa already inhabited by these tiny bullies! Nothing could dissuade them, nothing could evict them. Not ant spray with a mile-long tube to reach deep inside nests. Not dried potato flakes, guaranteed to expand in their abdomens and blow them up. Nothing would kill these suckers. Nothing. Nothing except shoes.

I found my son in the living room one morning, my sandal in his little hand, enthusiastically whacking random floor tiles. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" he exulted, every time the footwear slapped the floor.

"What are you doing, buddy?" I asked as casually as I could, vaguely horrified at the sight of my bloodthirsty toddler.

"I killin ANTS, mama!" He was so proud. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" screamed my son. WHAP WHAP WHAP went the shoe. I tried to instill a Buddhist-like respect for all living beings in my murderous son; he just looked at me like I was nuts. Ants = pain. Ants must die. Simple. I wondered who would end up on the shrink's couch for this one: him, or me?

The ants and I reached an uneasy truce: I killed them every way I knew how, and they bit us every chance they got. I mean, fair's fair, right? OK, so maybe it wasn't a truce, maybe it was all out war, but if they would just stopped biting me and my son, maybe I'd stop killing them, right? I tried to hide my attempted local genocide from my son, preaching tolerance and love and No Killing whenever I found him dancing around the living room, playing Medium Sized Ant Twister. Left foot, ANT! Right foot, ANT! Right hand, ANT! The months went by, highlighted by a turf war between the medium sized killers and some enterprising little Pharoah ants who had been colonizing the light switches, but had set their sights on some ground level real estate. It was a bloobath. Itty bitty ant corpses strewn across my elegant Italian tile floor, ravished by as many as five or six medium sized monsters at a time.

Mind you, these ants were fierce. And determined. They had drilled their home through ceramic tile and grout. No wimpy wood flooring, here. The ceramic floors were a godsend, though, come potty training time. I simply dressed the kid in a long tee shirt and let his zizi (exact translation: french for... oh hang it, i don't know the English baby word for 'penis' any more... ) hang out in the secluded breeze, probably singing Born Free in its little, zizi mind. You see where this is headed, don't you? Accidents were a breeze to clean off the tile floors. We were making fantastic progress in this perilous milestone.

Until one day, my son, who had been happily playing in the living room with his toy cars, let out a scream that had me convinced he'd shoved a screwdriver in the electrical outlet. Here, in Dubai, with 220 DC. Instead, I found him standing, bright red, howling, one hand clutching his preciouses, the other hand in his mouth, wailing, "ANT BITE ME ON MY ZIZI!" over and over and over. Let me tell you, this isn't a bobo that maman can kiss better. Oh me oh my no. Please no.

He screamed for 20 minutes. This is the kid who laughs when he falls off the bed and whacks himself senseless. I hugged and whispered and rocked and put cortisone and bobo cream on his bobo, a bright red dot on his poor little scrotum, I ran a cool bath and put a sachet of oatmeal and lavender in it, I snuggled him for hours as the waves of incomprehensible pain washed through his body from his most joyous parts. It was days before he'd squat down to play on any floor, and he mashed medium sized ants with a fury that only an outraged toddler could. I didn't stop him. I joined him. How dare they bite my son there!!

Today at the park, over a year since 'the incident', my son was playing in the sand. "Is that a medium size ant, mama?" he asked me in an innocent little boy voice.
"Yes, sweets, it is."
"Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!" grunted my son, and WHAM WHAM WHAM went his little bucket into the sand. Who can blame him?

Solenopsis geminata spread outside its native range at least several centuries ago, e.g., to the Antilles in the sixteenth century (Wilson 2005) and it was well established in Hawaii by the 1870s (Reimer et al. 1990). Some of the variation seen within the species in Florida may be due to introductions of populations from elsewhere within its native range (Deyrup et al. 2000). It is still spreading, being a relatively new arrival in Arabia (first records from Dubai al. 1997)), and new populations have been detected in towns in northern Australia (Andersen et al. 2004; Hoffmann & O’Connor 2004)

Imagination

2006-03-11T17:47:00.000+04:00

When you don't get snow, you make up some. Living in the desert has its challenges. We will never get a white Christmas. But, armed with a bike helmet, rocket jammies, spiderman sandals, and some clear plastic cut into the shape of skis that are then cellophaned to said spiderman sandals... and a mop and a broom, you too can learn to ski in Dubai.

The other day, I found my almost-three year old wandering the apartment with a prayer rug draped over one shoulder. When asked what it was, he replied, "It's my toy sack, mama! I'm bringing presents!"

Ah. Santa. He pointed to a sheepskin procured at Ikea (yes, all up and coming countries have an Ikea. It's in the "How to Grow a Super Power in 25 Years or Less" manual). The sheepskin, it appears, was his sleigh.

"But i don't gots any reindeers, mama!" Thus, the rug behind on his sheepskin sleigh, being pulled by apatosauruses, ankilosauruses, a tyrannosaurus or two, and whatever other dinosaurs we could find.

Santa Claus, indeed!

2006-03-10T19:03:00.000+04:00

When we went into the desert, we were a caravan of five 4x4s, with a total of eight children bouncing along for the adventure. It's a miracle no one was hurt or lost on this trip; glo stix are a must for desert dark wanderers of pint size. My little one fell into the firewood, not the fire. The desert is the ultimate playground for old and young, alike.

2006-03-09T21:29:00.000+04:00

A Date Palm in bloom.

There's something about camping in the desert, then coming back, looking at the map and thinking, holy shit, we were only 30km from the Saudi border.

We only turned back because we were short on petrol.