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| Playing dress-up like mama... |
Dear Debo,
Well this is ironic.
I started this letter planning to tell you all about how amazing my
baby is. After your last message that had that passing reference to your next
project being working on making my kids some cousins, I wanted to sweeten that
deal by telling you all about my precious Sabrine. How yesterday I plopped her down
in the frame of the backdoor where there is a nice breeze and she sat there for
45 minutes cooing in wonder up at the pattern of dark green leaves dappled against
the grey sky while I mixed and kneaded an entire batch of bread. She is so
relaxed and content to just be that sometimes I actually forget where I have
left her in her little chair – out under the clothes line where I had been
taking down laundry, or on the back porch where I was trying to get charcoal
lit. Or how she will bounce from hand to hand when people come to greet her,
bestowing gorgeous leaky wet grins at people regardless of what language in
which they are baby talking to her (Angale, leke bati!). Or how at
midnight, when she calls out from her pack n-play propped up next to her sisters’
bunkbeds, Bryan groggily fumbles between all the mosquito nets back and forth
and nestles her into the warm space between us, and she instinctively finds my
breast in the pitch dark and cuddles into me as comfortably as an extension of
my own body and we all fall deeply back asleep to the rhythmic gurgle of her
tiny swallows. These are some of the most precious moments of my life. Things I
will cherish until the day I die.
But, those moments are not this moment.
In this current moment Sabrine is refusing to sleep in the heat of the
afternoon although she hasn’t slept all morning and both of her sisters have
passed out. She can’t sleep without being swaddled but once swaddled she is
miserable in her sweat and every time she finally dozes off an accursed fly
will land on her left nostril and she wakes up enraged all over again. So here
we are, me passive aggressively rocking her little chair with my left foot
while humming an exhausted lullaby and trying to type while she resentfully frowny
sleeps into the blast of a fan sucking away at the solar batteries. Motherhood
someday may not look exactly like this for you, but there will be days it will
be just as maddening.
Otherwise though, your newest niece is pretty amazing. She is
happiest in the mornings which works out well since that is when I homeschool
her big sisters. We have taken to doing school outside most days this week
because the rains have been teasing us, and it is cooler outside under the
thick grey blanket of clouds than inside under the tin roof that pops and
growls as it heats up. I sit on a rope stool while Annabelle and Mikat sit at
their little plastic tables and chairs and we read Little House in The Big
Woods and color in matching pairs of animal mamas and their babies and trace
jittery letters and numbers and glue absurd amounts of construction paper
together to make all manner of things. I know your teaching forte is kids older
than mine, but I can’t help but think of what an amazing job you would do with
these little preschoolers. Between growing up in a world not so different from
theirs and all your boundless creative energy, you would have so much fun with
them, and they with you.
As much as they grieved leaving behind their sweet little school of
five months in Kampala, I think they are genuinely happy here, maybe even
happier. This week they have seemed a little bit high on the freedom that comes
with life out in the middle of nowhere. They are rediscovering all the joys of
cooking up feasts in the sand pile, climbing dangerously up the tall mast of a Neem
tree, painting pocketfuls of rocks outlandish colors and then throwing the
leftover painted water at white chickens, finding dead chameleons,
experimenting with which plants on the compound are edible (and the nuances
differences between “edible” and “desirable”).
Last Saturday we went out to one of the further camps in the county. I
was a bit dubious about the whole thing considering we were leaving at one in
the afternoon, interrupting naps to venture out at the hottest part of the day.
The girls managed alright through the community meeting we attended although
they were a bit bored by the grownups’ long conversations under a rakoba
outside of the camp market with only a handful of curious kids hanging nearby. But
with some dried pineapple and a nearby ant hill they managed alright. But we
had been invited to a friend’s house afterwards and I confess to an impeding
sense of doom as we made our way through close tarp walls and into a clustering
of huts inside a compound at 4:30 in the afternoon, all three of my girls
wilting by the minute.
We stepped inside though and immediately realized we had been invited
to a wedding. Hundreds of women in exquisite tobes were daubed like garish
paint across the earth toned canvas, making me feel shabby in the cotton tobe I
had thrown on as we left the house, old and cool over a baby. Huge trays heavy
with food were weaving overhead between the thick clusters of people, each making
their way towards men in turbans sitting on mats or old women behind mud walls.
Conversation hummed around us while little children dressed like miniature versions
of the parents scattered between all the legs and baby goats butted heads in a
rusty wheelbarrow. We were ushered to rope beds covered in velvety gold cloth and
offered water in blue glass goblets, all delightfully opulent against the dirt
and tarps and extravagant poverty.
We were greeted by a stream of happy people, including the groom and
his brother, each almost playfully somber and wielding long swords braided out
of grass and flowers. Eventually we Khawajias (Bryan, Eli and the boys
were somewhere out of sight with the men) were escorted to a quieter yard where
the throngs of children were forbidden to follow and we were served rice and
meat, bread and rice pudding a rather alarming shade of yellow. The daughters I
thought would be melting were instead mesmerized by the whole affair and
gobbled up a whole plate of food themselves. In fact, to my embarrassment and
pride, they couldn’t get enough of the fried pieces of liver and loudly asked
for more in a tone that transcended all language barriers. Our gracious hosts
(and a seemingly thankful Bethany) shoveled more liver onto my little girls’
plate which they ate until they could eat no more.
Before we left in order to get home before dark, we were invited to
watch the very beginning of some traditional dancing. An old man in a white jalabiya
and vest was plucking on the biggest robaba I have ever seen with a
leather cover so worn it had to have been carried out from their country when
the war started. Old women were ringed around him and shuffled their feet while
sing-chanting kicking up curling clouds of dust into the evening air. How
desperately I wish I could have gotten a picture of my Annabelle, Hana, in
her bright blue headscarf pushed to the inner circle and concentrating on the
rhythm of the feet around her, stamping her bright pink crocks in imitation.
But I didn’t, because my phone was somewhere in my bag which was somewhere with
a girl who had kindly offered to carry it somewhere back to the car for me and
who had disappeared somewhere into the crowd. Furthermore, a bawling Sabrine
who had been passed from hand to hand for the past hour was now offered back
into my arms smelling like an Arabian bride from the homemade perfume that had
been dabbed gently onto her forehead and the sweaty rolls of her arms.
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| Drill Sergeant Mary Katherine and her foot soldiers |
We fell into bed late that night, too full of rice pudding and liver to
even eat supper. The girls did eventually start to melt into emotional
trainwrecks, but miraculously, that wasn’t until they were already bathed and
in jammies and required little more attention that simply turning out the
light. I fell asleep shortly after, pretty tired myself, but so thankful for
these troopers. In the same way that I don’t mind that all their playmates are
boys and that they spend much of their time in trees or playing army, because at
the end of the day, for better or worse, they are obsessed with the color pink,
refuse to wear anything but dresses and fight over the “Elsa and Anna” plate at
supper time, I similarly am grateful for every moment they spend in places like
traditional weddings in a North African refugee camp eating liver and petting
baby goats. They are American little girls and at the end of the day, they are
still going to grow up with occasional trip to Disney World, too much stuff at
Christmas and an opportunity to go to college. When we first got back I had a
couple of heart pangs when they would cry for their school in Uganda,
questioning again all the things they are missing out on. But this week I feel
better about it all. That image of Annabelle gazing up at the old man playing
the robaba as she tried to dance with the women around him is emblazoned
in my mind. They are missing out on some things. But they are cashing in on a
whole lot more.
Gotta run. Sabriney Beanie is waking up with a big old grin ready to
hang out. Love you bunches. Get to work on those cousins! Love you,
Liz
