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Authors: Krista Bremer
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counterclockwise. The window jerked down in spurts, as stubborn and recalcitrant as my three-year-old in the backseat. When I had worked my window into its slot, I sat up, brushing away the hair that had fallen in my face. The other mother cocked her head slightly and said, with a hint of awe, “Wow! I didn’t even know they made cars like that anymore!” If only I’d had power windows at that moment, I could have coolly drawn a barrier between us with a touch of my fingertip.
Later, at the bank drive-through, I admired how the other cars’ windows slid gracefully open, like curtains before a performance. At night, I dreamed of windows that closed effortlessly, saving me at the last moment from attackers. I became convinced that my manual windows were giving me carpal tunnel syndrome. If only I had a car with power windows, life would be good.
But how would I convince my husband that a new car was an urgent necessity? We had discussed purchasing one when Aliya was born. In the first raw weeks after her birth, when I was too scared even to carry my infant downstairs for fear of falling, I’d insisted we needed a safer vehicle. But Ismail—the same man who went to our daughter’s crib throughout the night to check on her breathing and murmur a prayer over her sleeping body—balked at the suggestion that buying an expensive car was part of being a responsible parent.
In the mud hut on the coast of Libya where he had been raised, families collected water from a common well and filtered the larvae from it through empty flour sacks before giving it to their children to drink. By the time he was a teenager, the sound of his mother wailing in labor was as familiar to him as her haunting moans of grief; she had buried five children. Three faint gray lines were visible at the center of Ismail’s chest—the last traces of a tattoo his mother had given him when he was a child, slicing his skin and filling the wounds with ash, to protect him from evil spirits.
Th
at
was his health insurance.
In the suburban tract housing development where I had lived in Southern California, we displayed NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH stickers in our windows and children didn’t talk to strangers. Though the names of all the developments rapidly colonizing the inland hills were Spanish, the only Mexicans we children knew of were the ones who migrated north through the canyons, moving in quiet packs in the dark. We knew these Mexicans were real because when we ventured into the ravines, farther than our parents permitted us to go, we sometimes found their tattered blankets and the charred remains of their campfires. We feared these dark, dusty apparitions and made the same mistake as many of our parents did: we confused poverty with evil.
During my pregnancy, Ismail and I had traded tales of our childhoods, captivating each other with descriptions of our “exotic” backgrounds. I described earning my pancake-flipping badge at summer camp; he recalled reciting the Qur’an to a blind imam at the local tribal mosque after school. We reminisced about our first jobs: mine, at Baskin-Robbins at age sixteen, to earn money to satisfy a voracious clothing appetite; his, at age five (for no money at all), stocking the shelves of his father’s tiny shop in the village market. We imagined that we had escaped unscathed from the hazards of our respective childhoods and would now build a bright new life together, one that combined the best of American freedom and Middle Eastern tradition. But Aliya upended all those idealistic thoughts.
Some aspects of American parenting thrilled Ismail—such as the first-class university hospital, five minutes from our house, to which our health insurance gave us easy access. But most middle-class parenting rituals mystified him. He could not understand why I spent hours on the Internet, looking up recalls on baby cribs and car seats. He questioned my using hypoallergenic detergent on every cloth item that came in contact with
Later, at the bank drive-through, I admired how the other cars’ windows slid gracefully open, like curtains before a performance. At night, I dreamed of windows that closed effortlessly, saving me at the last moment from attackers. I became convinced that my manual windows were giving me carpal tunnel syndrome. If only I had a car with power windows, life would be good.
But how would I convince my husband that a new car was an urgent necessity? We had discussed purchasing one when Aliya was born. In the first raw weeks after her birth, when I was too scared even to carry my infant downstairs for fear of falling, I’d insisted we needed a safer vehicle. But Ismail—the same man who went to our daughter’s crib throughout the night to check on her breathing and murmur a prayer over her sleeping body—balked at the suggestion that buying an expensive car was part of being a responsible parent.
In the mud hut on the coast of Libya where he had been raised, families collected water from a common well and filtered the larvae from it through empty flour sacks before giving it to their children to drink. By the time he was a teenager, the sound of his mother wailing in labor was as familiar to him as her haunting moans of grief; she had buried five children. Three faint gray lines were visible at the center of Ismail’s chest—the last traces of a tattoo his mother had given him when he was a child, slicing his skin and filling the wounds with ash, to protect him from evil spirits.
Th
at
was his health insurance.
In the suburban tract housing development where I had lived in Southern California, we displayed NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH stickers in our windows and children didn’t talk to strangers. Though the names of all the developments rapidly colonizing the inland hills were Spanish, the only Mexicans we children knew of were the ones who migrated north through the canyons, moving in quiet packs in the dark. We knew these Mexicans were real because when we ventured into the ravines, farther than our parents permitted us to go, we sometimes found their tattered blankets and the charred remains of their campfires. We feared these dark, dusty apparitions and made the same mistake as many of our parents did: we confused poverty with evil.
During my pregnancy, Ismail and I had traded tales of our childhoods, captivating each other with descriptions of our “exotic” backgrounds. I described earning my pancake-flipping badge at summer camp; he recalled reciting the Qur’an to a blind imam at the local tribal mosque after school. We reminisced about our first jobs: mine, at Baskin-Robbins at age sixteen, to earn money to satisfy a voracious clothing appetite; his, at age five (for no money at all), stocking the shelves of his father’s tiny shop in the village market. We imagined that we had escaped unscathed from the hazards of our respective childhoods and would now build a bright new life together, one that combined the best of American freedom and Middle Eastern tradition. But Aliya upended all those idealistic thoughts.
Some aspects of American parenting thrilled Ismail—such as the first-class university hospital, five minutes from our house, to which our health insurance gave us easy access. But most middle-class parenting rituals mystified him. He could not understand why I spent hours on the Internet, looking up recalls on baby cribs and car seats. He questioned my using hypoallergenic detergent on every cloth item that came in contact with
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