First there was an oligarchy, then it was a coup d'etat, inside me.
Now a monarchy has come to the Land of Me.
PART FIVE Beautiful Surrender
Pregnancy Journal
Week 5
Today Mama Rice Pudding has ascended to the throne. She walks around with a crown on her head, and in her hand she carries a scepter no larger than a matchstick. To look taller, she has taken to wearing high heels. When she needs to go from one place to another, I carry her on a palanquin. The timid, rosy-cheeked woman I met on the plane has vanished. In her place is a tyrant.
Her Majesty the Queen's first act has been to create a new constitution. The first clause reads: "Motherhood is Holy and Honorable, and it should be treated as such." Unquestionable, untouchable, unchangeable.
As of now, even the tiniest criticism against marriage or motherhood will be punished by law. Simone de Beauvoir's books have been seized and burned in a huge bonfire. Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Anai's Nin, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sevgi Soysal are strictly banned. I am not allowed to read any one of them during my pregnancy.
There is only one book Mama Rice Pudding allows me to keep nearby.
"Read Little Women. It will remind you of the importance of familial ties and thus prepare you for motherhood," she says.
"But I read that a long time ago," I complain.
"Just go over it again, then."
I understand that for Mama Rice Pudding there is no difference between reading a book and knitting a sweater. Just as you can knit the same pattern over and over, make the same recipe for years on end, you can also be content with a few books on your bookshelf and "go over them" again and again.
Week 6
This week I have learned that "morning sickness" need not be in the mornings. It can happen anytime.
"Mama Rice Pudding, I feel tired and sleepy all the time — as if I've been carrying a sack of stones," I say. "How will I bear it?"
She hits her scepter on the ground with a thud so loud that the earth trembles under my feet.
"You will bear it just like our mothers and grandmothers and great- grandmothers did. What of the peasant woman who gives birth in the fields after a hard day of work? She cuts the umbilical cord with any available instrument and without a single complaint goes back to hoeing the crop."
Do I look like a heroic peasant woman? I can't even tell barley from buckwheat, but I dare not remind her of this.
"Be grateful that you haven't come to this world as an elephant," says Mama the Queen. "If you were a female elephant you would be pregnant for twenty-two months! Thank your lucky stars!"
Sad for not being a peasant woman but happy for not being an elephant: That is the sum of my mood this week.
Week 8
I am not interested in food, only in snacks. And since most snacks are stuffed with calories, I am afraid I will end up like the plump woman on the steamboat.
In order to snack more healthily I do some shopping: low-fat biscuits, low-fat pretzels, low-fat milk, low-fat yogurt, low-fat cheese — and unsalted rice crackers. When I get home, Mama Rice Pudding jumps off her throne and inspects my grocery bag.
"What is this?"
"Nothing, just a few things to nibble on," I say.
She catapults my bag out the window.
"For shame! You should be embarrassed! No salt, no sugar, low fat, no fat. What is this? Are we running a weight-loss clinic here? Is that Blue Belle Bovary messing with your head? Don't you dare listen to that hussy!"
Befuddled and hurt, I consider how best — or whether — to answer her.
"Your only priority is to eat what is good for the child," she concludes. "So what if your figure changes from size eight to size twenty, who cares?"
My cheeks burn with guilt. Could she be right? Have I put my looks ahead of the health of my child? Her Majesty the Queen teaches me a deep human truth — that motherhood has a pen name: guilt.
Just to be rid of this guilt, I go and eat a huge box of hazelnut cookies. And I don't even like hazelnuts.
Week 12
On TV Christiane Amanpour interviews AIDS orphans in Africa. The CNN crew has ducked into an adobe hut, placed their cameras on strewn straw. The landscape is harsh, unforgiving. With a napkin in my hand, I watch and cry.
These days, all sorts of things bring me to tears. There is a pair of shoes — faded blue Converse sneakers — that dangles from the electric pole around the corner, and every time I pass by them I feel a sense of sorrow well up inside of me. I wonder who they belonged to. How did they end up there? Rain or shine, they are always there — by themselves, so vulnerable, so alone.
It isn't only the sneakers. Boys bullying one another at the playground, two stray cats fighting over a slice of meat in the garbage, the skinny Kurdish street vendor who sells chestnut kebabs with worms, the neighbor lady who beats her carpet out the window and showers the passersby with dust, the melting icebergs in Antarctica, the polluting of the atmosphere, the quagmire in Palestine, a piece of crushed bread on the ground. Everything, and anything, is so distressing. The world crumbles in my fingers like sandstone in the wind and my days are painted with melancholy.
On the evening news they show a dog — a terrier puppy with brown ears and a white body. It has a huge, dazzling bow around its neck. Its owner is a retired chemistry teacher. As the lady chemist plays the piano, the puppy sits at her heels and begins to howl along.
I watch the scene and my eyes fill with tears.
"Why are you crying again?" asks Eyup, his famous patience wearing slightly thin.
"Poor puppy," I say, sobbing.
"What is poor about that puppy? He is probably better fed than thousands of children who go to bed hungry every night."
"Thousands of children go to bed hungry every night," I repeat, on the verge of tears.
"Oh, God, I should never have opened my mouth," Eyup says softly.
He doesn't understand me. How can I make him see that I feel bad for the puppy? I feel bad for all terriers with dazzling bows around their necks. Our lust for baubles of fame, our inability to cope with mortality, our expulsion from the Garden of Eden — my lungs fill with the heaviness of being a mere human. I can't breathe.
Week 16
Mama Rice Pudding hands me a box of CDs. "Take these and listen to each of them at least three times," she commands.
I glance at the box and mumble, "But I don't really like opera."
"They aren't for you, they are for the baby," she says as she starts the CD player and turns it up full blast. A second later Georges Bizet's The Pearl Fishers pours into the room and out into the entire neighborhood.
The rug beater across the street pops her head out of her window and looks left and right trying to figure out where the deep male voice is coming from. Suddenly her face comes apart in terrible recognition that the music is coming from our apartment. Squinting her dark, piercing eyes, she peers through our window into my shivering soul.
"Could you please turn the volume down?" I implore Her Majesty.
"Why? The baby is getting her first taste of culture — and learning French. Do you know that babies can hear sounds while in the womb?"
She puts on another CD. We hear the sound of rain hammering a tin roof, followed by the bleating of goats and the tinkling of bells in the distance.
Aghast, I ask, "What is that?"
"The peaceful sounds of Mother Nature," says Mama Rice Pudding. "It is recorded specially for pregnant women. It has a soothing effect on them. A perfect nondrug sleep aid."