How to become a mother
Written by Amani Haydar
Lawyer, author and visual artist Amani Haydar on how motherhood reflects through prisms of personal loss, equilibrium and destruction.
A couple of years ago I attended the Adelaide Writers Festival for the launch of my memoir, The Mother Wound. Wandering between events, I found myself sitting in the shade of a plane tree and listening to a conversation involving Clare G. Coleman, a Noongar woman who writes about the dispossession of Aboriginal people from lineages and places. She made a comment that stayed with me: “When someone wants you extinct, the only way to win is not die, and have kids.”
I had my first two kids mindlessly. Starting a family seemed like the next natural step in a trajectory I had unconsciously subscribed to. I’d acquired degrees, a husband, a house, and a pretty satisfying career and now it was time to acquire a child. My journey of acquisitions followed very traditional, model migrant (and capitalist) ideals around success which we have since seen amplified by Instagram culture. I’m talking about babies positioned amongst luxury items by influencers who seem to have endless money to spend on designer baby wear, impractical nursery renovations, and possibly someone else to take on the grunt work.
My journey of acquisitions was disrupted when I lost my mother to domestic violence while I was five months pregnant with my first child. This life-altering, debilitating violence resurfaced the earlier, unhealed grief of losing my maternal grandmother in an Israeli airstrike in 2006. The nursery and all visions of idyllic motherhood receded promptly and permanently to the background.
I found myself doing the math and wondering whether I too would meet an early and unnatural end. The mother wound. But here I was. Soon, there was one baby on my hip and another one growing in my belly. I had no choice but to resist despair.
Over the next few years, I juggled motherhood and a career change, shifting from doing ‘the done thing’ to really listening to what my body felt was most urgent. I reset my goals, planned my book, mothered two under two, and then under three, and then under four, and reimagined the future. A recurring theme that came up while processing, writing and attempting to heal from these events was my resentment towards the fact that motherhood as I envisioned it had been taken away from me — the village decimated, wisdom disrupted, personal resilience undermined.
“I found myself doing the math and wondering whether I too would meet an early and unnatural end. The mother wound. But here I was. Soon, there was one baby on my hip and another one growing in my belly. I had no choice but to resist despair.”
Upon finishing The Mother Wound I was almost sure I didn’t want to have any more children. Still, something compelled me to keep my collection of baby clothing, ‘just in case’. Eventually I felt ‘done’ surviving Covid and touring my book, and the thought of ‘one more’ crept up. It had been six years since my last, but this was the first time I’d planned and made the decision to have a child so deliberately. I felt content with where I was professionally and had a much more realistic mindset around what motherhood involved. I had also developed solid coping mechanisms. I knew none of this would guarantee a smooth delivery or a depression-free post-natal period, but I felt prepared and calm. My cup was full again and this baby was not a thing I want to get but a thing I want to give to.
Pregnancy was more emotionally manageable but more physically draining than it had been when I was younger. I struggled with iron deficiency towards the end. Baby measured quite big, and labour was slow. As I reached ten centimeters, I started thinking about my mother and grandmother.. Tears and sweat rolled off my face and into the tub as I rambled to the doula, ‘In a world that wants to kill us, our babies are a sign of our survival.’
Baby number three allowed me to reclaim motherhood and enjoy it as a more stable and self-assured mother (and he seems to like being my baby too). In a better place emotionally, I breastfed more effectively and for longer, I didn’t panic if he cried while I was driving, and I didn’t reprimand myself if he missed a nap. I see now what it takes to make motherhood joyful; timing, support, physical and mental wellbeing, and the freedom to make informed and empowered choices.
When the war on Gaza started, I felt myself shift into what I now understand as a more politically charged phase of motherhood. Mothering has long been political for Arab and Muslim women who are viewed through narrow tropes associated with terrorism, overpopulation, and welfare-dependency that dehumanize us and our children. As genocide unfolds in Gaza, we witness widespread indifference to footage of boys and girls who look like our own kids lined up in morgues, on roads and even on car bonnets. I’ve watched clips of Palestinian women wailing the names of their sons who share names with my sons.
Inevitably my personal traumas have resurfaced in this contextespecially as the flow-on effects of the genocide reach my own community in Lebanon, displacing most of my relatives and causing death and injury in our hometown and neighboring villages. But this time I can resist despair because of the community I have built over the past few years. By connecting with other mothers involved in activism, academia, and the arts I don’t feel isolated by my experiences.
The women around me are firming up my understanding of motherhood as not just an act of survival but one of resistance and I am incredibly grateful to be raising kids with this sense of clarity. Now, a part of me even wishes I could’ve had more. When the assault is on tomorrow, what could be more of a promise than the many tomorrows of many children?