The Distance Between Breaking and Becoming

Twenty months ago, I tore open to bring my son into this world.
Two weeks ago, my world tore open as my mother left it.

If you ask me what it feels like,
I do not have words,
I have fractures, 
Cracked glass catching light the wrong way.
Pain becomes strange when it lives inside you.
It stops screaming.
It just sits there,
quiet and heavy,
like a stone lodged under the ribs.

I have mornings where I wake longing to forget she’s gone,
where I reach for the handle of her bedroom door,
only to retract.
For a split second, I let myself pretend,
savouring the idea that she might still be inside,
I stand there, suspended between memory and truth,
Then reality crashes into my chest.

If you ask me what it feels like,
being Allah’s vessel for life 
broke me open in ways I didn’t know a body could break.
Tethered between life and death 
to bring forth this small universe of hope,
I thought I had reached my limit;
the far edge of fear,
of endurance,
of love so violent and consuming
it felt like a tidal wave to my soul.

My mother taught me I could survive that.
That breaking coaxed out a strength, 
a resilience, 
a patience 
I didn’t know I carried. 
That breaking is sometimes another name for becoming.
And then she left me to prove it without her.

If you ask me what it feels like,
losing the love of my life,
my first ever home in this world, 
has forged that strength in the most excruciating way possible.
It did not break me, it hollowed me. 
It scooped out everything soft and warm
and left an echo 
where a heartbeat used to be.
A slow unravelling.
A quiet terror.
A stretching distance between me
and the last time she called my name.
her voice now an echo 
ricocheting down the hollows of my insides.

And I am terrified.
Terrified that my mind would fail me,
that my memories of her will fade faster than I can gather them.

I find myself chasing after them,
the dying threads of her presence,
as they unravel in the dark.
Desperate to hold on to everything she ever gave me,
her words, her warnings, her laughter;
but grief has made a sieve of me;
Everything slips through,
like water I can never hold.
Most days, I cannot even hold myself.

I believe in the divine plan,
in the sacred order of which things happen,
in wisdom I am too small to see,
but believing does not stop the bleeding; 
it only teaches me where to place my hands.

One wound split me to give life;
the other hollowed me out so completely
I can feel the emptiness humming in the marrow of my bones.

There are days I feel like an imposter in my own life.
As if any minute now,
I’ll wake up sixteen again,
to my mother knocking at my door for Fajr,
her voice soft,
her patience endless.

We’d leave before sunrise,
the sky still half-asleep,
a grilled sandwich wrapped and waiting,
a burned CD sliding into the console,
duas and surahs filling the car like a third companion. 

In those quiet drives,
I told her everything: school, friends, dreams.
She’d slip cash into my hand,
remind me to take care of myself,
and flash her headlights twice before pulling away,
our silent language of I’ll see you again.

I didn’t know then
that the boy sitting at the back of the class,
the one I’d glance at without much thought,
would become a witness to both my crossings;
for the birth that almost broke me,
and for the grief that finished the breaking.

When I was younger,
I thought my mother was the world.
Now I know she was the axis.
The gravity.
The centre around which every one of us orbited.
Evenings meant gathering in her room;
my sisters, my father, all of us drawn back
like planets to their sun.
A family held together by the gravity of one woman. 

Now the orbit has collapsed.
She isn’t here when I come home.
She isn’t here to tell me a baby’s fever is normal,
or whether I should worry about a cry,
or that I’m doing enough,
or how to persevere when I feel like a lost child,
holding a child of my own.

And still,
somehow,
I am meant to keep going?
To keep breathing?
To keep mothering?
To keep standing in this world,
when every part of me aches for the woman who raised me?

They say that becoming a mother changes you,
that it opens a doorway into understanding your own
once you feel the weight of a child in your arms.

I look at my son;
this tiny, perfect proof of God’s mercy,
and I finally understand the magnitude of what she gave me.

Thirty-three years of mornings.
Of sandwiches and surahs.
Of headlights flashing twice.
Of unwavering, bone-deep love.

And I will never get to thank her enough.
Never get to tell her I understand now;
why she worried,
why she stayed awake,
why she scolded,
why she asked us to call,
why she poured everything she had into us
even when her body grew weary.

It shatters me,
that she isn’t here to witness my becoming.
That my son will learn to say Ibu,
but never know the woman who made that word sacred.
That she will never hear him call her Nani.
That he will grow up in the orbit of her absence.

So much of these weeks have felt like a fever dream,
a haze I keep hoping to wake from,
back into a world where she still exists.

And yet, somehow,
in the same breath that breaks me,
I am grateful.
Grateful for my child.
Grateful for the thirty-three years I was allowed to love her.
Grateful for the honour of being her daughter.

But gratitude and grief
are strangers forced to share a room in my chest,
two irreconcilable truths sitting quietly,
in the ruins of what used to be whole.

If you ask me what it feels like, 
there is something unspeakable 
about the introduction of life 
and the departure of one.

I never imagined I would stand at their intersection,
navigating what it means to be a mother 
while learning how to live without my own.