This article was published in its original Arabic version in September 2024.
When the blazing fire stopped for an extended period, I considered myself one of the survivors. That’s how it seemed to me. And when the opportunity to travel abroad as so many of our friends and relatives had done, we refused without hesitation. Our response was self evident: We had grazed death many times and had defeated it. How could we leave after finally reaching a safe haven? What kind of safe haven were we talking about that day? Ha!
Like the lettuce on a salad plate calmly wilting, waiting to be cut up and eaten, I wait for my fate in this country. But I no longer know what I truly want, to be devoured in one bite or in bits and pieces.
January 31, 2024
The teeth in my mouth are chalky. That’s how my mother described them to the dentist when I was young. My teeth would discolor easily, looking extremely diaphanous. Getting dressed to head out to the university, I would delude myself that I would hear a catchphrase for gleaming white and perfectly aligned teeth: “You have that Hollywood smile.”
But my teeth were more aligned with our popular folk saying: "Marble outside, soot inside.” So, that tightly packed, gleaming white exterior – the best that the godlike orthodontist could muster – hid an interior cave of metal fillings, porcelain crowns, and a lot of decay.
Sadly, youth seems to me now farther away than ever before. I remember well the thoughts and concerns of a university student just starting her third year. Revolutions had not yet arrived. They didn’t even exist in our wildest dreams. Our worries were simple. Everyday ones. Selfish and within reach.
Today, that 20-something young woman has turned into a wife and mother on the verge of her forties, with the spirit of a 50-year-old and the body of one in her sixties. I struggle to remember to keep my back straight, so I wear a neck brace to correct the beginnings of cervical spine degeneration. I also wear ugly orthopedic shoes to deal with bunions and compression socks for my varicose veins. I sit alone in the shade at the pool. I repeatedly slather sunscreen on my face and arms, watching reclining young women sunbath, and occasionally yelling out to my kids reminding them to plunge their heads under the water so they don’t get sunstroke.
I’m afraid of adventure...No, I don’t want to be misunderstood. My sense of adventure is different from what the word may inspire.
I’m afraid of adventuring to buy chicken from another store; it might be rancid.
I’m afraid of taking a different road; it might be longer.
I’m afraid of changing the style of my loose-flowing clothes; I might appear fatter.
Revolutions had not yet arrived. They didn’t even exist in our wildest dreams. Our worries were simple. Everyday ones. Selfish and within reach.
An uncalculated adventure. I have no strength or power to bear the consequences. In our country surprise is a free commodity presented like a daily dish one is forced to eat. Who needs a new personal surprise?
When the blazing fire stopped for an extended period, I considered myself one of the survivors. That’s how it seemed to me. And when the opportunity to travel abroad as so many of our friends and relatives had done, we refused without hesitation. Our response was self evident: We had grazed death many times and had defeated it. How could we leave after finally reaching a safe haven? What kind of safe haven were we talking about that day? Ha!
The worst kind of poverty is the poverty of collar and tie (Isabelle Allende)
I grew up in a middle-class family, when the word “middle-class” literally meant that; in the middle between rich and poor. I lacked a lot of things in childhood, but I wasn’t aware of it, or just that this deprivation didn’t get in my way for very long. A certain doll, a particular activity, a party, a visit. Life was easy, and we didn’t know of tragic lives even in Nostradamus’s wildest prophecies. Today I don’t really know how to describe my financial situation. I count what I have so that I can manage it until the end of the month. But anyone who visits me at my house in the middle of the capital city next to my kids’ private school asks me why I don’t spend the holidays abroad!
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05 December 2019
October 11, 2019
Others are a bit confused. They probably think among themselves that I’m miserly! Wondering why I don’t wear brand clothing, when I get sport or orthopedic shoes from abroad for the kids. Why do I maintain an expensive food program for the family? At least I head to the local popular markets to get what I need. And there’s all the extras...clubs and summer activities...art classes, piano lessons, computer programming… it all points to financial prosperity for the short-sighted.
We put all what we have every year to rent our house in that neighborhood in which the electricity doesn’t get cut. We figured that this would offset the cost necessary to install solar panels and the continuous need for maintenance. To be in a more well-to-do neighborhood would provide us with a sense of security, relatively speaking. As for the school, we thought it would guarantee an academic foundation for our kids, even a balanced social upbringing–it eats up the rest of our income. In this way we arrange our affairs with the little that remains. When I say “reflect on our affairs,” there is only one matter I’m thinking about–my children.
Thinking always around expenses everyday does damage to the brain, and makes it hard to focus on important matters. I observe my husband every night when he comes home from the office. His incomparable smile transmutes my pain the moment he walks into the house, his expression saying, as if he’s seeing the children for the first time: You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made.
In our country surprise is a free commodity presented like a daily dish one is forced to eat. Who needs a new personal surprise?
I watch my husband... that handsome man that time has ravaged twice as badly as me. The brilliant man who would surprise me with his projects and plans, the private company that he founded from nothing. I remember his first office which took up one of the tables of the al-Rawda coffeeshop in Damascus, where he would meet his colleagues planning the beginnings. His star rose quickly in a country from which everyone was fleeing during wartime ... But, war is a cancer that once you remove it, it returns in another form and with a different outfit. Inflation came and swallowed everything in its’ past, compounding the losses. Our country feeds on the flesh of its sons these days ... nourished by it.
I didn’t miss anything except this…
Contentment is a sweet poison, and I would say that I have an abundance of it. I say it daily on repeat that we can persevere no matter how far away from doctors. But my beautiful teeth have a different opinion. The smile that I made famous as my landmark, rejected my companionship, and three years ago decided all on its own to start a shameful and scandalous “tv series” and to collapse and distance itself from me.
It started with a simple morsel. I would feel something hard and small in the chunks of food every once in a while. I remember they were always described as “chalky”, so this didn’t stop or worry me. They would move at their own pace. And I thought that “their own pace” meant they would give me time until my sixties. But I was in my thirties and I felt a slight tremor in one of my molars. I jabbed it with my tongue so much that it fell out. I made the crown fall out that had been covering the molar for years. It stripped it, leaving only a small level part smoothed by my tongue. Because this molar had been repaired a number of times, it had to be pulled.
Dental implants were affordable, but I thought about delaying it, and was content with treating only one side so that I could chew food and wait for the price of the dollar to drop.
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07 November 2020
August 20, 2020
That was in 2020 when we had surplus naivety. The hope that the Syrian lira would rise kept us going. But this beautiful and distinct year in all that it brought besides the Covid epidemic, revolution in Lebanon and the banking crisis there, saw as well the collapse of the Syrian lira, or to put it more precisely, the suicide of the lira.
When I think about my teeth within the depths of these catastrophes that happened to everyone, I seem like a spoiled child. I seem that way even when I think about the catastrophes that affected my personal life – the house, in all its simplicity, that we bought, the car that we’re able to own, our possessions, and our dreams that couldn’t be realized...vaporized.
But in the end, health is the most important thing we have. How often we hear this on repeat. Health is a crown I saw for the first time when the crown of my second molar next to the first one that had settled on the floor fell ... I mean the gum. The gap became huge. The same scenario happened when another crown ripped out the rest of the molar with it. I tried to make it easy on myself, reminding myself not to chew on that side no matter what. I hid my sadness, even from myself. I was content to reduce my laughter, specifically those that came from the heart and made you lift up your head, open your mouth until your tonsils showed. In fact I’ve stopped laughing completely. There was nothing hard about that.
What I hadn’t taken into account was that relying on one side to chew food would lead to an inevitable catastrophe from which there was no escape. The catastrophe that I sensed with the first new tremor. This time I didn’t jam it with my tongue like I usually did, instead I tried to retain the unfortunate third molar any way I could; I got to know it well and had hope. I kept away anything that would irritate it to the point I practically only had liquids. But the throne can’t be saved if it trembles. So the fate of the crown fell with my tears.
Thinking always around expenses everyday does damage to the brain, and makes it hard to focus on important matters.
I’d never cried from pain before. Not at childbirth, not when I dislocated my shoulder, and not when I shattered my elbow. No, I never cried about my health before.
But my molars sent me into a long sobbing fit. Luckily, I fell into it while the kids were at school. I cried as if I’d never cried before. I cried for myself. For my country. For the father and what he bore.
Just after a few days another molar fell out without any warning. I could feel it right away on my tongue. Resulting in 2 by 2 in every direction.
March 8, 2019
A relative who’s a dentist at the Marmuq Dentistry Center visited me to offer a consultation, assuring me more will fall out. My gums were very inflamed, a result of the shoddy work and installation of the crowns. And if the teeth are weak, they’ll fall out or crumble away, one after another. She made me an offer to repair the teeth in a clinic outside of the Center for a cheaper price. I lied, saying price was not an issue, only quality mattered. I wasn’t with her when I looked at the number that practically paralyzed my face, relieving me from ever having to smile again.
I visited a second doctor. Then a third. A fourth. The price was always in dollars, forcing me to calculate the day of the procedure based on the price of the transplant. The dollar is nothing but another plant, non-stop growing, climbing higher and higher day after day. This was my state of being until the day I was absolutely convinced that there was no way of undergoing four transplant operations, and that the best option would be to have one transplant every year while also repairing the weak teeth dispersed here and there.
“Wabi-sabi”
I think about my grandmother a lot these days. I was deaf to the many sounds coming out of her mouth while she chewed, especially when she had an orange.
She only had four front teeth which she used to “chew” (this is the verb she used to describe the process of sucking out the goodness of the orange and spitting out the “gunk” or what couldn’t be digested for the lack of incisors and molars in her mouth). Today, I “chew” what I can calmly and have compassion for her with excess bile in my mouth and heart.
At other times I try to transform this part of my life into a comic chapter. I imagine writing it one day in a less dramatic way in a novel. Or perhaps my memoir. I’ll title this section “Wabi Sabi”, starting with a discussion of this Japanese term that means “finding beauty in the imperfect.” I would philosophize on it a bit, then go deep in praising my incomplete smile. My smile that my country made fall.
