Amani Haydar - The Mother Wound

I am from a family of strong women.

Amani Haydar suffered the unimaginable when she lost her mother in a brutal act of domestic violence perpetrated by her father. Five months pregnant at the time, her own perception of how she wanted to mother (and how she had been mothered) was shaped by this devastating murder.

After her mothers death, Amani began reassessing everything she knew of her parents relationship. They had been unhappy for so long - should she have known that it would end like this? A lawyer by profession, she also saw the holes in the justice system for addressing and combating emotional abuse and coercive control.

Amani also had to reckon with the weight of familial and cultural context. Her parents were brought together in an arranged marriage, her mother thirteen years her fathers junior. Her grandmother was brutally killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon, adding complex layers of intergenerational trauma.

Writing with grace and beauty, Amani has drawn from this a story of female resilience and the role of motherhood in the home and in the world. In The Mother Wound, she uses her own strength to help other survivors find their voices.

Shattering, unforgettable, beautifully told. Randa Abdel-Fattah

A magnificent and devastating work of art. There is a raging anger here, and a deep sorrow, but at the core Haydar gives us truths about love. This is one of the most important books Ive ever read. Bri Lee

Gripping, transcendent, tender and, at times, infuriating. With a daughters heart and a lawyers mind, Amani Haydar maps the territory that connects the wars we fight abroad to the wars we endure in our homes. Jess Hill

For Layla Shaikh Hussain Haidar & Salwa Haydar

bi-smillhi r-ramni r-ram

A clock hung on the wall in the birthing suite at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital. I heard it pulse above my head, above the beeps, above the gurgle of the gas, above the cooing midwives.

I had opted for morphine instead of an epidural. I felt the sting of a needle sinking into my bare thigh. It surprised me that I could detect this among the other pains; the rising rumble and thrust of each contraction, the tug of a canula here, catheter there. There were waves of nausea, hot skin stretching and the dull force of baby grinding against bone.

Another pain, the unspeakable one, was present too. But the grief had to be held tightly, quietly. At least until my child was born.

I was falling asleep or passing out between contractions. Sweating and heaving through them. In my mind I began listing all the things that expand and contract; muscles, wombs, pregnant bodies, fruit when it grows and rots, concrete slabs, glass, metal, every molecule, and all the stars in the sky. Then I silently called upon Al-Qabid, Al-Basit. The One who contracts, the One who expands.

An obstetrician in a white jacket appeared at the foot of my bed. I watched her mouth open and shut as she explained that she needed to take a blood sample from my babys scalp. It would indicate whether the baby was in distress.

I glanced up at the time and then down at my belly, which was swollen, almost translucent under the fluorescent lights. I had been in labour for eleven hours. Midwives in navy-blue scrubs shuffled around the room. Their shapes moved and voices spoke in short, quick strokes, as though there was an emergency.

The obstetrician asked me to hold still through a contraction while she found the babys head with a piece of equipment I couldnt name or see.

You mustnt push, no matter how strong the contraction is, she said.

I nodded.

A kind senior midwife with a pixie cut sat beside me and chanted, Breathe in hold breathe out good girl.

My husband peered over her shoulder with furrowed brows.

Within minutes the obstetrician announced, Baby is not happy. Youve got to start pushing. If you dont deliver soon, well have to perform a caesarean.

Okay, yep. I huffed as another contraction surged.

Push! the senior midwife instructed.

I knew what I had to do but my arms were numb from gripping the metal bars of the bedhead. Grief mingled with physical pain at the crest of each contraction. I wanted to take it all back. I wanted to tell them I wasnt ready. That I was too sad to push.

Al-Qabid, Al-Basit, Al-Qabid, Al-Basit.

With every contraction, the room melted away and I was in a rectangular grave, at first only large enough to hold a person. Earth had been scraped away to reveal four walls, striped layers of sediment.

Breathe in.

I breathed in and the grave swelled into a cave, expanding, like a lung made of brown soil, like a uterus, its walls wet with mud. I was in it and it was in me.

Breathe out.

I breathed out and the walls collapsed inwards, pulling me back into my sticky skin. My pillow and tee-shirt were damp with sweat.

Okay, now again.

Pain burned through every muscle, but it felt like someone elses. Like my ruh had exited my body and was lying down beside it.

Push, push, push! Almost there! sang a second midwife in a navy-blue hijab, her face drifting in and out of focus.

Al-Qabid, Al-Basit, Al-Qabid, Al-Basit.

Relief arrived in three abrupt stages; the head, then the shoulders, then the warm gush of placenta. The midwife in the blue hijab placed a slippery baby on my chest.

Oh my God, oh my God! I laugh-cried out loud.

A dark-eyed child stared up at me, blinking, gulping, already trying to nibble at my skin. I didnt think to ask if it was a boy or girl until someone said, Dont you want to know? Its a girl!

She was bigger and heavier and more purple than I expected, puffy from the vacuum suction that had helped her out. The hair on her head was thick and black but her eyebrows were faint and sparse. She stretched out her spindly fingers then rolled them into little fists before letting out a cry. My husband leaned in and whispered adhan in her ear, bearing witness, Ash-hadu an la illaha illaAllah, as I searched her face for traces of my mother.

You did so well! Moey beamed, rubbing my shoulder.

Everything hurts. I smiled back.

The obstetrician in the white coat was still at the foot of my bed. Well let Daddy hold her now. Youll need some stitches, she said.

I sipped laughing gas and watched Moey rock our wailing baby back and forth on the other side of the room while my wounds were stitched shut. I counted nine needle-pricks. There was a little pain, the kind that didnt matter at all.

As I lay there exhausted but relieved and a little high, the senior midwife returned to the edge of my bed and asked, So, where is your mother?

My neck stiffened and I felt myself returning to my body. She had not read my file.

She was murdered in March by my father, I answered.

The midwifes smile flattened, and her eyes widened. She patted my thigh and said, Oh, Im sorry, darling.

Thank you, I replied, grateful for the acknowledgement. I am so happy to have a daughter. I am from a family of strong women.

Moey and I met in our first law subject during our first year of university. It was easy to spot the other Lebs at uni; the boys still grew mullets, wore caps and hung around in groups near the Uni Bros kebab shop. Moey had a habit of wearing his hat indoors which, at first, I thought was very rude. But he was friendly and funny and under the rim of his hat was a smile so generous it reached past his cheeks and into his brown almond-shaped eyes. His grin was underscored by a tufty goatee, which has grown into a lush beard in the time Ive known him. It was the late 2000s so he added me on MSN, and we became friends. Our families were from different parts of Lebanon, and of different sects, but Moey wasnt trying to be my boyfriend and I wasnt interested in a partner. We got to know each other while living parallel lives until the final year of university when he started avoiding eye contact and I started looking forward to our classes together.