Khawla’s House

Description

It was the first time her firstborn had seemed so fragile, so small, and so close to tears. Wasn’t he telling the truth this time? The truth that she loved him “in her own twisted, spyy way,” not as he needed? But what good were those endless lists of treacherous truths? The truth that he was the first guinea pig in the empty laboratory of her motherhood, that her own wound became invisible in comparison to his, that her human condition “collapsed under the demands of her motherhood,” that she knew what she was capable of and what she wasn’t, that she couldn’t destroy everything she had painstakingly built—every white hair on her head, every wrinkle under her eyes, every extreme thought, every unconventional metaphor, every ruin in her heart—all for him; the truth that love is conditional, conditional; that they had lied about it; that the world was unfair; that misunderstanding was inevitable and seemingly eternal; and that she didn’t know where her role as a mother ended and where her role as a woman began. And what could she possibly do about the brutal conflict between the two of them, between wanting to take him back under her wing like a wet chick, and between never having forgiven him for being a product of his distorted place in his distorted time?