Let me tell you about my Teta
My grandmother has been visiting me in my dreams
This piece is a companion piece to one I wrote nearly a year ago about my Geddo, my mother’s father.
Teta Ihsan, my mother’s mother, is an avatar to me more than a person. I was her baby and she was my nanny for the first 18 months of my life.
After that, my memories are fuzzy.
Not because we didn’t spend a lot of time together (we did), but because Teta was the woman who blended into the background to make things happen.
Teta was the woman who was always there. In the kitchen of my grandparents’ Grecian house in Alexandria. At the dining table shelling beans. On the straw mat out on the verandah, a daughter beside her.
Two things I remember best about Teta: the way she sat, and the fact that she called me her little Cinderella.
The way she sat
In a cotton housedress on the straw mat in the verandah. A traditional Egyptian head wrap tied around her hair, even when we weren’t in public. One leg tucked under the other. Slow movements.
The way she called me her little Cinderella
Teta stayed with us in Ottawa for 10 months after I was born, looking after me. She rocked me to sleep each night, doted on me, swaddled me and burped me and changed my diapers and clothes.
While I have no conscious memories of this love, I like to think that I absorbed it on a cellular level. That it softened my skin and strengthened my bones and made me the sensitive soul I am today.
Teta was barely gone for a few months when Mama discovered she was expecting my younger sister. And so my grandmother came back to Canada in the dead of winter, and it just made more sense to look after me than to start all over again with a newborn.
Time and distance
Teta and Geddo came to live with us again for a few years when I was 10 years old. By then my life was less about snuggles and more about how long I could stay upright on my bike without holding the handlebars. When we sat down for dinner the table was crowded, extra chairs pulled up to make room for everyone.
My parents reminded us to speak in Arabic, which stilted our conversation. How much harder to tell my breathless stories when I first had to remember my mother tongue!
One summer day, Mama asked us to take some things upstairs to Teta’s bedroom. We had come in to grab water maybe, or a snack, and wanted to get outside again fast. The bags were delivered hastily, dumped at the door of her bedroom, where Teta nearly tripped over them later that night.
Mama, bless her, didn’t shout at us when she took us aside the next day. She spoke in her softest voice. But can you imagine? The hurt and neglect of the woman who swaddled and fed me? The woman who slept beside me, listening for every little breath as I learned how to be in this world?
And I was in such a rush to get back to my cartwheels or skipping rope or the pool at the park. Such a rush that I left a pile of stuff at the door to her room, where she could have tripped and fallen in the dark.
What must have gone through her mind? I hate to think it, but it was probably, I am an afterthought to these children. I am the mother of their mother and now I am an afterthought.
Even as I write this, I grasp for memories as one grasps for water in the ocean, the waves too substantial, everything slipping through my fingers and only random drops remaining.
Where are the conversations I know we had? Where are the stories she told me? Why do I only remember the moments I let her down or lost her?
Teta’s childhood
A story I cling to, to remind myself that she was not ephemeral. That she wanted things and had her own preferences. That she could be hard headed and human:
Teta had two thick braids of black hair when she was young, braids that went all the way down to her waist. She wanted to cut them short but her mother wouldn’t let her.
And so one day, Teta waited for her mother to start salah, and then Teta stood in front of her mother with a pair of scissors, cutting through one braid, right at her shoulders. When she was finished praying, her mother had no choice but to cut the second braid too.
Losing her
The day I heard that Teta died I was 18, in first year university. Mama had called us to her room and I felt a deep foreboding. There’s an energy that comes with bad news. You can smell it. You can feel it in your gut.
Ya banaat, I have to tell you something. And I thought, Baba’s lost his job—out of nowhere, this random crisis I invented.
When she told us Teta was gone I felt a crushing guilt. How had my mind bypassed her so completely, when she’d been declining for a while? How were my thoughts so stuck in the here and now?
Lately, I see her in my dreams, not speaking but smiling.
I see her as she looked in my childhood, sitting, her face lined with wrinkles, that one missing tooth. There’s nothing in the background, not the verandah in Alexandria, not the long, ancient dining table in their old house, not the old couch in our family room where she would sit in front of the light that shone in from the back deck.
Sometimes, I see her as she looked in the old pictures from Mama and Baba’s engagement. Younger, smoother face. Fancy dress. Full smile.
I want to tell her that I think about her all the time now. That I wish I had paid more attention when she was here. Taken the memories and stored them away so I could access them when it mattered. Maybe she knows. I want to believe she knows.
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Leave a comment:
Do you know your grandmother, and is she still with you?
How is / how was your relationship?
Did you know her as a person with her own wants and needs, or was she more of a caregiver or person you would visit a couple of times a year?
So beautiful. So much love in your words. I think as women our maternal ancestry is something extremely special that shapes us more than most other things in life. After all, a part of us (the eggs in our mother's ovaries) was inside our grandmothers womb when she was pregnant with our mother. Isn't that amazing? Subhan Allah 💕
The woman who raised me, Olga, died four years ago on 2/22. She was the village my parents had to pay for because we didn't have the kind of family that would move in with each other. Two weeks ago, in church, a baby got baptized and the sermon was about those people who love us with absolute undivided generosity and who imprint that into us when we are young and all I thought of was Olga. I took Olga for granted so much in my teenage years and in my early adulthood--she was always in the background (partly because she didn't speak English and so had to sit out many social functions). But even as I rushed about, she would rub me with her thick, soft, leathery hands and pray over me. Two nights before she died, I started getting visions of her--words in Spanish coming into my mind even though I no longer speak it in the house. I knew she was sick because she'd moved back home to Colombia and her daughter would text me and we spoke on the phone every once in a while. And even though her spirit started warning me, I didn't call her in the days leading up to her death. When she died it it me so hard--this was a person who had given decades of her life to loving me. She was never rushing off. She was always there. The background, it turns out, is actually the foreground. The purest love I had ever known. I expect that MANY of the young people in my life will treat me with the same apparent indifference I offered Olga. But I also know that someday, the love I had and gave will hit them as deeply as the love you've expressed for / from Teta. I hope not in guilt, but in gratitude.