Baran Al-Hashimi who, right after her son is born, is terrified of being left alone with him. So afraid of having a seizure while he’s in her arms, her limbs going slack, his impossibly tiny body slipping to the floor. She can sit in the oversized rocker in his nursery, his weight supported by a pillow. Can stand at his changing table with a stabilizing hand on his stomach. But soon, much too soon, he learns to roll. Learns to flip out of her grasp even when she’s paying attention. It doesn’t matter that it’s been years since her last seizure. Doesn’t matter that she made it through the entire pregnancy without one. She could have had one and missed it. She’d missed them before. She can’t be alone with him.
So she distances herself from him. Pumps and then switches to formula almost immediately. Never breastfeeds him. Makes sure he is comfortable, more comfortable, with his dad and his nanny and his grandmothers than he is with her. She ends her maternity leave as early as she can, even though her body is still piecing itself back together. Long hours at the hospital make the distancing easier. She leaves before he is truly up for the day, and comes home after he is asleep. Soaks up the small moments of the mid-night feeds and diaper changes, though she makes her husband wake up with them, too. She teaches him, this tiny infant, not to rely on her. She is not reliable, cannot be reliable to him.
His dad doesn’t understand. Can’t understand, especially working with the limited information Baran gives him. The fear she refuses to voice sits looming and unaddressed between them, a rift in their relationship that grows bigger every day until they are too far apart to find each other again. (The rift was there before, the baby had just been a temporary bridge.)
Baran Al-Hashimi who, when divorce proceedings start, does not fight for custody. He’s older now, but still too little for her to trust herself. A momentary lapse on her part could still be catastrophic. Besides, she doesn’t really know him. Tries to make eggs for him one morning right before the end, and is embarrassed when it ends with his plate thrown on the floor and his dad sighing “it’s been yogurt for three weeks now.” All of the distance means she has missed the child her son has become. His dad hadn’t. Had been paying attention, the whole time. Had been caring for him, raising him, loving him, the whole time. It was better this way. If she didn’t fight. If she focused on work, on her patients, on the things she could change, instead of on the things she had broken and could break.
She joins MSF because maybe physical distance will make it all seem more reasonable. Of course she can’t have custody of her son, she has patients across the world. It’s not because the physical distance makes the emotional distance hurt a little less.
Baran Al-Hashimi who, now, will tell stories about her seven-year-old son with a smile that she has carefully practiced to perfectly hide her shame. Somewhere along the way she learned that not talking about him hurts almost as bad as the truth— that she has a child she doesn’t see and doesn’t know— so she shares the little pieces she has. The pictures and anecdotes his dad sends every now and then, hoping that someday she might be interested.
She is interested. Of course she’s interested. She devours every piece of information, updates her lock screen with every new photo, gorges herself on every small tidbit. There is an ever present, cavernously huge ache in her chest. It’s been there since the day he was born.
She doesn’t know how to say that she is gone because she loves him.
