2010

SANAM MAHLOUDJI

I took this self-portrait in 2010, three years before I became a mother, just a couple of months after my father died. I was feeling alone, and the most myself. I know this is not the assignment.

I recently asked my mother if I could use her photo for this project. She said no. I considered sharing one anyway, writing about her and her life. She might never speak to me again if I did—she isn’t speaking to me as I write this. Still, I can’t burn myself so brazenly. But I can write my own wishes. I can write fiction. I can pretend that my mother is a twin—the reason for my twin daughters—and that she first became a painter when looking at the sky over the Caspian, the air and water becoming one. She was one with it, too, and captured the feeling with paint on paper. I can pretend my mother was born with an extra toe—she calls it Baby and whispers to it when she’s tired. My mother sings to me on my birthday.

Okay, here is one true thing: my mother has a laugh that is beautiful—loud, alive, and one that I still hear when I pull my bedsheets up to my ears, as if she were outside my childhood bedroom, in its now fossilized pink, entertaining her friends. Here is another: sometimes when I walk down the street at my most confident stride, I feel like she is inside me. For a split second, I am her. Maybe everyone feels these things. This also makes them easy to share. There is so much to tell that can’t be.

One night recently, I thought, What if I shared a photo of myself as a child? If only the child me could talk to the child version of my mother, maybe we could understand each other. Maybe we could learn how to love each other. Now, we are rocks. Too hard, set, dry. But what if we were children again, softer? More like the water that flows out of the womb, out of the sky, new to the world, without history to mourn. Maybe in that state, we could even be friends. Of course, I know, even water has a past. Even rain came from the sea. But what if?