How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghostsكيف تلتئم: عن الأمومة وأشباحها

Had I been more aware, and had someone asked to see a picture of my mother, I would have shown them this bird on the canvas she stitched with her own hands. My mother’s presence in that canvas has nothing to do with aesthetic taste or her technical skill. Yet, the sharp pang that bird evokes in me is something I never felt when looking at the photograph of us taken in the studio. Its eyes gaze at me as if they were her own. It is a motionless bird—one for which she used to sit by the window to catch the best light—where every needle-stitch was a symbolic wound in the process of bringing it to life; hundreds of wounds required to make it whole.