My late mother's birthday

Today is the 3rd of February which marks my late mother’s birthday. She passed away in 2011 at the age of 59. Usually I feel a lot of emotions for the loss of my mother at this time of year, but this time it’s different. I woke up knowing it’s my mother’s birthday and I felt nothing because the situation here is so intense that I sometimes find it difficult to even think of myself, where I was in life and where I want to be. This war has forced us to put our feelings into freeze mode and feel nothing because if you feel every single emotion it will destroy you. 

I’ve never mentioned this even to my closest friends because I didn’t want them to think I was crazy, but I remember putting my mother’s coffin bands (which were used to secure her clothing before burying her) in a special place in my bedroom. I thought that when I die I’d use the same bands because they were used for my mother, so it gave me a feeling of safety knowing that something of hers was always around. In that journey I also want to feel safe and this was the way I could keep her with me in my other life as well. 

I also used to wear her things whenever I got the chance. I had one of her blouses which she loved and whenever she wore it she’d say to me, ‘If anything happens to me and you want to feel me by your side you can wear this blouse.’ A lot of my friends knew that I would wear this blouse on special occasions. Now that I’ve left everything at home - the coffin bands, her shirts and everything - it doesn’t make me emotional at all because the priority now is just life and surviving. I will still always remember those things in my mind because this is the place where they’ll be forever now, together of course with her. This is part of how I feel today.

Sometimes I am also grateful that she is not around to witness all that is happening now. She died with fibrosis in her lungs and she wasn't able to breathe polluted air, as is the case for many people with asthma. Like all mothers, she would be managing everything even though she was sick. I am 100% confident of this because she did this until the last day she lived on earth.

The ongoing wars in Gaza mean that people here have learned to preserve memories in their mind and heart and not rely on material things to do so. In our house that was completely destroyed back in Al-Maqousi area, I had albums with thousands of pictures of my mother and the family together, of me when I was young and growing up. That house was beautiful and had so many wonderful things in it but for me the albums were the most precious thing. When it was destroyed during this war we lost them all. This was a family house that we, the family, gave to our brother to start a new life with his beloved wife. I mentioned before that I contributed to building it during my twenties.

The days are continuing here as ‘normal’ -we are still hearing about the dead and the injured, still waking up in the middle of the night, still hearing the sounds of the drones and still thinking about what the next step is going to be for me and the people around me. I still feel like the drones are in my lap after more than 120 days of war. The drones rarely stop flying over our heads - nothing has changed. The host family has also recently lost additional members - a woman who was 58 who was living in Deir Al Balah in the middle area of the Gaza Strip. The house was hit by an airstrike and she was killed. She has 3 children who remained alive. 

We are hearing more and more stories about children who are now mothering their siblings. We heard about a child who is less than 12 years old who has a baby sister and both of their parents were killed. Now he’s the one giving her milk, changing her diapers and doing everything for his little sister. According to Unicef approximately 17,000 children are now separated from their families or unaccompanied. 

Also Rafah is kind of weird - when I go out I see the most beautiful animals living on the streets because their families have had to leave them and travel or they’re unable to look after them. There is a cat living with us who came with a family from Gaza City. Unfortunately the host family was unable to take another family in but we are looking after the cat until its family can take it once they are back.

These days I completely avoid going to the market in downtown Rafah because it’s become too crowded. I just can’t stand walking into that place anymore so I decided to give up going there and if I need anything I try to find it close by. If I can’t find it close by I just have to do without it because going to the market has become unbearable.

Sometimes things happen in war time that make you laugh. There were rumours going around last week that Al-Awda Square, which is in the middle of Rafah market, was going to be bombed and 5,000 people were going to be killed. The reason this rumour was spreading was because one of the most famous fortune tellers here in the Arab world, Laila Abd Al Latif, said that. And everyone, including myself - and I’m saying this laughing out loud - stopped going there because she said that. I even tried to stop my brother and everyone I know from going there - not because I believed her but because most of the time her predictions are so right that people think she has some kind of political affiliation rather than being a fortune teller! 

It was also written everywhere like in Sawa News Groups that the Red Cross and the Red Crescent are not allowing their staff to go to that area. It’s weird how people respond to rumours - I haven’t heard her or seen her giving this prediction myself and I haven’t heard anything from the Red Cross or the Red Crescent directly, but in spite of that everyone was talking about it and warning each other about it. And it’s true - war is the time when people spread rumours the most amongst each other. But again like I said, I’m not going to downtown Rafah to shop because of what she said, it’s because it’s too crowded to go there. That’s it for today.