BLOG: One mother, two Mother’s Days
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The one mother I refer to is any Arab woman living in America.
This Sunday, May 14, on Mother’s Day, American mothers across the nation will be celebrated by their loved ones. But for Arab mothers living in America, this Mother’s Day will be their second.
I will come to this in a bit, but first, let me touch on a medical concept.
Motherhood is often thought of and talked about as a natural, inherent, built-in, de novo emotion. Or at least that was what I had thought until I read an intriguing and thought-provoking study by Spanish investigators few years ago.
In a post from early 2017, I wrote about an article I had seen in the New York Times by Pam Belluck, published on December 19, 2016, titled “Pregnancy Changes the Brain in Ways That May Help Mothering.” Belluck wrote about researchers from Spain compared brain scans from 25 women hoping to become pregnant, 20 matched women who were never pregnant, 17 men who were never fathers and 19 first-time fathers.
“The brain scans showed specific, pregnancy-induced changes in the brains in both size and structure,” Belluck wrote.
In some ways, this scientific breakthrough may not be greatly welcomed by people who prefer to adhere to the sacred, mysterious nature of the “motherhood instinct.”
But I digress.
Let me return to the topic of this post.
Unlike the American Mother’s Day, which falls on the second Sunday in May, Mother’s Day in the Arab world is celebrated on March 21 every year, no matter what day of the week that date may fall on.
So, in America, Arab mothers are celebrated by their loved ones twice a year: on March 21 and on the second Sunday in May.
I explained this in detail in a prior post.In this post, I wish to introject some poetry into this discussion.
Some of my readers know that I am a poet. That is a poet in the Arabic language, so I cannot write English poetry. My daughter, Dua, though is a poet in English but cannot write Arabic poetry (though she is bilingual and fluent in Arabic as in English, as she came to America when she was 4 years old). I have asked Dua in the past to translate (poetically) some of my Arabic poems into English.
I have written a poem about Mother’s Day, explaining the notion of Arab mothers in America enjoying not one, but two Mother’s days every year. Figure 1 is a screen shot of part of the poem. The overall translation of these initial 3 verses: A mother will have two Mother’s Days (in America) if she is an Arab: one in March and one in May.
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