[february 11, 2019]

Hi beautiful loved ones,

I remember this day and night 9 years ago… Felt like everything was crumbling.

Sometimes, it still feels like everything is crumbling, and I am (slowly) growing to be at peace with that.

I miss my mama. Dudi and I are deeply excited/humbled on the daily because I have a little fetus growing inside of me (!!!), and my body is changing in many ways, and my psyche is changing too. I hear Ima’s voice in my ear, “Oh my goodness! My baby is having a baby! Tfu tfu tfu.” I always thought it would give me some sort of “closure” when I was pregnant, somehow, the ultimate connection to my mother. Maybe it still will/can… It has made me realize that, just like always, I really only want her.  I miss her nuanced perspective, her intellect, her complete presence with me even on the phone. She always made it known how much she loved us….

Not many more words right now. A Naomi Shihab Nye poem below that resonates.

So grateful for each of you and for this community and space.

Love always,

einat

***

Making a Fist

By Naomi Shihab Nye

    We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

                                                                  —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.