Dear Morayo,
I’m just learning how difficult it is to get anything done when you have a baby- especially one like you who really hates napping on her own! The only way you go to sleep is if I take you out for a walk, or feed you until you pass out in a milk-drunk state of bliss. However, today you spent our morning buggy walk mainly staring up at trees and gurgling sweetly at me, nodding off for just twenty minutes. Although I love your coos and smiles (and I really do!), I dread you not napping as the day becomes so much more difficult for me. You’re currently in the sling after I’ve walked you round the block, and it’s touch and go whether you’re going to stay asleep whilst I sit here and type. I have taken to sitting with you in the sling after having walked you to sleep, which is always bad news for anyone sitting opposite me, as I have to sit in the least ‘ladylike’ position ever with my thighs in a full ‘manspread’ in order for your little legs to dangle between mine. If your toes so much as brush against my thighs, you magically wake up and ‘know’ that we aren’t walking any more. I also have to sway from side to side; there’s quite a lot going on really! All to make you sleep sweetheart, as you get so grumpy when you don’t. All Daddy and I need now, is for you to work out how to have a nap on your own, and the three of us will all get more sleep!
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how I spent nearly four years wishing I had the same problems as everyone else, and the fact that now I do. Daddy and I had a row about leaving stuff around the house last weekend (his mess, my nagging- obviously!), and this morning I felt quite sad when I walked past one of my favourite houses in the town being demolished by McMansion developers. These are both examples of things I would have deemed ‘middle class problems’ and been pretty dismissive of, or even rude about between 2013 and 2017. Petty couples arguments about housework, discussions about whether or not we are ‘where we want to be in our lives’ with friends, saving money for a down-payment on a mortgage, a baby not sleeping, traffic on the M25 as a result of seemingly poor infrastructure; all of these things don’t matter as much as we think they do. I knew that then. I have to keep in mind that they still don’t, and hope we bring you up to know the difference between the big and the small things. Or rather, they do matter, but they should be kept in perspective. However, when you have one huge problem in your life that you genuinely don’t understand why is happening and when or how you are going to make it disappear, it can be quite difficult to face other peoples’ seemingly much pettier, less important problems. It has sometimes been difficult to be graceful and kind over the last few years.
It’s amazing what you have achieved this week, Morayo. You are grabbing so much more with your hands, and your little peanut head (or your ‘pyow’ in Nigeria) is just so perky and alert. Your eyes follow us around the room, and focus on toys when we put them in front of you. You and Daddy play a game which you both seem to love, where he puts his big bald head in your face, and you mawl it whilst squealing and laughing. During swimming class this week, you managed an unaided underwater dunk where I had to put you under and then let you go, catching you as floated back up to the surface. You did this without crying once! I on the other hand almost cried with pride. Not content with trying to sit up on your own, you’re also obsessed with trying to stand, squeaking until we hold you up on to your feet, whereupon you look directly into our eyes with a determined little glare and then do some serious hotstepping. I don’t know why, but I never thought I would find my own baby so cute! It’s such a good reminder, watching a baby learn a new skill, that we really need to practise something a lot to learn how to do it well. Having said that, I don’t understand how someone who was inside me less than four months ago though, can have such a determined little face and character!
I don’t think it was the night I got home from the mukhabarat facility- it was perhaps a night or two afterwards, but I got a phonecall from your Dad. I had been falling asleep clutching my phone since arriving back in Amman, and suddenly a random number was flashing at me an hour or two after midnight. He was being moved to a police cell, and had managed to convince the friendly guard to let him borrow his phone. I don’t know how, but your Dad remembered my number! Who memorises telephone numbers in this day and age? He was breathless with relief at being able to talk to me, and told me to meet him at the police station on the Third Circle in the morning. We had about a minute before he had to give the phone back, so that was pretty much the conversation before I had to somehow try and get back to sleep.
Morning came and I marched up to the police station, asking at the counter (floating in a haze of cigarette smoke) whether they were holding my ‘friend’. The men said they had no idea who I was talking about. I will never know whether this was true (it was going to happen a lot over the following months), or whether it was some kind of horrible joke, but they waited until I had detailed the fact that they were holding a Nigerian citizen who was this tall before looking at me directly in the eye and saying ‘Ohh, you mean the NIGGER?!’, to which I then had to say ‘um yes’.
They led me down the corridor, past the offices full of the ubiquitous tea-drinking, chain-smoking men surrounded by mountains of manila folders and filing cabinets until we reached a similar room. The only difference was that this one had what can only be described as a cage in it against the back wall, and inside this cage was your father.
Dear Morayo 