Work Text:
What Ana thought reconciling with Fareeha would look like, she is not certain. She knew, of course, that the process would be painful and likely slow—even if she did not anticipate the degree to which it has been so—but she had little concept of what would come in the aftermath, what it would mean for her to be what she presently is: the mother of a woman grown.
She could prepare for arguments, for tears, for resentment and even rejection, and was able to weather those things when they came, to wait out the time it took for Fareeha to process everything and to reach the point where they stand now, at a tentative peace.
What she could not prepare for is the aftermath, the one she is presently living in. She apologized, acknowledged to Fareeha and to herself the ways in which she failed even prior to her not-quite death, is and doing her best to show that she means what she said, that she is trying to be a better mother, to listen more, to respect Fareeha’s ability to choose for herself what it is she wants, and needs, to do. That is all a good start, but that is all that it is: a start.
What comes next?
She only knows what it is to be a mother to a child. She knows how to kiss scraped knees and play pretend, can sing well enough to soothe a nightmare while she wipes away tears, has plenty of experience telling Fareeha to Be careful not to… Don’t… or Watch out for… She knows, too, what her own mother did for her, at this age—very little.
What she does not know is what Fareeha needs from her now. After so many years, she has surely learned how to be on her own, to turn to others for comfort and advice and encouragement. Given their history, Fareeha is unlikely to appreciate any unsolicited advice about her career or any other lifestyle choices. Even a Stay safe out there feels charged, a reminder of what they both know: that were it up to Ana, Fareeha would not be living the life she does presently.
This leaves Ana with little to do, or to say. For years now, Fareeha has been effectively motherless, and she seems to have gotten along quite well in that time, has become successful and confident, maturing into the sort of commander Ana never wanted to admit she had the potential to be. There is nothing Fareeha seems to need from her, and little that she might want, given how unwelcome Ana’s reentry into her life seems to have been. Still, there must be something. Why else would Fareeha have allowed Ana back into her life?
(Allowed, here, is maybe a strong word—Ana reentered Fareeha’s life without asking permission. Nevertheless, she hopes it means something that Fareeha is looking for, something that she can provide, even if she does not know yet what that something is.)
Usually, Ana’s instinct when she feels directionless is to attempt to wait out the situation, in the hopes that something will change or, barring that, that the next course of action will reveal itself to her organically. It often looks to others like inaction, but Ana feels such an approach wiser than to forge on ahead without mind of the consequences. If she were to push for too much too soon with Fareeha, it might feel overbearing, overwhelming, or even overfamiliar. They are family, yes, but they are strangers now also. Better to take a more measured approach.
Or—better, she thinks.
Fareeha, it seems, does not agree, if their conversation in the courtyard is anything to go by. I want you to be here, Fareeha told her, evidently finding Ana’s wait-and-see approach to be more akin to avoidance. Ana gave reassurances then, said that she was—and she is, she thinks, or at least wants to be, but she is not certain where here is, exactly.
At least when they were arguing, or not speaking entirely, Ana knew where they stood with one another; these days, it feels like she always one wrong word from dredging up the past. Even gestures are fraught, a hand too gentle on the shoulder feels condescending, like she is babying Fareeha, but it would be too much in a different way to nod her head in greeting the way she does to the others, a sharp little acknowledgment, as if they were no closer to one another than any other person here. She does not know how to be around Fareeha, and suspects Fareeha does not know how to be around her either. They are not quite strangers, not quite comrades, nor even quite mother and child.
Here is an in-between. An in-between between what they were and what, however, Ana is not certain. All she knows is that it is untenable to attempt to linger as she has, because Fareeha never has been good at staying still.
So, back to acting, to doing, to trying, in a way that Fareeha understands. Back to showing that she can be here—wherever that may be.
Being physically present is not enough; were it not evident from the situation, the context in which Fareeha told her to be here, she would still know it from her own mother, whose almost suffocating attention to Ana’s comportment in no way compensated for her emotional absence. There has to be more than that, than existence in a shared space, has to be more, even, than surface level conversations, the only kind Ana knows how to have with her daughter anymore.
(Everything else ends in a fight. They were both of them born for war, and cannot seem to find one another in the peacetime. Détente is as close as they come.)
There is no guidebook for this, for relearning how to be a mother to your adult child—no good one, anyway. None that understands what the two of them have been through, together and separately, none that provides a suitable vision for their future. There is just uncertainty, and no past to which Ana might turn. It is anathema to her, by nature and by vocation, to go into things blind.
Yet for Fareeha she will.
Or—she will try. She will fumble and stumble her way through anything, if it means she can be a mother again.
Because what she is now is nothing, or worse, is a hole in the place where a mother has been. She knows what it is to reach for comfort, and be denied it so many times that one learns not to seek it out at all. She knows what it feels to want to be loved, but not to know how to receive such, because one did not learn what it felt like to be cared for. She knows what it is to carry that pain, that distance, onto one’s own child.
Fareeha, whom she named for joy, should not have to know that pain. Her name is a promise, one Ana has broken now time and again, and Ana—she in so doing has not lived up to the promise of her own name, either.
There is no undoing the past or returning to it, no erasing her mistakes and picking up, again, where she left off, before she stopped being the mother her daughter needed. Even as they are reconciling, Fareeha has made it clear that there will be no absolution, and perhaps not even forgiveness, just a promise to move forwards.
And that is, perhaps, for the best. Fareeha has changed so much that Ana could not begin to try to relate to her in the same way—and Ana, too, has changed too much to slip back into her own place. They are not the people they once were. Ana is not the mother she once was, and Fareeha not the daughter she once had. Still, Fareeha is her daughter, and Fareeha wants a mother.
A mother who is here, whatever that may mean for Fareeha.
Which returns Ana to the crux of the problem: for her, here is something still on the edge of becoming, and for Fareeha, it is something else, is something more concrete.
It feels like it would be unfair, to ask Fareeha what it means when she says that, to expect that her do all the work of deciding what their relationship should be. She worries that if she does so, it will feel like she is not trying hard enough, like she wants to be handed an easy answer, rather than doing her part in learning how to be a better mother. It should be on her to know how to do that, not on her child.
But maybe that is the problem: her instinct, still, to see Fareeha as her child. Her daughter is a woman grown, and knows well by now that other adults—Ana in particular—are not infallible, that they do not know everything.
Maybe it is time to treat her daughter, in that sense, like an equal. Maybe it is time to trust that if Fareeha wants her to figure this out, she will say as much, and to believe that if Fareeha feels she is asking too much, or crossing a line, that she will tell Ana so. Maybe it is time to stop expecting herself to be able to find all of the answers, and to see Fareeha as just as capable of charting a path forward. Maybe it is time to have a real conversation.
Maybe it begins like this:
“How do you want me to…?”