Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  I’m in a state of bliss. Watching an unfamiliar landscape roll by, even for a few hours, with not a thought in my head, is more restorative for me than a week at a spa. It’s one of the few things that return me to the quiet, childlike state of simply being-in-the-worldness that I crave, but have neglected to seek in the last few years. In the early years of our relationship, I’d sometimes ask Paul to just drive me along the water for an hour or two, no talking. Which suited him just fine; he’s not a talker and loves to drive.

  This being-in-the-worldness is more than a feeling of inner peace or stillness; it’s where I am most fully myself and most fully in the world. My very being, beneath any doing or thinking. I had my very first experience, or awareness, of this when I was around five years old.

  Our family was moving from the East Coast to California, and I was asleep with my mom and siblings in a private sleeper car on the Santa Fe Railroad. I was always awake before five A.M. (to my mother’s great dismay) and knew I had time to tiptoe out, explore, and return before anyone else woke up. The day before, I’d wandered into the kitchen car, where a porter was having his coffee and boiling eggs. He made us both a soft-boiled egg and toast. I, being an outgoing and chatty five-year-old, showed him how my mother made us eggy-in-a-cup by tearing up the bread into little pieces to soak up the yolk, which no little kid is going to eat plain and runny. I then took his bread and made him one, too. He was chuckling the whole time about my taking over his kitchen, and in my pajamas no less.

  But that morning I decided to poke my head under the blackout blind beside my bunk instead. It was still dark but a thin pale line was beginning to glow in the distance. As it began to widen and turn pink I noticed something new—that the world here was flat, utterly, which I’d never seen. There were no hills or stores or neighbors’ houses, which are mountainous to a kid and gave my world endpoints. I wiggled myself completely under the blind and pulled my knees up to see, for the first time, a world that didn’t end anywhere. I can still remember the sound in my head of my own breathing along with the soft chiketa-chiketa of the rails and the feel of the window made cold and wet by my breath.

  I sat there for what seemed like ages, thrilled and astonished to learn that the world went on forever! I watched the sunrise blanket an endless feathery prairie in pink and peach and felt the yellow warmth reach the glass and make me squint.

  And then I had a sudden feeling of person-ness, of my very existence. And it felt very big, as big as the world itself. I had found a space between me and the world that I knew even then that only I filled up. I stayed there, aware of being me for the first time until everyone woke up, when I crawled out and went back to being a happy kid on her way to a new home.

  I found I was never able to return to that place of calm, authentic being-ness unless I was alone and either outdoors or looking outside. Silence and solitude are as necessary to me as air. It’s where anything false about me falls away and I’m only and ever my most essential self, as true and powerful as we all are at our core.

  Nepal has two types of street kids: children on the street, and children of the street. For children on the street, it’s their workplace, where they sell various wares or beg. They may be thin and dressed in threadbare clothing, they may live in slum housing, but they are bright-eyed with clean hair and laundered clothing, with families to go home to. These are the two little girls we saw our first night in Thamel.

  For children of the street, however, the street is both home and workplace. These are children that have been orphaned, kicked out, or ran away to escape various forms of abuse. They roam the streets in packs, looking almost feral beneath matted and filthy hair, runny noses, grimy clothing and faces. Many of them are addicted to sniffing glue, which keeps them warm in the winter and dulls the hunger pains.

  Mainly, their eyes tell the difference. The Nepalese call these children kathe, which means “naughty,” “dirty,” or “failure,” and treat them as subhuman. The emotional, physical, and sexual abuse they’re subjected to by their peers, the police, and the general public breaks their spirit, makes them a shadow of who they could be. When a child has never known love, when no one cares if they live or die, their eyes are bottomless.

  Fortunately, there is a man who cares if they live or die, who picks them up from the gutter, brushes them off, and showers them with unconditional love. His name is Rabin, and my mom and I are at the orphanage he runs for the kathe children. What Rabin does gives these kids more than a second chance at life; what he does is see—and help them see in themselves—the magnificent people they are. And in this he reminds me of my mother.

  My mom saved me not once, when she bundled me in her arms and took me from my father’s house, but twice, when as a teenager I needed to be taken from myself. When drugs made me unrecognizable, when I was emaciated and hateful with matted and dirty hair, when I woke up on mornings and didn’t even see myself, she saw me. Really saw me. The me she knew since birth, the me she brought back.

  Our most meaningful scavenge here is to work at an orphanage for at least four hours. We went first to one in the countryside, a model facility where the kids were in classes. The director there felt the greatest need was at an orphanage in town, the SOS Children’s Village Jorpati, a less well-funded facility that serves emotionally, physically, and mentally disabled kids.

  Rabin Nepali, the director at that facility, is a soft-spoken middle-aged man with a beautiful smile. His facility takes what he calls “the most needy among the needy kids. At Jorpati I can work not just with my head but with my heart.”

  His organization, SOS Villages, then does what they’ve found creates a success rate that would put our social services system to shame. They give them mothers—for life. They are no longer orphans, they are never up for adoption. They become part of a real family of kids with a mom who raises them as her own; they go to school, do chores, grow up. Those that are able go off to college or other training, some are given seed money for a business, those who need lifelong assistance go to group living homes. The mothers remain part of the community as grandmothers once their kids are grown; the kids return to visit the rest of their lives.

  Jorpati is not in a good area, but once inside the walls of the facility, we find ourselves in a sweet courtyard of flowers and vegetables the kids here have cultivated. Rabin leads us into a cottage where several squirmy, excited children sit waiting for us with big smiles. Some are physically disabled, some emotionally challenged, and all are having a hard time sitting still. They are just so beautiful it’s all I can do not to plop down next to them and take the littler ones into my lap. I speak very slowly to them as they’re introduced, assuming they’re still new to English.

  “I . . . am . . . very . . . exci-ted . . . to . . . meet . . . all . . . of you!”

  “They understand English,” Rabin reminds me gently. “They’re just shy to speak at first.”

  I glance at the faux-pas-a-meter otherwise known as Mia’s face and realize I was doing what always makes me laugh when someone else does it—if you think someone doesn’t understand your language, you speak s-l-o-w and loud.

  The kids trail Rabin like ducklings as he takes us through the house to meet their mother, a stunning, petite Nepali woman around forty.

  “How lucky you are to have so many beautiful children,” I tell her.

  “Yes,” she says shyly, beaming with pride. She brings us to meet another child, a tiny little girl asleep in a wheelchair. We’re surprised to learn she is thirteen. Rabin explains that she has a condition that prevents her from growing. He brushes some stray hair from her forehead as the kids flock around her, whispering. She’s clearly much beloved.

  When I ask if there’s anything that can be done for her condition he tells us that no, this is simply how she is. I realize I just did that most American of things—assume that almost everything can be fixed.

  Rabin leads us out to a porch where a few kids sit in chairs along the railing. He’s trying to tell u
s their names but a spontaneous teenage boy who has difficulty speaking keeps interrupting him. Rabin alternates between trying to answer his questions and introducing us to the other children, no easy task.

  The boy finally pops up, hugs Rabin tightly, and takes Rabin’s face in his hands with such enthusiastic joy I’m half-afraid he’ll hurt him. The boy begins to cry as he struggles to say something.

  Rabin’s eyes fill with tears as takes the boy’s hands from his face and begins to kiss the palms with such humility and tenderness that for an exquisite moment time stands still.

  Sometimes change comes violently, as it has here politically with the Maoists. But that kind of change comes at great cost and can vanish overnight. Lasting positive change comes for nations as it does with children—with nurturance; with caring and growing a nation’s human resources and potential. Motherhood works. Not just biologically, as a force limited to women. Rabin is a shining example of motherhood as a concept, a way of being.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cairo

  Never Ride a One-Humped Camel

  If you’ve never seen a Bollywood film before, rent one. Hunky actors sob while professing their love to blushing coquettes, cheesy song-and-dance routines abound, and the moment two characters lock eyes and realize they’re in love, they’re instantly transported to magical green hillsides.

  Om Shanti Om, a Bollywood film that actually parodies the genre, played on the plane to Cairo, and since I slept through it, my mom’s reenacting it in our room at the Mena Hotel. I’m laughing so hard my face hurts as she sings and dances.

  “Your limbs are like flowers, so colorful,” she croons to an invisible actress. “I want to be part of that color, my sweet!”

  Apparently things didn’t work out; her next move is to spin to me, wailing, “She left me, and broke my heart on the twenty-sixth of last month. Now I am a wanderer and a lover of disco. As I roam through Paris and San Francisco, my heart is alive with the pain of disco, pain of disco, pain of disco!”

  And with that, she stag-leaps her way to the bathroom. When I manage to stop laughing, I sprawl out on the bed to see what Bill’s served up on Egypt’s scavenge menu.

  My first impression of Cairo is of a city trying to camouflage itself; most buildings are made of sand-colored stone or painted in fading beiges and browns that blur into the desert surrounding it. The only colors that stand out were light blue or green doors and shutters, bleached pale by the unrelenting sun.

  Cairo is a modern city but you still see much of what travelers would have centuries ago. Boys and young men in long robes and fez hats lead small donkeys harnessed to wooden carts laden with melons, tomatoes, or oranges. Men gathered around tables talk animatedly and smoke cigarettes or shisha. Streets are swept with palm fronds.

  “Mia, do you have my mascara?” my mom calls, poking her head out of the bathroom as she towels off her wet hair.

  I walk into the bathroom and comb through my toiletries container.

  “Here.” I hand it over. “I used it this morning, sorry.”

  “And my powder?”

  I look back in the bag and fish that out, too.

  “And that’s my black shirt you’re wearing, isn’t it?” she says, exasperated. “I was going to wear that tomorrow. I brought one long skirt to wear in the mosques and that’s the top I brought to match it. Mia, you know I don’t mind you borrowing things but you’ve basically commandeered half of my wardrobe and toiletries—mainly because you didn’t bring nearly what you should have,” she adds pointedly.

  “Sorry,” I say, getting annoyed. “I was a little busy with a job and getting my place ready to sublet. Besides, you weren’t even wearing the shirt. It was just sitting in your suitcase.”

  “Of course it was ‘just sitting’ there. It’s an inanimate object, its job is to sit where I put it so I can find it when I want it. How many times do I have to tell you to ask me first? And when you do borrow something,” she says, waving the mascara I borrowed at me, “put it back where you found it. My mascara goes in my makeup bag. Everything I buy isn’t communal property, and neither am I for that matter—you’ve fallen asleep on me on literally every single plane or train we’ve ridden and not once did you ask if I minded.”

  She starts marching around the room collecting clothes of mine strewn everywhere, the floor included. I want to tell her to stop being so dramatic (Chicken Little, the sky’s falling! Anything but an unmatching shirt!), but that might prompt her to fire off every offense I’ve ever committed.

  “And stop,” she says, dramatically dropping my clothing on my suitcase, “making every hotel room a pigsty!”

  She gives a final look around the room, and, satisfied, plops down on the bed beside me.

  “Okay, I got that out of my system,” she says, smiling. “Sorry, honey, but every hotel we’ve stayed in I’ve asked you nicely to keep it neat and I can’t count how many times I’ve told you to tell me when you borrow something. It’s aggravating, being dismissed. Chris says the same thing about her daughter. You guys get mad if we don’t listen to you, but you think it’s optional to listen to us.”

  That’s true—I do often only half-hear what she says. Sometimes foolishly, like when she told me to always pay more than the monthly minimum on student loans (I called her one day, shocked that after a year and a half of payments none of it had gone toward my principal). I think, in part, she gives so much advice and commentary because she knows I’ll ignore some of it, but sometimes I feel like I have to ignore it or I’d go nuts. But she’s right in that it’s different to dismiss advice she’s giving to me versus dismissing a request she’s making of me.

  “I didn’t really think about it that way, but you’re right, it’s rude. Sorry, I’ll try to be better about that, okay?”

  “Thank you. If you want me to treat you like an adult or a friend, you have to act a little more like one and stop assuming I’ll caretake you. I know you guys see moms as The Giving Tree, but at some point you should outgrow the need to swing from my branches and sit on my stump!”

  We laugh. She’s referring to Shel Silverstein’s book about a tree who gives away every last part of herself to a little boy she loves.

  “Or maybe at least water me from time to time,” she adds, smiling. “Now fold up my shirt, put on something else—preferably of yours—and let’s go before the market closes.”

  Never ride a one-humped camel if you can help it. And if, for some reason, like you’re really stupid and shortsighted, you have to ride one in a skirt, just hook the chain from the lead camel’s nose ring into your own nose and let him drag you across the hot sand. You’ll still get where you’re going and it’ll hurt less.

  I told myself not to feel guilty about the T-shirt. I’m always giving her the clothes off my back, off my hangers, out of my drawers. She’ll often wear something out before I’ve even worn it once. But she’s twenty-five, enough already.

  I hate having “options.” Picking out clothes is like having to pass a test every morning. So I buy multiples and keep colors to black, white, muted blues, and lilacs, boring but easy, and they work with my light green skin (some of us really are olive; in a certain light I look like Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch). And when I travel, I pack light. Twenty-five days around the world with a single carry-on means clothes are scheduled. And today was my skirt-and-shawl day for mosques.

  I forgot about the camel ride. A mandatory scavenge is riding around the pyramids wearing the ridiculous-looking headgear we bought last night—a huge neon-blue chiffon square with baseball-size pompoms in Day-Glo colors attached all around.

  We’ve hired a kind driver named Imam, who’s just bought his own taxi and is pretty happy that his very first customers have hired him for two entire days. He speaks some English and he’s a bit shy, but one camel joke (tick off another scavenge) and a few blocks later, he has us all laughing and is as chatty and affable as everyone else here. Egyptians are thus far among the warmest, most hospitable and
humorous people I’ve encountered traveling.

  Per the hotel’s advice to avoid tourist-trap rides, Imam’s taking us to his own camel connection to save us being fleeced and assure us the camels don’t have fleas. He drives us through the narrow streets of a working-class neighborhood toward the pyramids.

  A lot of life here seems to happen on the street, either at the side of the road or outside front doors where men are ironing, fixing tires, sewing, having tea, reading the paper.

  We wait by giant cement-and-chain-link camel pens as Imam negotiates with three generations for a rate. A young boy with sea-green eyes that leap out of his dark complexion seems to be driving the hardest bargain. Grandpa finally waves his hand and I’m assigned a flirty gal with a pink bridle and multicolored necklaces; Mia chooses the horse.

  “You can ride a horse anytime, Mia,” I suggest.

  “Not around the pyramids, I can’t. Besides, I’m not getting on that beast. Those things look scary.”

  “Not as scary as we’re gonna look once we tie these things on,” I mutter as I tie the Bozo scarf on. This is where you really get just how much youth is its own kind of beauty. A pretty young woman can get away with wearing this. At fifty, you could get slapped for scaring babies.

  “Oh, my God.” Mia cringes when she sees me. “She’s gonna toss you off just on principle.”

  Oh, pooh, I think, my Miss Camelia here is a little buttercup. She’s got the cutest nostrils and enormous bedroom eyes heavy with lashes, and her velvety lips are pluppeting all over my shirt and arms. She’s either kissing me, sniffing me, or preparing to eat me.