Maa assalame

I didn’t expect it to be over five months before I posted here again. So many things have happened since I wrote the last post in November.

Our son, S, was born in December 2009. He became distressed during his birth and was born very ill. After over a month in hospital, he was able to come home and is physically thriving. He has cerebral palsy which affects various reflexes and movements and will delay some developmental milestones. He is a feisty, determined little boy who is more beautiful than I could have imagined and has recently started laughing which is one of the loveliest sounds you have ever heard.

It is impossible to properly express how difficult the months since his birth have been. We have grieved for the son we should have had who wouldn’t have to struggle to do the most basic things; for the moments we should have spent with our newborn when in fact we weren’t able to hold him for five days; for a life where we wouldn’t have to feed him with a machine. It has been by far the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to us (we had lived fortunate lives) and we continue to struggle sometimes. Someone wrote to us when they found out and said it was times like these that made you realise what it was to love and be loved. I love our little one so much I sometimes feel my heart might burst. We could not have got through it without the support of our friends and family (and the NHS) and I wouldn’t have survived it without Mr A.

We couldn’t be certain S would get everything he needs (and is getting in London) in Doha and so we have moved back to the UK which meant I never returned to Qatar, S never got to visit, and Mr A had to pack up our home in a hurry. He now has a new job, we have a new flat, and our belongings are floating back to us on the high seas. It’s not all bad - we are near our families and old friends, have views of tall trees out of our windows and can buy as many Sunday newspapers as we like. But we miss the life we were meant to have for a bit longer in Doha, the friends with babies and the cooing in Arabic, the enormous flat and the swimming pool. At least we’d already found a comfortable home for the cats.

So, I promised myself that this blog would be predominantly about me being a foreigner in the Middle East rather than a blow-by-blow account of the minutiae of my life, and so it’s over. I could blog endless stories about how my son is the most adorable baby in the world (and did I mention how beautiful he is?). I could tell you about the woman waiting in the health clinic who was whispering Arabic to her baby – ‘mash’allah, mash’allah’ – or the car driving past our window last night with the call to prayer playing so loudly that I thought, just for a moment, that I was in the Middle East. But this is it for now. I’ll leave the blog here in the hope that we’ll return to the Arab world sometime in the future (insh’allah) and I can carry on where I left off…..

With best wishes,

Ms A

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