understood. I had come from my mother, I had lived inside her, but I was not of her. I was not an Abu Sa’ab, a wedge driven even deeper after she divorced my father and dropped her married name entirely. After that I was a foreigner, an unfamiliar thing, other. I would never belong to her again, though I desperately wanted to. No matter how hard I tried I would never attain the status of being hers. It would always remain just beyond my reach.
