“Better than me” by Hiba Al-Ashtal

 

“Mom, what’s your biggest regret?” I asked.

Nothing had prompted this loaded question. It was unfair. We were having a typical quiet evening, the sort we’d had often in my 22 years, my mother watching the news and me nested beside her reading a book.

“I regret that I cried a lot,” she responded, welling up with tears. “I spent my youth crying.”

My mother’s response was probably as surprising to me as my question was to her. I thought she would pick something “correct” or “appropriate.” Maybe something like, “I regret that I didn’t always make my health a priority.”

I hadn’t expected my mother to talk about her sadness. She was the strongest person that I knew, and her pain scared me. This mother felt vulnerable and fragile; I didn’t know how to be with her, so I didn’t encourage any further conversation. I let the silence settle in, and we went to bed shortly thereafter.

Lying in bed that night, I didn’t let myself think about her response. Frankly, there was no need; I knew exactly what she meant, but I wasn’t ready to see my mother as a person. I only wanted to know her as my mother: tough, critical, impatient, and fiercely loving. I was leaving to start my PhD in a couple months, and I needed to convince myself that she’d be fine without me. But now, nearly a decade later, I think of my mother’s response often, and I honor her sadness.

My mother has endured many hardships in life, none more cruel than being robbed of the opportunity to make her own decisions. At the age of 16, my mother was forced to drop out of school, forgo her dream of becoming a doctor, and get married – a now outdated custom that wrecked many young dreams in Yemen. 

Her marriage amputated her adolescence and her possibilities, and it burdened her with responsibilities she shouldn’t have had so early in life. By age 19, my mother had immigrated to America alongside my father and later had my eldest brother. By age 28, all four of her children were born – the last one being me, the only daughter. 

Growing up my mother would often say to me, “I want you to be better than me.” Although the sentiment was a cheer, a moral buttress against my own self-doubt, it was a harsh reminder that the options I had were never afforded to her. And with every milestone that I achieved, my guilt settled in deeper. 

I vividly remember the day that I realized my mother couldn’t help me with math homework anymore, because it was now beyond what she had learned. And while it’s common for children to surpass their parents, perhaps it’s even how it should be, I surpassed my mother at a relatively young age and that felt wrong.

For all intents and purposes, my mother succeeded at her mission: I am “better” than her. I finished high school, went to college, and even got a PhD. I have a successful career as a scientist, I’m independent and can fend for myself. I live in a big city and travel the world once or twice a year, just to see what else is out there. I have options. My mother never got to have options. I get to have a life that she never got to have, and, at times, a life that she may even envy. It’s when I notice my options that I remember my mother’s sadness.

There are many things my mother got wrong while raising me. These topics come up often in my therapist’s office. But there are also things she got right. She broke a traumatic cycle – I wasn’t a teen bride, I got to choose what I wanted to be. A free thinker, my mother dreamed a life for me that she could never have. She never got to break free, but she hoisted me on her shoulders so that I could. For that, she is the most resilient and loving person that I know.

I am eternally grateful to my mother. And while we’ve never talked about her sadness and my guilt, I know she’d say, “It’s ok that you’re better than me, and I’m happy for you.

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Hiba Al-Ashtal is a Yemeni-American born in Manhattan, Kansas, and educated in the United States, Yemen, and Qatar. Her writing explores the complexity of navigating through new iterations of the self, family, and home while living in diaspora. She is currently a scientist and lives in New York with her dog, Arlo. 

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