I’ll Tell You When I’m Home.
Reflections on a memoir through the lens of my own pregnancy and journey toward intentional motherhood
Reading I’ll Tell You When I’m Home was not only a window into Dr. Hala Alyan’s journey to motherhood but also very much felt like holding up a mirror into my own journey toward intentional motherhood. The memoir weaves Hala Alyan’s life story together with the nine-month journey leading up to her daughter’s birth. She recounts her ancestors’ displacement, the snap decisions her parents had to make to ensure the family’s safety — even when it meant leaving everything behind — and the repeated start-overs in new countries and cities throughout her formative years.
As a child who was rapidly displaced from one place to another, she eventually grew into an adult seeking to fulfill a longstanding desire: to become a mother. But her body, as she explains with raw honesty, seemed entirely at odds with that wish. With a heart-shaped womb, she could conceive easily — but carrying a pregnancy to term proved a different story. Trial after trial ended in heartbreak. As she writes, with visceral frankness, her aim was “to lie on my back, to wait for semen, to have matter meet matter. To emerge transformed.” Her words — primal and unembellished — capture the essence of human creation.
Shockingly, miscarriages are very common. And it takes most couples several times before one sticks. Ectopics, which are even scarier, are a sobering reality that ITYWIH describes in harrowing detail. Ectopics are when the egg fertilizes outside the uterus, most commonly in the fallopian tubes. Like, they’re lethal, and are never able to carry to term.
So, given her body’s fickle nature, she decided to proceed with seeking out a surrogate. She was eventually matched with a nice Canadian lady whom she refers to as “Dee”. The blank slate between them helped to maintain boundaries. If something went awry, having a surrogate whom you don’t know wouldn’t make whatever preexisting relationship awkward.
Hala crafts a nonlinear narrative that loosely follows the structure of the nine months of her daughter’s development, but fear not — to the unaccustomed reader, it might read fragmented, but to the contrary, she maintains a floaty, dreamlike surrealism that dips from scene to scene, past and present, country to country, occasionally on the same page. She utilizes the motif of the Scheherazade, the clever, witty woman who successfully evades execution each night by the King through cleverly telling stories that end right before their resolution, at the strike of the first light of dawn.
She places deep importance on Beirut as a cornerstone of her identity. Granted the rare freedom of living alone without parental oversight at a young age, she embraced every opportunity to explore, occasionally stumbling into youthful mischief along the way — memories she now looks back on with a mix of nostalgia and reflection. It was perhaps this early, unchecked independence, compounded by a series of personal traumas, that paved the way toward her struggle with addiction.
ITYWIH doesn’t have a jagged, disconnected feeling, rather what it reminded me of was my own thought process while I myself was giving birth. Attempting to distract myself from the contractions, I allowed my mind to float freely wherever it wanted to go. I swam in an ocean of random memories, each one a buoy to grip on to while the contractions tried to pull me under. I went in and out of the present, from peering at my husband, wearing a bright red shirt, trying to maintain a smile when I could witness his jugular vein popping through the skin of his neck from fear.
I thought of being six, waking up to a crying dog in my arms — a puppy that my mother got me for my six year old birthday. She tried, I reassured myself. In that moment, I hoped putting out compassionate vibes would reflect back at me. Then I propelled forward twenty years, to the sudden death of my first lover. I thought of him looking down at me from above. Or perhaps he was in the room as me, coaxing me to stay strong, as he used to do while he was alive. I thought of everything in my life up to that moment, condensed in the seven hours between admittance and going under anesthesia for the C-Section operation.
Truthfully, I’d been a long-time reader of Alyan’s works. First, I was introduced to her poetry collection, “The Twenty-Ninth Year”, which remains one of my top-recommended collections of poetry whenever someone is interested in reading something gripping, vivid, and illustrious. I can’t quite remember how I stumbled across her works. I might have been looking up narratives about traveling from place to place. Or I was curious about reading more books by Palestinian authors.
On a whim, I messaged her a few weeks before my own delivery. Despite her rapidly-growing popularity, she took the time to respond to my inquiry about what she learned about babies. I was right: I know a maternal figure when I see one. “I realized they will be constantly changing but I didn’t realize that would mean you’d have to be constantly changing too”, she said in a voice note. I know she didn’t mean this ominously, but I can only handle so much self-discovery before I start to collapse into self doubt. Having a kid, that’s like a big thing. The Big Thing. With my shaky upbringing, seeing whether I was fit for motherhood would only be discovered upon actually becoming a mother. That’s a gamble I’m happy I took, but my anxiety was sky high on actually you know, doing the thing and giving birth.
I, like her, married at age 29. She’s accurate that 29 is quite a transformative year. The chaos, as disjointed and directionless as my own twenty-something sojourns appeared, just needed time to buttress a greater purpose. Now at age 32 going on 33, I’ve had nearly two years since the birth of my son to assess what this greater purpose even is, in tangible terms. Like her, I agree: “I wanted to matter less”. The irony of seeking purpose in this life is that the answer is often rooted in losing ego. The loss of I. For me, that nine-month journey of pregnancy became a period of decentering myself — of clarifying my values, deciding which stories about me and his father I wanted to pass on, and understanding how the extended family might shape his life. Hala, too, used that same span of time — waiting for her daughter — to reflect deeply, though her path and outcomes differed from mine in significant ways. Truthfully, nine months is not nearly long enough. The reality is that understanding yourself in the grander scheme of being a mother is a dynamic process, and not something completely self contained in a mere nine months.
“You’d have to be constantly changing too”, her voice note echoed in my head.
She places great emphasis on the flavors of Beirut. I’ve never visited, but it’s a city known for being a jungle, especially considering its nightlife. I couldn’t imagine spending my youth there — my time in Oregon during my early twenties was bad enough. By the time I’d made it to Amman, I was a bit more mature, but still, Beirut without reins sounds unhinged. And from the way Hala constantly references the city in ITYWIH, I’m almost certain a strong joint could get her to reveal stories that never made it into the memoir. Either way, I enjoyed living vicariously through her stories, as they reminded me much of some of the decisions I made during that same stretch of time during the late teens to mid twenties. With little rhyme nor reason did I migrate; I was a wanderer, with little to do for commitment, that I had passed off as just simply a longing for wanderlust. I could identify with Hala’s love for travel.
Regarding motherhood, it’s taboo, but I can’t lie — there is a loss of identity that naturally occurs. I felt this most in my relationship with my husband. Parenting will not necessarily be the reason for fracturing in the relationship, but it will reveal the uglier, darker realities that could have been ignored, at least for a longer time without a child in the picture. Like a gear slightly off-track, under the weight of a child, it will clank and clank with greater friction. Before the birth of my son, my marriage glided over the waters, passion driving the motor. But now? Treading the sea has become laborious, like our tongues getting trapped in riptides pulling us under the weight of every new argument. Even with my husband an ocean away, sometimes I feel the tension of his voice, the time away like the retreating of the waters from the shore, only to break over my head and drown me again.
But unlike Hala, it was me who was less than passionate about becoming a parent. In esoteric terms, maybe I’d become unaligned with my feminine. My husband was the one to bring up the conversation first. “Babies.” He said one night, breaking the silence. “I want babies. More than one”. When I asked him how many children he wants, he answered flatly. “Five”, without hesitation.
Yes, he was serious. And no, we’re not going to be having five.
Hala’s ex spouse, on the other hand, was less than thrilled, from the sound of it. From what I can glean in between the lines, (her memoir is not overly incriminating of her ex spouse Johnny, with whom she had been married to for a while before their daughter came into the picture), he really did not want a kid. For which reasons the reader doesn’t learn, but that’s okay. Being a disinterested father is still significantly more socially acceptable to discuss than being a disinterested mother. And truthfully, I wouldn’t have called myself disinterested, but having a child revealed something in me. Having to give what I was never given. My own sigh of relief I didn’t have a daughter, but a son instead. I’m not totally oblivious about the obvious not-so-hidden internalized misogyny from that.
“The truth is I don’t know what makes me deserving of motherhood, aside from the fact that I deeply, deeply want it. I have wanted it for as long as I can remember, and I remained invested throughout this journey in not turning against my body.”
Hala’s pondering here, what makes me deserving of motherhood, made me contemplate the worthiness of passing on your genes. I’ve always just taken pregnancy as a thing you just do, whether it’s deserved or not. I mean, who deserves anything? How many parents procreate with reckless abandon? How you’re brought into existence, and the arc of your life, is not perfectly polished in anyone. I mean, had I not been selected to be raised in the household I grew up in, I’d have had a drugged out mother and runaway father. And even then so, my adoptive parents evidently had their own ulterior motives in mind. Raising children is not for everyone.
My husband constantly loves to reassure me how beautiful I was while pregnant. “My pregnant nikdeh princess”, he beamed with pride during my pregnancy. How a man treats his wife while she’s pregnant is a lens that will always influence how she sees her husband. Because what’s being pregnant like? The loss of bodily function, (from constantly dipping and raising blood pressure); having an appetite for a specific brand and flavor of chips for a whole week while throwing up everything else (Bugles, nacho flavor); peeing every goddamn time I sneezed, coughed, or laughed; feeling the whooshing of a baby doing glides like astronauts preparing for reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Pregnancy, as wholly natural as it is, is the most unnatural I’ve ever felt in my life. Like a coup arbitrarily deciding how you should behave in the moment. Your decisions are never really only consulted by you, but by something else.
This is fucked up beyond measure but a part of me is envious of those who delegate the task of pregnancy to someone else, whether out of convenience or necessity, as was Hala’s case. Let’s face it: getting a baby put in you is hell of a lot more fun than getting one out of you. But reading about her challenges with remaining pregnant, I looked at the relative ease in which I was able to get pregnant and give birth with some guilt. I guess we got lucky, or I’m just very fertile. “Bullseye”, I say, whenever someone has asked us how many times we tried, (which on its own is an odd question to ask, but I’ve been asked that several times). “Just once. Like it had legs and leapt toward my egg in a loving embrace”. Unlike Hala, I was very much not burdened by the throes of infertility. This honestly makes me extra glad I was a late-bloomer and didn’t lose my v-card until I was twenty-three because holy shit I could have gotten in trouble had I not taken protection very seriously.
Despite the ease of the overall pregnancy experience, my mother in law had insisted on one thing: The epidural was totally the easy way out, and to be avoided. Her logic?
The pain of delivery connects you to your child more.
Is there a deeper connection to the child you carry and deliver — with all the pain that accompanies it, from conception to birth — than to a child born through surrogacy? I mean, I’ll never truly know the answer, but I don’t think so. I don’t blame people for wondering. To be fair, some women are highly attached to the experience of being pregnant and giving birth. My own OBGYN told me that several women have refused any pain relief because the pain they feel brings them closer to their child! This is just plain quackery, to my ears. And besides, I still had plenty of pain and suffering while being pregnant. So while I don’t personally know whether Hala herself had reservations in this regard, pregnancy and delivering are just the beginning of a long, arduous journey. Delivery is the easiest part, in my opinion. She’s right. You do have to adapt and constantly be changing in tandem with your baby as they grow.
And, in case you were curious, my mother-in-law eventually acquiesced about the epidural, and gave up trying to convince me the “value” behind delivering a baby in pain.
While I’ve mentioned the feeling that you’ve lost your identity a little bit, there is an identity that forms from birthing and caretaking, too. Your selflessness, ideally, should be invoked. You have to put the needs of someone else above your own. No questions asked. Plus, in my case, I couldn’t repeat the mistakes that were made toward me. I could not inherit the sins of the father, (and mother).
While I certainly would never appropriate the term “displacement” to describe my own trajectory, as an adoptee, there’s a special loss of identity rarely discussed in frank terms. The motif of the savior is everywhere whenever adoption is discussed. They’re called the selfless parent, willing to take on the burden of the mother and father who were either disinterested or frankly incapable of continuing parenting. We’re told so bluntly, “Think of the loving, wonderful people who are incapable of having a child, how happy they would be with you!”. This is a form of erasure, albeit a completely different one from the tragic realities Palestinians face.
Nonetheless, I could not help but remember the cause of my own intentional motherhood.
For me, it was the desire to make things right. Humanity must continue. I am a believer in God. I am a believer that I am the vessel between uncreated and created. “People with working uteruses” (if you excuse my reductionism) were chosen by God for this opportunity. Sure, it’s up to you to decide whether to utilize your body for this purpose or not, but in my opinion, I am a door, and so I chose to open it. The hallway of heaven is a foyer into my womb.
While I certainly don’t treat children as some kind of metaphor, whether for making up your lost hopes and dreams while choosing to live vicariously through them, I do believe the objective to raise children and learn from your own parent’s mistakes is not only a way to leave the world in a slightly better place than how you found it, but also with more intentional parenting, we become the stitching needle of redemption to pull into place those frayed threads of the tapestry of sins of each generation before us.
I sometimes become frustrated by my husband. There’s no words that can truly communicate what not having something is like. The state of having cannot understand the state of not having. Truth be told: my husband has things that I don’t. And the consequences of those things course through his veins, his impulses, his identity, his ethics. He has blood relatives. He looks in the eyes of those who brought him into existence. His mother remembers the pain of giving birth to him, but she can contextualize all that suffering now by seeing how the wonderful man she raised turned out to be.
I, on the other hand, have myths, rumors, and goals that I never reached for someone else. “I only adopted you so that I could live vicariously through you! Oh you would never understand.” She’d lament. I was three when I first heard her confess. She’d assume I’d never remember. I did.
What I am able to offer my child is a beautiful household, filled with the aromatic dishes of Palestine, and loving embraces from the five-plus people who stop by each day to play with my son while they have Nescafe with either me or Troy’s Tata. The first nanosecond of any cry is a call to his Seedo for nurturing. I have to practically compete with a whole household to hold him, which doesn’t always please me since I am his mother after all, but too many hands is infinitely better than too few.
I’ve digressed. Back to Hala’s work. I purchased this first as an audiobook, (which was finished the same day it was released), then again as an ebook. I process the depth of words differently as I read them, but hearing her narrate was certainly a unique experience. Like she’s allowing you in on the secret. A tendency to make up funny lies, addictions, hedonistic proclivities, are not typically shouted from the rooftops, but uttered in safe environments with an audience that you’re certain will understand. Her confidence is infectious. Vulnerability is the nudity of the soul. But what does it accomplish, really? The little Machiavellian in me offers this axiom: The price of honesty — when it risks reputation — is only worth paying if your audience has developed enough of a sense of self to relinquish their own judgment. That’s far from guaranteed. It takes strength to stand with such conviction, and as such, I admire her fortitude.
And as she writes early on in her memoir, awareness of “audience” as a concept was constantly a factor. She knew what they wanted. What to say. It’s obvious she’s a charismatic individual, probably someone who has learned over the course of life the value in observing before reacting. You can learn a lot about people if you just sit in silence and listen. That eventually became her job, after all. It’s lent well to her trajectory of making sense of messiness to procuring a stable environment to raise a child in.
Hala’s primary framework with her patients is narrative therapy, and this certainly influences how she understands her own place in the world. What you tell yourself does indeed make a difference. I mean, how’d I have ended up had I believed the bullshit I was told. “You’ll wind up a prostitute like your birthmother!”, “you’re unstable and probably have bipolar just like her”, “you’re gullible and believe everything you hear. God forbid the day you’re offered drugs the first time”. Had I not proactively worked on contradicting every supposed prophecy of my adoptive mother, then I may have become someone unrecognisable today.
Therefore, giving your child a strong narrative from the get-go is utterly necessary to develop his self-esteem. I’m already practicing what I will tell my son. “Mommy loved Daddy and we prayed to God to give us a little baby, and there you came to us, in Jordan Hospital. Dr Efteem, who also delivered all your uncles and aunts, greeted you and said you looked like a baby angel. Your first food that you LOVED was Molokia. Mommy didn’t even like Molokia the first time she ate it, but you? You grinned and giggled, with your eyes widening with glee, upon tasting those dark green leaves. In fact your first solids was a small bowl of molokia. Next thing you loved more than anything was zaatar, which Tata made from freshly dried thyme leaves by hand. She put her loving touch in everything. When we first took you home, you had to listen to Fairuz in order to sleep. Tata’s sister Mimi from Palestine came all alone from Quds to help. Look, how many people love you!
When we went to America, you started to develop your little personality. You laughed at everyone, loved puppies, and gobbled up our sickeningly-sweet yogurt snacks. Life for you will be a loving adventure, from your Jordanian home to your American home, separated only by an ocean but the compassion will never be further away than a Facetime call that someone will always answer.
Is it comprehensive? Barely. Hard to know precisely how to offer a rich narrative with stories of ancestors and migrations and displacement with my background. That’s going to be my husband’s primary job, anyway. What can I say? I certainly can’t speak for his half of the genetic blend when I can barely account for my own. I mean, you think white people don’t know anything about their background? Well, I really don’t know anything. I’ve a name of my supposed birthfather. One or two pictures. Leathery skin and pale, greyish blue eyes, as I remember. I know he was much older than she was. He was a mechanic, working odd jobs here and there, certainly not making enough to sustain a family. My birthmother was born in America with Swedish roots from her grandparents, though my ancestry reports my DNA reflecting middle-Germanic and Irish roots, (which as a woman, I can only acquire my mother’s DNA and not my father’s, so I will forever be in the dark about his true origins). She went down a sordid path of addiction, failing to get her act together even with a baby on the way. And, if the rumors about her are true, sold her body for money. That’s it. That’s all I have.
My husband on the other hand can trace back generations. Some came from Ramallah, while some came from Jerusalem. Several of his great-great-great uncles were part of the priestly class in Jerusalem. Orthodox, before they became Western Rite Catholics. The former permits you to marry and bear children while the latter maintains a strict code of chastity. Like many Palestinians, my husband’s grandparents were displaced from their homes in the late 1960s. They barely escaped the violence, and a year after ’68, my father-in-law was born in Amman.
We live in a multigenerational household — my son’s great grandpa lives on half of the top floor, my husband’s uncle and his wife and their three adult-age sons live in the apartment next door, while my son and I live on the middle floor, with his grandparents. The first floor is my father in law’s brother and his family, and then the ground floor is a family friend who is closely tied to the Orthodox Church here in Amman. The building is peppered with Christian icons of the Eastern flavor — with a strong emphasis on the divine maternal in Christianity, the holy Virgin. They did what they could to recreate a little Jerusalem. A little Holy Sepulchre.
The reminder to forgive is everywhere.
At the time of this writing, we have entered the second day of the fragile ceasefire following the dog fight between Israel and Iran. Unprovoked bombing, first by Israel, swiftly followed through by direct American support, has escalated a region that’s barely cooling from the last major regional calamity. Not too long ago did ISIS sweep through, accumulating swaths of territory, while threatening the borders of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. When that thing died down to manageable conflict localized in Iraq and Syria, I’d just barely arrived in Jordan in September of 2018 on two scholarships to study Arabic. Things were calm. Under control. I felt at ease, as did most people.
Of course, my anxiety is bludgeoning my senses these days. My son is blessed with the American passport, and soon my husband will follow with gaining those privileges. But even American passports aren’t the buffer they used to be from the world’s injustices toward holders of certain citizenships. So yeah. The USA, Israel and Iran really need to stop with their bullshit. I’m sick and tired of seeing sparks being flung across the sky like Greek gods playing celestial pickleball with ballistic ICBM missiles. I mean if this starts up again I’ll have to tell my son they’re shooting stars. Time will tell if their ceasefire will hold. I cannot have Jordan become an unviable place for long visits. My goal is for him to remain connected to his family, no matter what.
But truthfully, I’m also fearful of his life growing up in America, even more than the geopolitical conflicts in the Mideast. Being connected to Jordan is therefore non-negotiable. I need him close to his family, even if it isn’t in the same household, preferably we could still at the very least be in proximity to them. Funnily enough, his original due date was September 11th. “No, no, it can’t be..” I had murmured, the first time I saw the projected day of delivery. “I must schedule a c section if he doesn’t arrive by September 9th. My son will have a hell of a time every year, I can’t risk it.” Fortunately my son was born on September 1st, three days before my birthday and four days before Tata’s birthday. A whole week of celebration he can look forward to. The three of us are virgos. Virgos are supposed to be neat and tidy, which both he and his tata are, but anyone who has ever had to live with me can tell you that astrology must be bullshit.
Hala’s memoir wraps up with the delivery of her daughter, the timelessness of that moment that holds forever in every layer of the conscious and subconscious in a new mother’s psyche.
When I see you, everything changes. There is no future, or it is only future. There is no future or, if there is, it is screaming in my arms, pulling me into the moment. My life snaps into focus. The future is no longer mine or it is no longer only mine. It is yours now too. It is more yours than mine. It is a possession of self. I’m not shaking. I’m still. I’m not consumed with love; I’m enlivened by it. I’m silenced by it. I sit in the hospital room and hold you. The little squeak of your suckling. I can’t nurse you, and I spend minutes trying to think of a joke to whisper only to you, something about a dry bar, but then you blink and I forget what I was saying.
Reading this, I was brought right back to the moment the doctors in that ice-white operation room finally cut him out of me. I recall the moment they put him on my chest. The first cry. Bringing my own child to my breasts to finally nurture as they were made for, the way he bobbed his head from side to side, yearning for milk — but I was saddened by the fact my nipple was unable to become hard enough to grip onto. I remember joking with everyone that at this moment, I’d let out a loud MOO like a cow. And I did. I made my in-laws and all the nurses laugh.
What have I learned about identity from I’ll Tell You When I’m Home?
That it morphs — fluidly — in response to time, place, and the people around us. But this malleability doesn’t signal weakness or instability. On the contrary, biology teaches us that the strongest species are not the most rigid, but the most adaptable. I believe the same applies to people. Those who endure are not necessarily those with fixed identities, but those who can intuitively reshape themselves in harmony with their environment.
Clearly, Hala has mastered this art, and not only that, but she can add to the long list of mastered thematic styles — poetry, prose, and memoir. Therefore, I absolutely recommend reading this memoir. It is not just a book; it’s a map for those of us navigating inherited rupture and learning how to mother in the aftermath. It reminds us that home is not a fixed place, but a practice. Ultimately, identity, like memory, is not about holding steady — but knowing when to let go, and allowing change to do what it does best: transform.
After all, to mother is to become a shelter — one shaped by wind, time, and tenderness. And in offering that shelter, we don’t just learn who we are — we become a haven where others, too, may unfold.
