Mothers in the time of clowns

Planet Earth 2025,  I wake up under a blue sky to a view of roses and thyme on my patio. Roses that my grandmother taught me how to prune and thyme because our blood runs green from foraging this flower bud that we crave so much and that somehow defines our identity as semite mediterraneans, breathing zaatar wherever we go.

I stroll in my very peaceful neighborhood with my daughters looking at squirrels but nothing inside of me feels peaceful at all.

Today I am every mother in Palestine, a land and people not different at all from my land and my people but we were taught to feel that it was a piece of land on the edge of the world far away from us and from our ancestors.

I’ve seen so much horrors these past two years enough to pierce through my soul leaving me with a moral injury and a general feeling of disgust about every political and economical system there is.

Clowns, I see clowns everywhere, making speeches, shaking hands, signing weapon deals and lecturing the world on the right of self defense.

I see mothers getting pregnant and giving birth, breastfeeding and caring for generations of children and men in silence and in the shadow, bleeding in their bodies and bleeding in their souls, still waking up every day to a world run by clowns.

I see mothers giving birth to newborns only to see them starve and stare at us giving up on this life slowly and even after they die I could still see them staring at this empty and deceiving world. They knew better than to stay alive in a world.run by clowns.

I see mothers burn or see their children burn as palaces get full with summits and meetings and rape creeps running the world.

Mothers are malnourished and sleep deprived but they are expected to hold their bleeding body together and to generate energy for breastfeeding and cooking and cleaning and caring for the world.

Where are the feminists when we need them? Oppression is not just a bearded guy asking her to cover up it is most primarily a clown in a suit making her look up at the sky and smile at bombs coming to get her and her family, clowns handing her flour at gunpoint, making her prove she is weak enough to deserve getting baby formula.

Clowns rule and our world has become a circus in which we are reduced to an audience protesting mediocre numbers where we are locked up and made to watch.