Mothering the world, by Tanaïs
Written by Tanaïs
Illustrations by Hana Iqbal
You’ve appeared in my dreams only a handful of times. Usually, we’re eating breakfast by the sea. I want to say we live in Hawaii, but the water’s blue feels Mediterranean, dark and warm at once. You are small, maybe four or five, baby bangs and a dimpled smile, awaiting a piece of fruit I’m feeding you. Sometimes you are the same shade of brown as me. Other times, you’re lighter, perhaps when my subconscious acknowledges that you might look like your father. Whenever we’ve met, there’s only been bliss. I am your mother, and you are my child, but I’ve never met you at any other time, at any other age, in any other life—not as far as I know. When I awaken, I ache. With longing, but also relief—that I didn’t have to bring you into this world.
It’s been a few years since we’ve sat down for this breakfast.
Today, I’m forty-one, and yet people—most recently, my parents—still say, “It’s not too late, you know?” They can’t fathom why I would let the chance to replicate myself with my beloved Mojo pass me by. Why should our lineages die with us? To outsiders, we’re hot breeders, parents of hot mixed babies. To ourselves, we know that our life purpose is not parenting, and we fear losing what we cherish the most—our love. We’ve always felt that our time together, just the two of us, was too precious to give up.
But am I not a mother? Of my works and world, of the youth who seek me as a source of comfort and wisdom.
So, I answer with the truth, perhaps a bit dramatically. “This world stole my desire to give it more children.”
There’s nothing anyone can say to refute that, even the feeble attempts to assure me that the world has always been this bad, and it is a great tragedy that I’ll never know the joy of raising my own young. But they don’t say these things with much conviction.
Today, we’ve seen more dead children than should ever have died by violence. Everything—my writing, my relationships, my future—has been altered by witnessing this. Thousands of families wiped from humanity. Newborns smoked to ash by bombs made and paid for by this land of my birth. Their only crime: being born Palestinian. Every video echoes in a dormant maternal hollow inside me, unfulfilled by my own body, where I have wept and wailed for these loves and futures extinguished.
Each genocide is its own singular, gruesome archive. My work reckons with Bangladesh’s past, through a study of my motherland’s war for Liberation. All conversations about motherhood with my parents are haunted by the specter of surviving this horror, and the recurring dream of my unborn child might be a wish to join the people whose progeny is to keep our memories alive. I start to weep as I write that I’ve let our lineage vanish—a reaction, not a truth, but just as potent—and it spurns a new conversation with my husband, of Irish and Algerian descent, about what we’ve chosen not to do. Choosing to move against the grain, rejecting parenthood or religious indoctrination, we’ve ended the ancestral cycle of huge families, child brides, consciousness, humanity.
My husband wonders if he’s derailed my life from a path I could’ve taken.
No, no, I assure him, I never wanted to lose myself, my body, my heart, to another human being in this way. It’s not your fault. But my grief does not have an easy explanation.
Each month, moon as my guide, I pray that my sole form of birth control—old school, rhythm method—works. Call it Tantric or self-attuned, but I’m at an age where I know the ideal time of the month to fuck and avoid pregnancy. Besides, I’m still not prepared to confront an abortion. I’ve never outgrown that 18-24 young adult fear of being pregnant, even though the closest I’ve come is a possible miscarriage, which I couldn’t verify aside from a few blood clots.
At twenty, I felt the same relief I feel now, month after month. Back then, I found my body to be the greatest source of pain. I felt forsaken in it. I had been assaulted by a boyfriend, had grown accustomed to being judged when I walked into rooms. The last thing I wanted was to add to my body the sudden burden of motherhood, expected to do everything, be everything, for my children. My own mother’s sacrifices, the abiding, endless love she has for her daughters, is my standard—and the constant stress of holding it all together lives in her body. These days, I’ve come to look more mother than ever. I’ve lived a sedentary writer’s life, birthed two books in the last five years. After surviving coronavirus and losing a toddler’s worth of weight from my body, I started to eat, and eat, savoring my food like a person who’d lost their sense of taste for too long. Breasts swelled, belly thickened, hips wide and soft, heartbroken by this period of mass annihilation.
There are days when I let myself feel this sadness, that I’ll never meet the unborn child by the blue sea, not in this lifetime. I will never know the feeling of mothering a child who belongs to me, cleaved from my genes, borne through my body.
But am I not a mother? Of my works and world, of the youth who seek me as a source of comfort and wisdom. I am a mother of the world, meeting strangers and beloveds, those who’ve lost their mothers or survived them, even hated them. I never wanted to be a mother. But perhaps this is what happens when you don’t bear your own children—motherhood comes for you anyway. When you have the privilege, and the time, to mother the world with kinship that you’ve chosen, a motherhood beyond blood.
Tanaïs is the author of IN SENSORIUM, winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and BRIGHT LINES, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. Their forthcoming novel, STELLAR SMOKE, a speculative, sci-fi work about a family of Bangladeshi femmes in the near future, will be published by Dutton Books in 2025. They are the founder of Studio Tanaïs, a perfume, beauty and design studio, and live with their partner Mojo in Brooklyn, NY.
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