One of the oldest memories I have is of my Mother.
When I close my eyes, I can return to that moment. Warm morning light bleeds through the edges of the curtains in our small apartment in Regent Park, bathing her in a soft, backlit glow. She is kneeling on a prayer mat, reading the Qur’an.
That’s it. That’s the whole visual memory.
My Mother was young, still in her twenties. She had left behind everything she had ever known for somewhere new and foreign. She followed my Father to Canada with a child in hand.
I was that child.
I lived most of my life without giving this memory a second thought. It was simply something I remembered, no different from the other fragments of childhood that stay with us for reasons we do not yet know or understand.
I did not see a young woman far from home. I saw my Ammu ( আম্মু ) - my Mother.
Children forget that their parents were once young. Adults do too. To us, our parents arrive already formed. They seem certain of what to do, where to go, and what to say.
Now I am older than my Mother was in that memory.
I have finished school. I have taken on a mortgage, bought a car, gotten married, and traveled parts of the world. I have lived long enough to know for certain that she could not have been certain either.
She was in a new country, living in a small apartment with a husband she had followed and a child who depended on her for comfort and safety. She was learning the language and customs of a place that had no memory of her.
I sometimes wonder whether my Mother ever had the chance to be herself here. Or whether she moved directly from being someone’s daughter to someone’s wife, and then someone’s mother.
I wish I had asked her what she was thinking in that moment.
Was she afraid? Was she hopeful? Did she believe the life ahead of her would justify everything she had left behind?
We rarely, if ever, ask our parents these questions. When we are young, we do not know enough to ask them. By the time we understand that our parents had lives, fears, and unfinished dreams of their own, much of who they once were has already become memory.