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In the beginning there was a sea of endless blue in my mother's eyes, and I drowned in it. When she would shut her eyes hoping for an afternoon nap, I would gently pull her eyelashes and separate her lids so that the blue would reappear, and I could continue to be. On rainy days she would suggest that we leave our umbrellas at home and take a walk between the drops, so we wouldn't get wet. She was a magician and I believed everything she said. The biggest gift a parent can give her child is the permission to go. She never did and when she developed an illness that impaired her cognition, I felt I didn't have the right to go on with the act of living without her. This is how I landed in analysis and embarked on the long struggle of differentiating.
I often wondered about what prevented my mother from allowing me to fly the nest. Probably her mothering was influenced by the loss of her own mother at the age of two, along with the experience years later of being told by a stranger that the woman she called mom was actually her stepmom. It wasn't just a case of her becoming the mother she thought she needed to be for me. It was more about what she lacked and about what I needed to be for her.
The seven years it took to make my documentary Afterward allowed me the opportunity to radically listen to those I was raised to regard as an other - the Germans and the Palestinians. In my encounters, I experienced being in the role of both victim and victimizer and was forced to face my own implication in the Occupation, even after living for 40 years in the diaspora. However, it was the reactions to my film in the last four years, since its completion, that made me think of my mother's experience and its impact on me through a different lens.
When I discuss the reactions to my documentary, I don't focus on the people who liked the film or those who didn't. I focus instead on a distinct group of people who would ordinarily be drawn to the topic of the documentary but who refused to