A mother's tragedy

A true story from the files of the family meeting point. Lawyer Younis Al-Tahrawi. "On the basis of the suit, the request and the mutual consent, I, the sharia judge, have ruled that the plaintiff be enabled to see her four children every Thursday at the premises of the family meeting point at the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution." With this preamble the judge and others believe that they have ended the tragedy of a mother who has six children, the eldest "H." and the youngest "D.", with the others' ages falling between the eldest and the youngest. What they have in common is that she was deprived of them all, and worse than that, she was unable to enforce the ruling issued in January. Every Sunday she sets off to settle at the Centre, waiting and waiting, moving from the sitting room to the window, but to no avail. Yet she kept coming without weariness or despair, sometimes accompanied by her mother and at other times by her father, who are all she has of her family. After continuous efforts, the father relented, the father who had forgotten the bond of marriage in the midst of disputes that had lasted twenty years, a marriage that still stands but in which human values are not mentioned and in which there is no morality in a love whose dust has reached the children they brought into this dark fate. The problem is that even his compliance and the enforcement came by way of procrastination and partial implementation: each time he would bring one of the children, claiming the others were at school. So his justifications were cornered and refuted and a day and hour suited to all the parties was set, and indeed, after many calls and the intervention of the enforcement body, the first meeting took place. The children came with the greatest difficulty, as though they were being driven to death before their eyes. The surprise was that the children refused to sit with their mother and received her as though she were not their mother, and refused even to shake her hand or to allow her to take them in her arms after this long absence, amid her tears, which poured down along with her justifications, which sadly were of no use. And with the strokes of the clock, whose smaller hand settled on four while the larger approached twelve, the father refused to allow even one minute beyond. It was the end of a bad day for this mother, who had expected that she had at least won in forcing him to bring them, but her defeat was in the refusal of the children of her heart to return the feelings of motherhood she had pictured throughout the period of her forced separation from them, while the father practised every kind of incitement, which generated harshness in feelings and emotions.