Too Much Pepper, and a Baby by Lora Berg

Photo by Noelle Guirola on Unsplash

How do people decide on a number of children to have? 

Have:  1. possess, own, hold. 

             2. experience, undergo. 

The second definition—experience, undergo—works for me when I think of my children. The word remains suspect though, as parenting in my view is more of a continuous becoming.

We were living in Jeddah, by the Red Sea, back in 1998 where I worked as a U.S. diplomat. One evening, I looked around the table at my dear family, my husband Karim and children Abraham and Miriam. Someone was missing, but who?

My mother had three kids, I the youngest. What would our family have been like without me? What if I hadn’t ‘been’ at all? Could that have been a reason I wanted to go for three? In these days when many of us have a choice about our family size, how do we know ​what the right size ​is​​​​? How do we know when our creation is complete, ​​this essay, a painting, a poem? 

“Let’s adopt again, Karim,” I nagged, like wind whistling through a window open a sliver. I went so far as to call the orphanage in Tunis, his home country, to ask about the steps to adopt. 

“Please, Karim, go to the Tunisian Consulate and start the paperwork.” I looked at him with needy eyes. Tunisia had more transparent procedures for adoption than Morocco where we’d adopted our first daughter Miriam, overcoming many obstacles. 

“I’m sure it will be easier this time, insha’Allah,” I added, as we’d been living in the Middle East so long. Karim sighed. We’d visited the orphanage in Tunis when I lived there a decade before, and it had been a sad, neglected place. Yet I’d read that this adoption would be straightforward, since Karim had Tunisian citizenship. However, his passport had expired. With his political past as a dissident and the same repressive regime in place, he didn’t want to risk going to the Consulate, or back to Tunisia. However, he picked up on my longing, and always liked children—so he went.

When Karim appeared at the Consulate, he was told, “Shave your beard, and then we will renew your passport.” The consul did not even recognize the madness of his own request, as humiliation in that bureaucracy was the norm. In Saudi at the time, it could be preferable for a man to be bearded. In Tunisia, men were supposed to be shaven—to prove they weren’t part of the opposition. But really, Karim looked most handsome with a beard. 

He shaved it off for the first time since his teens, for our child-to-be, and me. How vulnerable he seemed, a shorn ram, sacrificial. Beard or no beard, veil or no veil, how can governments keep fooling themselves that dress codes control how a person thinks? Still, no passport arrived. Each week, the consul told Karim that he didn’t have any blank passports to fill out, but some would come next week, insha’Allah. After several weeks, I decided to show up at the Consulate as well and misuse my diplomatic status for a personal cause. 

“Oh no,” said Karim. He could already hear the dishes breaking.

“This looks to me like the same old, same old from your government, a human rights violation!” I ranted at high pitch, throwing my determined if puny weight around as I’d started to do since arriving in Saudi where daily, my frustration seethed below an otherwise tranquil surface. While I made good friends in Saudi, the constant gender constraints there​ wore me down.

The consul grinned tightly and started pulling his desk drawers in and out. Lo, he “found” a blank passport for Karim—anything to remove me from his presence faster. In the coming days, our adoption papers moved smoothly through Tunisia’s National Institute for the Protection of Children and in four weeks, I was on a plane to Tunis. In fact, this happened so fast that I wondered with a start if I was really ready to mother a third child.

Mash’Allah (God bless you), people would say in the Arab world when they learned we were raising adoptive children, from taxi drivers to government officials. Islam encourages generosity toward orphans. This was preferable to the “adopt me instead” which I also heard, followed by a laugh, from some young people when we were adopting. Due to a lack of opportunities, people often longed for a ticket to the West in whatever form it might take.

There are several Quranic verses about orphans, such as Surah Al-Baqarah Ayat 215, “Whatever you spend of good is [to be] for parents and relatives and orphans and the needy and the traveler. And whatever you do of good – indeed, Allah is Knowing of it.” Orphans are to be treated with compassion and provided with financial support. People during our time in the region gave charity for orphanages regularly. Under Islamic law, couples could take guardianship of children in most Arab countries, but not give their last names or fully integrate the child into the family as an heir. This system is called guardianship and is said to preserve lineage and identity as well as to safeguard inheritance.

Tunisia however legalized adoption under Law 27 of March 4, 1958, and this remarkable law went further in that it provided for not just orphans but also children who were neglected or of unknown parentage. Still across the region, there was this deep-seated mistrust of children from outside the bloodline, and a particular neglect of children born out of wedlock who lived in institutions. Such children in the popular imagination were viewed as haram, forbidden, somehow lacking a family tree. In Morocco, children of this status were sometimes taken in, to be put to work in the household. 

Karim’s parents in Tunis took in two boys at different times, one from an early age who had been living on the street and joined the family for ten years, and another who came as a troubled pre-teen and lived with the family for six years. Karim doesn’t recollect any paperwork being done. The boys resided at the house, ate with the family, attended public school, and did not take the family name. They moved on when they reached the age of majority, having been spared childhoods in institutions or on the street.

The opaqueness of adoption in the region entered my thoughts as I flew to Tunis, hoping all would go smoothly. On landing, I took a taxi straight to the Manouba orphanage—much improved since I had visited years before and been troubled by neglectful conditions. 

“God bless you,” said the taxi driver, of course, “for taking care of the orphans.” The orphanage as I entered did not look at all as I remembered​,​ back in the day, a sad and half-lit place. The large room at the entry was clean and sunny. The first baby I saw had auburn hair. She presided in a bouncer in the middle of that sunlit room and laughed, waving her hands excitedly.    

A young attendant smiled. “Take Moulka,” she said, pointing at that baby. “Moulka” means the powerful one, not the milky one as it sounds to an English speaker, and when that pretty baby started to scream, I noted her powerful lungs.

Why look further? I thought. Why not Moulka, the first baby I see? Maybe it is written, fated, mektoob. Why break my heart seeing other babies, and feel the guilt of choosing? I peered into the distance toward a second room. The smell of clean laundry and baby formula filled the air, along with wails and gurgles. 

I smiled tentatively back at the attendant and said, “Yes, I’ll take Moulka.” 

I moved about in a daze, entered the efficient director’s office and filled out some papers. The whole process took about half an hour, after which the director said, “You can take the baby now. In five days, you need to appear at the adoption court, with your husband.”  

“Take the baby now?”  

“Yes. Everything is ready.” 

“At the court? With my husband?”  

“Of course. With your husband.” 

“I see, I see,” I murmured. 

Karim had stayed in Jeddah. As much as he loved his parents, he didn’t want to set foot in Tunisia, fearing the government and related, buried memories. I hadn’t expected to be offered a baby on my arrival and had no supplies. I’d made a reservation at a nearby hotel. How would I do the paperwork I needed to do for the court, alone in a hotel room with an infant to care for at the same time?  

Callous as it may sound, I hadn’t told my mother-in-law Mima that I was in the country, not wanting to navigate the cultural gap, extended family pressures, and the adoption all at once. Mima had been surprised by our first adoption and was slowly coming around. Or maybe I had misunderstood, and she felt no reluctance. In any case, on that day as I took the baby in my arms, I realized that I was not as independent as I’d thought. I needed Mima’s help to get through the next several days without losing my nerve. Contrite, I asked to use the phone at the orphanage, and called Mima.  

“My dear!” she exclaimed, and in her graceful way, instead of acting hurt that I had suddenly appeared, took a taxi straight over to meet me at the orphanage. She arrived looking ever lovely and concerned with her amber eyes, and a tidy headscarf covering highlighted hair. She wore a kaftan and was bundled in an overcoat.

The minute “Moulka” saw her, she started to kick, wave her hands and smile. Mima’s eyes filled with tears. “Binti, my daughter!” she cried and rushed over to coo at the baby. “Mash’Allah Subhan’Allah. God be praised!” 

Of course, I wouldn’t be staying at a hotel, so I made a quick call to cancel, and we set out to my in-laws’ apartment in the neighborhood of Ben Arous. At the Chaibis, the fair baby whom we would name in full, Giselle Starry Chaibi, sailed from the arms of one adult to another, seemingly never to be left on a bed or alone. 

In Arabic, Giselle translates as Ghizlan (the plural of gazelle), the GH pronounced with a soft French style R, an ancient feminine name often heard in Islamic poetry. Karim’s younger twin brothers carried Giselle around in their arms night after night as she bellowed. For simplicity’s sake, Mima started to call the baby Zuzu. Maybe that Zuzu, Zuzu, slumbering sound would help her rest? But our dramatic Zuzu would take years to gain the gift of easy sleep. 

Summoned back to Tunis to appear at the court, Karim became ill almost from the moment he landed. We went to our first meeting at the whitewashed high court building with its columned arches, to be followed by a final one the week after. An unsmiling woman judge had us sit, and asked Karim such questions as: 

– Are you Muslim? (I’m Jewish, though I’ve said I was Muslim on rare occasions when I saw a need. But thankfully that day, Karim was doing the answering.) 

 – Do you have the means to care for the child?  

 – Are you legally married?  

 – How is your health? 

 – Why do you want to adopt?  

I proved to be an accessory, not needing to speak, and simply nodded often. We were told to return in a week. 

Then in front of the courthouse, we ate at a grill-style restaurant. For nostalgia’s sake Karim ordered lablabi, chickpea stew poured on old bread. The lablabi arrived so full of peppers, his eyes stung before the spoon could touch his lips. “Subhan’Allah, God’s Glory, it’s good,” he said, and ordered more. 

Could I learn to cook this, I thought, to give him extra happiness? But that was just a flash, as I didn’t take much interest in cooking. Later in life, he would turn out to be the one ​of​ our couple to master Tunisian recipes and make us feasts. 

Ever one for a flourish, he went on, “The sea I missed is here, in this spoon, and I’m eating the waves, and the shore, and the sun. Did I ever tell you how much I love my mom’s lablabi?” 

Flashing a smile of bravado, he added even more gobs of hot pepper paste, harissa, from a bowl in the middle of the table.  

Then he moaned, pressing his tummy, and on arriving back at his mother’s, retched. He succumbed to such dyspepsia that he could barely walk for the rest of the visit, but lay flat in bed, six days, intestines riven. 

Day seven—I kissed him, and he awoke—better, to hold our new daughter. 

I had hammered away at adoption tasks, and let Karim lean on me as he hobbled into our final courthouse meeting, where seated before the same very serious woman judge, he answered final questions weakly, briefly, that we had already answered at various stages of the process. All of this was pro forma. The Tunisian father was the key to a Tunisian adoption. With the father ​in place, our process proved easy, and the judge granted us our baby. 

A few days later, Giselle had not only a birth certificate with our names as her parents, but also a Tunisian passport inscribed with the name Ghizlan Chaibi. Karim hobbled onto the plane with us back to Jeddah after tearful farewells, and within moments of landing in the Kingdom, experienced a miraculous cure. 

Looking back, despite the fact that we were living in Saudi’s hot desert climate, or maybe precisely because of that—it seems to me that Zuzu came to us like a season’s first lovely snow, wafting and landing so light, so cool, I could scarcely believe she was in my arms. Kissing her on the forehead, I’d remember my mother’s goodnight kisses in upstate New York. 

Once we were home and settled back in, Abraham and Miriam took their time holding and inspecting our new baby. In the evening, I would look around the table at all gathered: Karim, Abraham, Miriam​,​ and Giselle. I’d pass the bowl of Tunisian harissa to Karim, hoping he wouldn’t add too much to his meal—and no longer feel that anyone was missing.  

Still there were nights when my baby could overwhelm me. What is this round rosy arm, I would wonder, flailing up from the billowing white quilt on the bed, as if from the sea, or a grave? Her journey to sleep would be the drama of the evening, binding me to this daughter who didn’t have an easy beginning. But at last, she would settle in. 

Outside, I’d see sparrows dancing in Jeddah’s warm winter branches, nibbling at the nubs on the twigs. And I’d think to myself, once, I was like them, dancing in the weather, chatting and singing, hungry and free… No one needed me. Now, for my children, I’ve become the tree. 

Lora wrote “The Mermaid Wakes” (Macmillan Caribbean). Her poems appear in journals such as Shenandoah, Colorado Review, etc. She served as Poet-in-Residence at Saint Albans School and holds a Johns Hopkins MFA. Lora served at U.S. embassies abroad as Cultural Attaché. She is a grandma in a vibrant, multicultural family.