Mother's Day in Morocco
On witnessing and learning from other mothers
This past weekend, I went with six moms and ten children to Morocco.
We were: a Siberian (yes, she grew up in Siberia!) mother of three who now lives in California with her Chinese husband, whom she met in an ESL class (the American story); a Japanese-Cuban mother from LA; a Canadian mom – recently retired from the navy – and her daughter; a British mom and her two kids; and a fellow Midwesterner, an Iowa farm girl turned traveler. The kids were a wild bunch ranging from 2 to 14.
The vibe landing in Tangier was much like that crossing into Tijuana from San Diego – though the surrounding geography is essentially the same, you are instantly and completely in another world. Tidy, sleepy streets and overpriced cafes whirl into a labyrinth of cars, people, street vendors, fierce sun, packed shops full of bright oddities, taxi drivers hustling for a buck, and the lurkers, migrants, and lost souls found everywhere on the world’s charged borders.
Our first task was to walk from the ferry terminal to the hotel – my idea, obviously, because it would save us approximately $7. This involved immediately crossing a massive roundabout and three major boulevards. I shouted “GO!” hanging onto a kid with each arm, and we all charged ahead until I shouted “STOP!”, and we all hovered on the precipice of the careening turquoise taxis until I shouted “GO!”, until finally we washed up heaving beneath the ancient brick walls of a fortress.
Later, the British mom would tell me that her daughter – who’d wanted to walk up front and whose hand I’d clutched throughout the crossing – started calling me her “adventure friend.” "As in, “Where’s my adventure friend, mummy?” I could not love this any harder.
Then we wound our way up, up, up through the medina, past the tea shops where men hunched in their chairs and sipped their thé de menthe; past the cats, the endless cats, calico and white, spindly and tabby, sleeping and sauntering and dashing into shadowy doorways; past the fake Birkenstock and the fake Rolex and the fake Hermes shops; the carpet shops; the postcard and knickknack shops; the countless perfumeries with colored heaps of musk in tubs; past the roundabouts with fountains; past the 1930s French cinemas, to the hotel.
And so it began, a weekend of intense travel. On Friday night, dinner elbow to elbow at a restaurant in the street, meat skewers and mango juices, elder bohemian Frenchies smoking as they ate their olives and judged the living daylights out of us.
On Saturday a trip two-and-a-half hours through the Rif mountains to the blue city of Chefchaouen, a tourist trap but also a real place where people live in tiny apartments tucked into the mountainsides, where women in traditional wool head scarves wash clothes in basins before fields of poppies.
Elena and I wandered the labyrinthine medina searching for a cafe recommended by a friend, and at one point we came across an impossibly well-dressed man who looked as if he’d emerged from a turn-of-the-century French film: pointed shoes, little pantaloon tweed pants, mustard-colored sweater over collared shirt, tweed vest, newsboy cap, perfectly crisp mustache. I asked him for directions in French, and he responded with a gentleman’s manners, making elegant gestures with manicured hands, bowing slightly before and after he spoke.
“He was like a guy out of a fairytale,” Elena exclaimed, and we made up a story about how he’d emerged from an apartment full of velvety fabrics and books and teacups and old watches and now he would go do fanciful things in the city, like dance or write fortunes.
We finally found the cafe and ate lunch – more smoking Frenchies! – and then hiked up a mountainside where hordes of schoolchildren jostled and raced and local tourists photographed themselves in traditional Moroccan dress and boys sold orange juice in front of beautiful, desolate mountains: “Jus d’orange?”
At the top was a mosque and a view. Elena criticized the city for not being entirely blue and we had a lively debate about what it meant to cover one’s hair; Elena had much stronger opinions about it than I’d expected, and I had to let the battle go for now, hoping some aspect of cultural difference sunk in.
Then we got lost in the souk on the way back and were almost late to the bus and straggled in just in time so hot and dehydrated and tired, and we drove 2 hours back to Tangier that turned into 3 hours because of traffic, and our bus navigated literally down the middle of the highway lanes in a mildly stressful violation of all fundamental rules of the road, and we straggled out at twilight hungry and disoriented before trekking up and down hills to an Italian restaurant where I drank an illicit Aperol Spritz, a rare alcoholic treat in Morocco.
The next morning, I had a rigid plan to walk around the medina in Tangier, but it was foiled by desperate kid begging to play in the pool, which turned into hours. When Elena and I finally left it was midday, and we immediately got lost in the medina, turning corner after hidden corner, coming across kids playing soccer, and pocket-sized shops full of dangly gold lamps, and racing motorbikes, and cats and kittens, and hanging laundry, and an insane market of herbs and spices and fish and rabbits with their fur still on hanging from hooks, and men squatting on stools drinking tea, and pink geraniums in the slanted sun.
When we finally emerged it was already time to race back to the hotel for our luggage, which we dragged down through the twisting streets to the ferry terminal, where we waited for customs and waited to board and waited to depart and waited again for customs, then climbed on our bus through the windmills and haciendas and olives, then emerged under a big, bright moon.
I had no food in the house where we’re staying, so I went next door to another mother’s, and we drank wine and cooked the 3 euro Spanish omelettes from the convenience store and talked about the weekend.
My neighbor told me, “I have so much to learn from the other mothers here.” She didn’t mean languages, or business skills, or how to get from one country to another. She meant being. She meant the subtle things, like not caring if an arrogant Frenchie huffs at your kid while they dangle like a sloth from the ferry railing, or the way you handle yourself in traffic or chaos or fatigue, or how you say no simply and elegantly so you can sit in the corner by yourself for fifteen minutes.
I haven’t traveled that intensely for a long time. I forgot – purposefully, intentionally – the feeling of that chaos, of grasping for control and not getting it, and also that sensation of wild discovery, unmoored and revelatory: rounding a corner and the boy with the angelic golden face perched on the bicycle cart asking, “Just d’orange?”
Such travel exists outside of time, as do the relationships between mothers. They aren’t about sitting down to have a coffee or a glass of wine, though there’s that, too. They’re about being in the thick of it, together. They’re about being someone’s adventure friend. Watching someone else’s kid in the pool. Seeing how a mother crouches down and speaks softly, or cradles the back of a crying child’s head in her palm, or does not panic when one might panic. Seeing how women exist in the world – how smart we are, how fearless, how loving, how bold and brave and just damn capable. How much we have to learn from each other, just by being together. How graceful and silly, how strong and solid, even as all of us are carrying our own deep wounds. How simply being in each other’s presence can offer the deepest kind of healing.
I think of what the British mother said when the two older girls, Elena and her twelve-year-old friend, were watching the younger kids in the pool: “Those girls are just cream, aren’t they?”
But it’s us – we’re the cream. The ones who made this happen, got our kids on the ferry, figured out we missed the passport stamp and had to return, waited eight million hours for each other’s kids to use the bathroom, wound together through the tiny streets, sang together on the bus.
And not just the ones who went on this whirlwind trip to Morocco – the ones every day figuring it out, over and over, the tears and the heartbreaks and the sandwiches and the friendships and the questions and the scrapes and the relentless needs. This trip, all mothers, only mothers, mothering and traveling full time, made it so clear to me: we are the cream. There is a reason the world so often seems to conspire to keep us isolated, apart, anxious: because when we come together our power is undeniable, so absolutely creative.
The best mother’s day gift: this holding of other women. This grace in being together, the beauty and messiness and perpetual revelation of witnessing. We have so much to learn from each other, and the best lessons come without control: not the strict order of a playdate or a dinner party, but shared, overlapping lives, adventures, conversations, showing up at the sliding door with half a bottle of wine and the 1 euro convenience store pasta sauce, “And have you seen the moon?”
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Omg who are you and can we be friends?!!!
Such a beautiful piece, I was there with you all