The Woman Before the Thread

Yesterday, when I sat down for the first official day of The Thobe Project, I thought I would be thinking about fabric.

Pattern. Thread. Colour. Technique. All the visible things that make a thobe what it is.

Instead, I thought about a room in Kuwait.

Not even a room in our own home, which surprised me at first. When I reach back into my earliest memories of Kuwait, the place that returns to me most clearly is the room right at the entrance of my Teta’s home - their family room.

I can still see it.

You would open the door, and the couch was right there. My grandparents would be sitting there, often with my amto, my father’s youngest sister. There was no dramatic scene. No great story being told. No moment that would have announced itself as important at the time.

Just the ordinary intimacy of entering a home where you were already loved before you had to ask for anything.

My Teta always wore a sheer white scarf wrapped softly around her head. It was not a harsh or tightly constructed hijab. It was airy, barely tucked, almost floating — but her hair was never visible. I do not think I ever saw my grandmother without her head covering.

She wore floral house dresses. She had prayer beads. She was a devout Muslim, praying five times a day, her beads moving through her fingers in the spaces between prayer and ordinary life.

And then there were her hands.

I remember the tattoo on her hand vividly. Blue ink, faded by time. As a child, I did not understand what it was. I did not know to see it as a tribal marking, as something connected to land, belonging, indigeneity, womanhood, Palestine. I only knew that it was part of her. Part of the beauty of her.

Everything about her was beautiful to me because she was love.

When I greeted her, she would bless me. Her words would fall over my head like protection — prayers for God to keep me safe, to take care of me, to guard me. I do not remember her as overly expressive in the way some grandmothers are. She was calm. Traditional. Quiet. But her love did not need performance.

It was there.

Steady.

Unconditional.

I remember the feeling of walking into that room.

Joy.

Warmth.

Safety.

The kind of love a child does not analyze while receiving it, but recognizes immediately. The kind of love that enters the body before it becomes language.

I remember sitting on the floor in that front room, picking mulukhiyeh leaves.

The mulukhiyeh would come once a year, and my father would bring it — I believe from Jordan, or perhaps from Palestine. What I remember most is not exactly where it came from, but the excitement that came with it. The sense that something special had arrived.

The women of the family would gather to clean it. Leaves would be separated from stems. Piles would slowly grow. Hands would move. Voices would fill the room. Everyone was happy, almost jubilant, because this was not just preparation for a meal.

This was an event.

It meant the family would feast.

My uncles, cousins, everyone.

And we would eat it the Palestinian way, as a soup, which I would only later understand was different from the way my Lebanese husband’s family often prepared it as leaves. At the time, I did not think about difference or tradition in that way. I only knew that we were proud of it. Happy to help. Happy to belong to whatever was happening in that room.

Now, I look back and see that picking mulukhiyeh was one of my first lessons in inheritance.

No one called it that.

No one sat me down and said, this is how women preserve family, this is how food carries place, this is how children learn who they are.

But that is what was happening.

Leaf by leaf, I was being folded into a rhythm that existed long before me.

Years after my grandmother passed, I learned something I had not known as a child: when my mother had to return to her teaching job only six weeks after giving birth to me, my Teta looked after me as a baby.

Suddenly, something in me made sense.

The attachment I felt to her had always been deeper than what our conversations could explain. I had always thought I belonged so strongly to my father’s side because I was close to him. But when I learned that my Teta had cared for me in those first weeks, months of my life, I understood something differently.

My body had known her before my memory did.

Maybe I had not just loved her as a grandmother. Maybe, in some hidden part of me, I had loved her as a second mother.

Even now, I can still cry over losing her. The strength of that grief surprises me sometimes. It comes from a place younger than language. A place that remembers being held. After she passed, she left me one of her gold bracelets. One of her heaviest pieces. I still hold that bracelet with so much emotion.

It is not only gold to me. It is her wrist. Her hand. Her blessing over my head. Her beads. Her blue tattoo.

Her quiet love, made into something I can still touch.

And later still, I would learn another part of her story. My grandmother was a Nakba survivor.

I did not know that as a child. I did not know the full weight of what she had lived through. I did not know that the calm woman sitting on that couch, the woman whose presence felt so soft and constant to me, had once been a young mother forced out of her village of Rantis.

I did not know that she had been pregnant with my father while already caring for four other children.

I did not know how many times displacement had entered her life.

I did not know what it must have meant to be uprooted and still be expected to mother, to feed, to hold, to continue, to begin again.

I learned those details later, in high school.

I had a wonderful history teacher. During our studies of the Holocaust, she understood that I was Palestinian, and she tasked me with interviewing my grandmother for a project so I could document our family story.

At the time, I did the assignment.

I sat with my Teta. I listened. I wrote.

But I do not think I understood the importance of what my teacher had given me.

Looking back now, I think she was an angel in my life. She gave me the gift of sitting with my grandmother while she was still alive and asking her questions I may never have known to ask on my own.

She gave me the gift of a doorway.

I only wish I had known then how sacred that doorway was.

By high school, my political awareness had already begun to form. Not with the language I have now, and not with the full understanding of adulthood, but enough to know that Palestine was not only a place we came from. It was also a wound. A struggle. A history that had shaped the adults around me long before I knew how to ask them about it.

But in Kuwait, as a child, that is not how Palestine first arrived to me.

It did not arrive first as politics.

It did not arrive first as grief.

It did not arrive first as something I had to explain, defend, or prove.

It arrived as fact.

It was simply true.

We were Palestinian. My grandparents were Palestinian. My father was Palestinian. Our food, our Arabic, our family names, our gatherings — all of it carried that truth without needing to announce it.

Palestine was not separate from life.

It was inside life.

Maybe that is why the room at my Teta’s entrance comes back to me so clearly. Maybe it was not just a room I visited. Maybe it was one of the first places where I was held by a history I did not yet know.

As an adult, I think often about my Teta’s calm.

When I was young, I understood it only as personality. She was quiet. She was traditional. She was composed. She did not say too much.

Now I wonder if her calm was also survival. Not weakness. Not passivity. Not the absence of feeling.

But the kind of calm some women build after life has required too much of them. The kind of calm that allows a family to keep eating, keep gathering, keep laughing, keep raising children, keep picking mulukhiyeh leaves, even after being uprooted from the place that was supposed to hold them.

When I think of her now, I do not only see a quiet grandmother.

I see a hero.

A survivor.

A strong, badass woman.

A woman who carried Rantis in her body, who carried children through displacement, who carried faith through loss, who carried love without needing to make it loud.

And that is the part that undoes me.

As a child, I did not know I was sitting beside a woman who had carried Palestine through catastrophe.

I only knew that I loved her. I only knew that walking into her home felt like walking into safety. There is mercy in that, I think. Children do not always inherit the full story at once. Sometimes they inherit the feeling first. The warmth. The food. The couch by the door. The grandmother whose love does not need many words.

The story comes later.

And sometimes, it comes too late for all the questions you wish you had asked.

I wish I had asked her about the tattoo on her hand.

When did she get it?

Was it before marriage?

After?

Did it mark beauty, belonging, family, protection, tradition?

Did she think of it as something ordinary?

Did she know that one day her granddaughter would look back and see it as a sign of something deeper — a woman marked by land, by memory, by Palestine?

I wish I had asked her more about Rantis. What she missed. What she remembered. What she chose not to say. I wish I had understood, while she was alive, that her quiet was not emptiness.

It was a library.

But adolescence does not always know how to cherish what childhood received so freely. Later, when family divisions grew, I did not always know how to stay close to the people I loved. The distance between sides of a family can quietly reshape a child’s access to love. I think about that now with sadness.

I wish I had known earlier how much she had been to me.

I wish I had shown her more affection. I wish I had understood that losing her would feel, in some hidden part of me, like losing a second mother.

Maybe this is why The Thobe Project feels so emotional.

Because it is not only teaching me to stitch. It is teaching me to return. To women. To rooms. To questions. To stories I received in fragments. To the inheritance I felt long before I understood it.

Yesterday, beginning this thobe, I think that is the memory that came back because this project is asking me to pay attention to what I inherited before I had language for it.

Not only the visible inheritance — embroidery, patterns, fabric, village motifs, the beautiful things we can point to and name.

But the quieter inheritance too.

The way women kept families intact after rupture. The way food became continuity. The way prayer beads moved through a grandmother’s fingers. The way a gold bracelet could become an archive. The way a faded blue tattoo could hold a question across generations. The way a room in Kuwait could still carry Rantis. Maybe that is what I am beginning to understand about the thobe.

It is not only a garment.

It is a way of returning to the women whose stories I received out of order.

First as love.

Then as memory.

Then as history.

Then, finally, as responsibility.

Yesterday was the first official day of The Thobe Project, but I did not feel as though I was starting from nothing. I felt as though I was returning to a room I had never really left. The room at my Teta’s door. Where my grandparents sat. Where my amto was near. Where mulukhiyeh leaves gathered in small piles. Where blessings were spoken over my head.

Where a blue tattoo lived on the hand of a woman I loved before I knew what she had survived.

Where Palestine lived quietly in food, family, faith, and the calm of a woman whose story I would only understand years later. Maybe this is where my first stitch begins.

Not in the fabric, but in the room where belonging first entered me gently enough that I almost mistook it for ordinary life — held by the woman who came before the thread.