Eid Mubarak

Farewell to Ramadan writing for another (lunar) year.

No more breakfasts with my husband every morning. I'm going to miss that, but not enough to continue getting up at 4 to make them.

This is the first year I haven't gotten sick while fasting.

And this year, for the first time, I'm going to go to Welcome Back Monarchs Day at Natural Bridges, and eat the pumpkin ice cream. I've been waiting three years for Ramadan to pass this celebration by.

None of these things are particularly profound. There is, however, a quiet feeling of accomplishment, and strength, and maybe a serenity that doesn't lend itself easily to words.

Whine

So my face is all wrinkly and frowny-looking, my pants are falling off my hips and my bras don't fit right. But that roll of fat around my abdomen? Still present and accounted for. Cellulite on my thighs? Yessiree, Bob, right where it always was. I wish I could say I see some physical benefits to fasting, but I don't. I really like the way changing your habits throws a spotlight on the many little things you do without even thinking about it (a bite of food while cooking, the coffee or tea pick-me-up that causes more energy fluctuations than are really worth it). I also like the feeling of accomplishment that comes from choosing a hard task and sticking to it. Furthermore, as someone who really can eat all she wants (just not always exactly when I want it, for now, anyway) it's really interesting to see how sustaining non-food experiences can be. Man does not live by bread alone, indeed.

But I can't say I think it's doing my body any good.

Thursday, Friday.

The hardest moment

of Ramadan came tonight, when it was all I could do to keep my hands off the cookies I was baking, right before, but not quite at, time to break my fast. I kept on having kind of hallucinatory intervals of thinking that the fast was over, and then remembering just in time that it wasn't. When it was time to eat, I came very near to making an entire meal of fresh-baked cookies. As it was, I probably ate more than I should have.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday .....

Ramadan

1st Ramadan

I love this picture of the first day of Ramadan. It is an amazing picture, because the moon was actually below the horizon at night and too faint to see after the sun rose. (This picture was take from an airplane.) The Islamic calendar is a lunar one, so each month begins with the new moon. If you're interested, you can read more about it here.

Ramadan, although venerated by Muslims, is basically one month of 12 in the Islamic calendar. A month that is now almost over. Less than a week is left, and now each day I am saying to myself that it is the last of these weekdays that I will fast. And oddly, fasting is getting hard again, to the point where one day I woke up last week thinking that I could not possibly do it any longer. Although, of course, I could and did.

This is the last Sunday I will fast this year. A week from today I will be eating pizza and birthday cake. Yeah!

Isn't it ironic

that the reason I feel each day of fasting is getting easier to get through is that I see the end of Ramadan coming closer and closer? So theoretically by the time we finish I will be thinking, "Oh, this is nothing!" and at the same time "Thank God this is over and done with!"

Today is the 20th day, so tonight, I can start counting down the 10 days left. This is a good thing.

The second week finished

So now we're going into the third week of Ramadan. I've been thinking a lot lately about how different life is for me when I'm fasting. As much as I try to be normal, I spend a fair amount of energy trying to get through the day. Sometimes I throw in the towel altogether and just hunker down and wait for sunset. Consequently, I have less energy for things like returning phone calls, getting together with people, etc. At the end of the month, I find I have let a lot of opportunities slip by. When Ramadan ends, it's like being Rip Van Winkle, waking up to a world that was different than the one I fell asleep in. I've lost touch with people, Ziad and Maya have fallen behind in their work, their musical progress has stalled. I hope this is happening less this year than in others. It helps a lot that the children are less childlike. Now that they are older they are more capable of working independently. Rather than needing my support, they have been supporting me. Maybe that's why, even though we fast longer days each year, fasting itself has become more a fact of life and less of an enormous struggle. Still challenging, though.

And, much as I focus on getting through each day, I am focusing on getting through the month. Two out of four weeks done! Fourteen out of thirty days. I look out the window and see a beautiful full moon.

(Note: The calligraphy above says Ramadan mubarak, or congratulations on Ramadan (roughly). I love arabic calligraphy, and have since I was very young. It's graceful lines have always seemed to me to be the height of elegance.)

The first week

This morning, the second week of Ramadan begins. The first week is always such a huge milestone for me. I look in the sky and I can see the moon half-full, and I know that we've taken a good first step in our month of fasting.

What's interesting to me is that every year feels so different. I can still remember two years ago, how shell-shocked I felt on the first day. Maya and Ziad had their first day in a new program that was just starting up, and I felt somehow like I was looking at the world from the bottom of a deep hole. This year, on the first day, Ziad had his first day back in his Nature Awareness program, and Maya and I went to a conference with our consultant from their charter school, and I was chatting with her and talking a blue streak. It was really a good day, although I was tired when we got home.

Which brings me to the overwhelming sensation of this first week: fatigue. I'm hungry sometimes, and thirsty a lot, but that doesn't seem to bother me too much. Sometimes I get so tired, so fast, that I imagine this must be what narcolepsy feels like. I go from feeling fine and energetic to having no energy at all, in a very short time. Which is pretty scary if I happen to be driving. On the way home from San Francisco last Saturday, I had to pull over and close my eyes for a few minutes, even though I wasn't particularly tired when we first got in the car. On the plus side, I haven't gotten sick.

Every week is different. This last week we went to Santa Cruz on Thursday, San Francisco on Saturday, Santa Rosa on Monday. We had a birthday party on Sunday, guitar on Tuesday, piano and scouts on Wednesday. We'll have OT on Friday, and maybe a play date (or perhaps a book group meeting). Well, it's no wonder I need to rest sometimes. I just hope the next three weeks aren't any busier than this one.

Ramadan mubarak

Today is the first day of Ramadan.

I got up early to make breakfast for my husband, the kind we used to eat with his family on weekends before we had kids and everyone's schedules got so wildly divergent. We had:

Foul (pronounced fool)-- this is a kind of bean salad, made with fava beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic, parsley, lemon juice and olive oil.

Za'atar -- this is an herb mix that you eat by dipping a piece of bread into olive oil, and then into the za'atar.

Cucumbers and olives

Feta cheese

Lebni -- some people call this Greek yogurt. It is yogurt that has the whey strained out so that it is very thick and creamy. The most common way of serving it is with olive oil poured over it, and crushed dried mint sprinkled over that. It has a beautiful refreshing taste.

Halaweh -- or halvah. This is a paste of ground sesame seeds sweetened (a lot) with sugar. The kind we like also has pistachios.

Cherry preserves

French bread and butter -- it may seem odd not to eat all this food with pita bread, but Nabil likes baguettes better.

We needed to finish eating by 5:37, but Nabil actually had to go back to work for something he had forgotten, so he left around 5:15 to do that. It's odd to think that many people are leaving for work then, or have already left, whereas he is going to drive to work, pick something up, and then come home to sleep.

It may seem odd to talk about a day of fasting with descriptions of food, but one thing that Ramadan does is help you truly appreciate the food you have. This will be a long day for me, because Ziad will spend the day in Santa Cruz, accompanied by Maya and me.