The doctor showed me gray lullabies on the screen, and in the middle of them was a simple outline of my little one shaking his head in a sarcastic way. I hear his heartbeat: "boom, boom, boom," multiplied perhaps thousands of times, as the pulse moves in a phosphorescent zigzag line to the end of the screen and then fades away as a small, barely perceptible wave. We waited a long time for him. We waited for him and prepared for him the cradle, the toys, the cloth dolls, the diapers, the week''s candles that the neighbor''s children would carry, and the lace-embroidered sieve. His grandmother, Umm Al-Saad, gave us a bag full of seven grains, grains of goodness and blessings, a week before our travel! When we first found out we were pregnant, we didn''t sleep. That night, my wife and I kept imagining ourselves as parents, reminiscing about all the beautiful names in our family history. If it is male and if it is female. I gave her the right to decide on the name if it was a girl, so I suggested "Maryam," after her mother, and she gave me the same right if it was a boy, so I said: "Muhammad," after my late father.
