The Wonder Chronicles: 10
Getting arrested, Sept. 25, 2012. Photo: Kristy Leibowitz
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Selfull Women
When one of my nephews was a toddler, his babysitter asked him where his Tante Mona lived.
“At the airport,” he replied without skipping a beat.
He would often accompany his dad, my brother, to pick me up and drop me off when I visited. It wasn’t quite a malapropism but you could make the argument that I spent more time at the airport than my actual home in New York City because I traveled so frequently.
When one of my nieces was eight, she told me she had been looking up pictures of our family online.
“I saw one of you…” she paused. “Never mind,”
I thought she’d wanted to say she’d seen a picture of me with my arms in casts after Egyptian riot police assaulted me and that she worried she’d upset me with a bad memory. She’d seen a picture of me getting arrested in New York City after I spray painted over a racist pro-Israel advertisement in the subway in 2012.
I told my niece that I was proud of getting arrested. We had a good chat about why I spray painted over the ad and why protesting was important. And then together we looked at the pictures of me getting arrested. And our conversation continued:
Niece: I know why you got tattoos. (pointing to my forearms)
Me: Why?
Niece: Because they broke those arms and you wanted to say ‘I’m free and awesome! (Pause) Why did they break your arms?
Me: They wanted to scare me and make me go home and stop protesting.
Niece: Did you go home?
Me: No
Niece: Good!
That nephew is now 17, that niece is now 16.
I’ve spent the past five days at a gathering of my siblings–my brother and his wife and their four children, and my sister and her husband.
A highlight of our time together was a discussion that my eldest niece initiated about the kind of life she wanted to create for herself. We were watching Turkey beat Austria in the men’s Euro 2024 championship as the grown ups – her parents, the aunts, the uncle – shared how we’d fashioned the very different life paths we’d created.
It was a raucous conversation typical of our family gatherings. I prefaced my contribution by saying that barring a disastrous two-year marriage, I do not want to be married and that I am childfree by choice. And shared my menopause transition.
When I was growing up, two of my aunts called Samia also didn’t have children–not by choice. I remember the sadness with which the grown ups would share the Samia’s most recent attempts at conceiving; those aunts were nevertheless examples for me of women who were childfree.
I hope that as they grow up, my niblings remember that Tante Mona is happy to live at the airport, get arrested, and be childfree by choice.
Tantes, everywhere: Model myriad possibilities for your niblings.
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:
Hitting the heart button so that others can be intrigued and read
Upgrading to a paid subscription to help keep FEMINIST GIANT free
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
FEMINIST GIANT Newsletter will always be free because I want it to be accessible to all. If you choose a paid subscriptions - thank you! I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, get a paid subscription if you don’t already have one or send a gift subscription to someone else today.