Taken From You, This Joy

Abstract: This essay is in two parts. The first section explores the journey a woman goes through to become pregnant. She is a teacher who struggles with a student who became accidentally pregnant in high school, while she has struggled foryears to conceive. The story follows her miscarriage of one of her twins and the later successful birth of her daughter. However, the woman is still haunted by the death of her miscarried child. The section moves almost twenty years later. The woman is watching a video of a mother who went through treatments, just as she had, to give birth to a child who has now been massacred from the attacks on Gaza. The woman explores the guilt and struggles for having been able to have a child and to live outside of Gaza. She examines the devastation of the loss of a child, of a mother’s dream, from outside forces.