This post is part of the #30DaysArabVoices Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature Arab voices as writers and scholars. Search the hashtag on your favorite social media for more blog posts.

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When I set out to write my first middle grade series for children, Daughters of the Lamp, one of my main goals was to transport readers to Egypt, the land where my parents emigrated from and which I had so many special memories of visiting as a child every summer. But I also wanted to capture how complicated and conflicting it was for me at times to grow up in Queens, New York, which I thought of as home, while my parents referred to Cairo as home. “Which one is home?” was a question I frequently asked. The answer, so clear in retrospect, is both were home. To embrace the totality of home, I had to learn to hold both places in my heart, both cultures in my heart. And now I am the richer for it.

For me, writing is an exploration of the complex and conflicting in a way that allows children to reach that place of duality and nuance with characters they can see themselves in and trust. Though it may have been easier for me growing up with one home, it wouldn’t have been better. I could not imagine a life in which I had not heard the wedding tablas beating through the streets of Cairo, awakening every cell in my body. A life in which I had not heard all seventeen floors of my Queens apartment building explode into cheers when the Mets’ Mookie Wilson hit a ground ball through the Red Sox’s first baseman’s legs in the last inning of Game 6 of the World Series. 

Easier does not equate better. As is the case with the most beautiful parts of life. They can be gray and messy but also magnificent. Magical. 

May all children find joy and understanding in the beautiful messiness of life. May they learn to hold more than one truth in their hearts, not just in the light but in the dark, so they can grow up to be adults who do the same. We need that now more than ever.

This post is part of the #30DaysArabVoices Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature Arab voices as writers and scholars. Search the hashtag on your favorite social media for more blog posts.