Are we doing the right thing? A Dubai Mum's honest thoughts

Are we doing the right thing? A Dubai Mum's honest thoughts

I've started writing this three times. Each time I got a few sentences in and deleted it, because every version sounded either too dramatic or not dramatic enough, and I'm not sure which is the bigger crime right now (assuming we ignore all the really big crimes that are happening before our eyes and being live streamed into our living rooms).

So let me just start where I actually am: sitting here, 2 months on from the night my phone & my watch, then my husband's phone and his watch screamed at me at some ungodly hour with an emergency alert, listening to the sky outside make sounds I never expected to hear in Dubai, wondering what on earth I was going to say to my son as we scrambled to get under the stairs whilst simultaneously in a daze looking for his favourite Bunny to take downstairs with us.

If you were here for it, you know what I mean. Those booms, and that specific, gut-wrenching quality of a sound you don't have a reference point for because you've been fortunate to have a passport that has protected you from the life of so many, and then scrambling to Google/Reddit/X/check the WhatsApp groups whether what you'd just heard was something to be afraid of, while simultaneously trying not to look afraid in front of your child. Dubai had never come under missile attack in recent years before February 28th. None of us knew how to deal with it, and in the absence of knowing, we improvised — some of us brilliantly, some of us badly, and most of us somewhere in between, depending on the hour and how much sleep we'd had.

The school closures came really fast. KHDA moved everything to distance learning, and just like that, our routines — which so many of us cling to like lifeboats — were gone, leaving both us and our children floundering around. And what replaced them, for a lot of families, was this odd suspended state of being home together in limbo, either quietly watching the news or desperately trying not to, fielding questions from children who are sharper and more attuned to the emotions of the grown ups than we ever give them credit for. Children who listen to everything that the grown ups say, especially when the grown ups forget that the children are in the room. I think we're probably all guilty of that.

But the thing nobody really talks about with children and big, scary world events is that it's not what you tell them that matters most - it's what your body is doing when you're telling them. The body language matters so much more than the actual words. Another thing that we forget about with our children. Children don't primarily process information through words, they process it through the nervous system of the adult in the room. And our nervous systems, after weeks of emergency alerts, of explosions overhead, of checking which direction the smoke was coming from, of reading WhatsApp updates at 1am — they were not okay. For many, they are still not okay, and maybe never will be ever again. The stress response that gets triggered by a sudden loud bang doesn't care whether the bang came from a missile interception 10km away or a threat at your front door. Your body responds the same way when your house shakes and your windows rattle, whatever caused it or however far away it was. Adrenaline, cortisol, the whole cascade of hormones, and you can't stop them, they just come. And when that happens repeatedly, across days and weeks, it accumulates - the after effects don't just switch off because the news cycle moved on. Also- don't get me started on the news. I read that 'News drives war' - which after this, I firmly believe. And it is so, utterly wrong what people will do to sell a few copies of a tabloid. The 'reporting' has been appalling.

So when you snapped at your kids, or burst into tears over nothing, or went uncharacteristically quiet and incredibly busy, or became frozen with fear leading to indecision, know that that wasn't weakness, or laziness, or stupid, or denying (despite me previously saying that I felt a lot of people were in denial about the effects on themselves, I see that now). That was your nervous system doing its very best to protect you, and I think we need to be a lot gentler with ourselves about that before we can be gentler with our children. Because the way we speak to our children during frightening times becomes part of their brain architecture and core memory response. Not in a way that should make us more anxious — we all know we don't need that — but in a way that's actually quite empowering and, dare I say it, liberating, once you realise it. Telling the truth at an age-appropriate level and naming what's happening: "Yes, those were loud sounds. The people whose job it is to keep us safe are doing their job." Letting them see us regulate our emotions and our bodies, even imperfectly is what stays with them. Not whether we had the perfect words when we didn't know what the words were. There's no faking it until you make it over here.

While all of this was unfolding above us, something else was happening among expat (and yes, despite what the British press would have you believe, expat is a real word, it's not made up because we are too good to be classed as immigrants) families: a fork in the road that a lot of people had always privately known was there but had never been forced to confront quite so closely.

Some families left. Some people who'd always said "we'll leave when it feels right" suddenly felt it was right, and they went — some for a few weeks, some, I suspect, for good. In fact I'd say many went for good, judging by the entire contents of homes I saw being sold on WhatsApp groups and facebook pages. There's no judgment in people leaving. When the airport is being hit by drone debris and you have small children and the privilege of holding a passport that gets you out of the place where it feels choices are being taken away, the equation changes. What's interesting is watching which families stayed, and how differently they experienced the same weeks. Because for some, the extended time at home together became — and I say this knowing how it sounds — really lovely. Slower and more more connected to each other, like a long holiday that nobody planned but that delivered things that normal Dubai life doesn't always make room for, that living in Dubai on the endlessly hustling hamster wheel makes us feel that we don't have time for. In so many ways, it has reminded me of Covid times. Our son was a tiny baby when covid started, around 6 weeks old when we started to get an inkling that things weren't quite right in what we were seeing coming in on planes into our country.

I was one of those people who found themselves back in the UK during some of this conflict, in fact, I'm still there. And I want to talk about and t be honest about what this time away has given me, because it's quite a lot — including some thoughts I'm still not entirely sure what to do with. It's been 'triggering' in a lot of ways, most of it (if I'm honest) to do with the opinions of others, both in Dubai and the UK.

Being in the UK, watching my son in a British school context, doing the school run (fyi I also did this in Dubai, just to disappoint all those that think we have servants to do everything for us) chatting at the gates and seeing firsthand what his education looks like 'on the ground' — it has been incredibly eye opening. Not because it's better or worse than what he has in Dubai (that debate is endless and mostly useless), but because I finally felt it. I understood it in my entire mind, not just in my head from reading Ofsted reports and WhatsApp parent groups. I've seen first hand the curriculum differences, the social dynamics, the pace of it. It has been, for the first time ever to me, fully concrete and formed thoughts in my mind. This is actually what's making me struggle most with the decision of returning, and I never in a million years thought it would that.

And then there has been the time with his grandparents. Unplanned, unstructured, normal, just 'time'. The kind of days where nobody is rushing to a playdate or a class or a brunch or getting up at some horrendous hour to get to school for a ridiculously early time (I have definitely enjoyed the 08:45 English school starts!). The kind of time where my son gets to be bored enough to be curious, where their first question isn't 'what are we doing today?' Where our son has got to experience something that I would never have thought to describe as precious before I watched it happen right in front of me: an ordinary British childhood afternoon. Nothing Instagram-able and nothing memorable in the conventional sense. Just real, normal, unglamorous belonging somewhere. And this is where I have to be careful not to project onto my child and not to live vicariously through him - his childhood is his own, and I can't ever try to have it make up for any shortcomings my own head.

None of us will ever have this time again, during this very specific window we've all had a peek through into an alternate reality, for some of us very briefly, for those of us still sitting in our in-laws weeks later, for longer than we would ever have thought. And I am (I genuinely am) so grateful for it, even though the circumstances that created it were, quite literally, terrifying. That's a strange oxymoron to work out in your own head. Again, it really brings back memories of covid times. Back then, the guilt of not staying, of not using my nursing skills and helping on the wards was intense, I'd almost say all-consuming. The 23rd of March 2020 was the first (of many) lockdowns, our son was 10 weeks old. I truly wanted to go back to work, cut my maternity leave short. My husband literally laid it out that I'd be leaving him at home with a new baby who wouldn't take a bottle, and I'd have to move out as our son was too young to be exposed to something we knew nothing about. I cried in the car the day I dropped my work laptop back, leaving it on a wall outside the hospital as everyone was too scared to come near me and infect us. My maternity cover came down and looked at my son through a closed car window with a mask on. That's the level of fear of the unknown, and the early days of the U.S-Israel-Iran conflict in the UAE was the same for many.

Running antenatal classes in Dubai, I really understand how so many pregnant mums-to be and new mums have been feeling, because I've been there. The difference with this is that before, the whole world was in the same storm, just in different boats. You could argue that Dubai has been in a cruise liner throughout this whilst the mothers in Iran, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Lebanon and so many other places have been in the freezing cold water with little more than a log to cling onto. And Dubai mums have had, many for the very first time, a tiny little peek behind the door of war, and the fear it brings. And we understood only the tiniest fraction of what mothers the world over have had to endure for millenia. It's ok not to have 'liked' that feeling, in fact I'd say it's completely normal. And it's normal to feel a strange sort of 'survivor's guilt', without having really ever been at physical risk. Because the children of the world who live in actual war zones are just that, children. And our hearts break for the mothers who cannot provide safety and protect their babies, a very basic human right that is denied solely by the lottery of where they were born. And we feel guilt for our privilege, and shame for the world.

The guilt is real, it is intense, and it isn't necessarily ours to hold. We are not the ones bombing countries into oblivion. 'Mum-guilt' has led us down paths and influenced our decisions, it still is for many, and I'm no different (where is 'Dad-guilt' btw? Oh wait, it doesn't exist!).

My business is in Dubai. My work, the thing that I built quite by accident, the thing that gets me out of bed with a sense of purpose that has nothing to do with being someone's mum, is in Dubai. And the honest truth is that when I've been weighing up everything, namely to return to Dubai or stay in the UK, that is a factor. Not the only factor. Not even the biggest factor when it comes to the acute safety decisions, but a factor. And I've been quietly thinking away about it for weeks, I'd actually say agonising over it in many ways.

Is it selfish? Is it selfish to want to return to Dubai?

I've been asking myself that question and I don't think the answer is as straightforward as the internet would have you believe, because the internet tends to speak to mothers in one of two tones: 'You are enough, you are doing amazingly' (relentlessly affirming yet slightly hollow and fake) or 'nothing matters except your children' (quietly terrifying at the huge amount of responsibility and possibly ignorance, and also just not true in any useful sense).

The question of whether you give up yourself — your ambitions, your work, your drive, the bits of you that existed before you became a mother and that don't disappear just because you had a child — that question has been in women's minds forever, and I don't think it gets answered by a move to a new country or a global conflict. It just surfaces and smacks us in the face continuously, demanding to be answered.

What I know is this: children learn what they live (a favourite poem of mine, look it up). A mother who has given up everything she wanted, who has flattened herself into pure sacrifice, who swallowed her ambition whole (perhaps even grudgingly) and performed whatever her version of contentment is teaches her child something. A mother who works, who sometimes gets the balance completely wrong and can't spin any more plates, who is visibly tired but also visibly alive in the work that she does — that also teaches something. Different things. Not necessarily better or worse universally, but genuinely different.

I'm not arguing that career justifies everything. I'm not saying absence doesn't matter, or that a child's need for presence isn't real and significant. It is. But I am saying that the one size fits all narrative— either you're all-in as a mother or you're selfish — is a false one, and I think a lot of Dubai mums are living in that false narrative right now without naming it, mainly because they don't know how, or their brain is too fried from holding everyone else's emotions to focus on their own. I'm also not saying (for the record) that the Mum who chooses to stay at home and lives a life of blissful pride and contentment is wrong- because that's her choice. Which is the key word.

The extended school closures, the weeks at home, the slower pace — for some of us, myself included, has opened Pandora's box. Reminded us what we were missing, and also, honestly, reminded us why we have chosen to build the life we have. Because sometimes in life you need the contrast. You need the quiet weeks at Granny's house and the long school run and the ordinary afternoons to understand clearly what you're trading, and to decide whether the trade off is worth it.

I don't have a nice, neat tidy answer, and I think that's the point. I think anyone who tells you they have this figured out without any regrets on either side is rare, but I'm not saying impossible to find.

What I do have is this: a son who got extra time with his grandparents that we'll never be able to recreate again, who spent a few weeks living a kind of childhood I didn't give him on purpose but I'm glad he got to feel it. A business I am not going to apologise for, (because why should I?), but that I am going to restructure because I was very close to burnout before we left Dubai, and I cannot get back on that hamster wheel hustle anytime soon. I do have a nervous system that is still a little bit frazzled, but a clear, unmedicated mind (I mean as clear as an ADHD brain can ever be) which has led to really feeling (probably a bit too much!) for the first time in a few years. I also have  a much clearer sense that the question isn't 'are you a good mother or a person with ambitions?' , but whether you can hold both of those clearly without letting either one take over the other, or forgetting which one you hold most dear.

That, I suspect, is actually the real work. The real work isn't the school run, not cooking dinners or vacuuming the kitchen or ironing school polo shirts, or not even the curriculum choice, nor the country. The work is the holding onto and remembering what matters most to you.

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