Where society sees potential as the privilege of youth, my 70-year-old mother stands as a gentle rebellion, in a spot where she’s been challenging limits all her life.
Wafaa grew up in Qoubbeh, where her father, his sister, and four brothers lived in three neighboring buildings in a tucked-away corner of Tripoli. Warm façades opened onto unpaved paths shaded by old trees and tangled greenery. The scent of earth and leaves mingled with the murmur of neighbors, creating a quiet harmony where family ties and daily life wove seamlessly together, a small world of closeness and continuity.
At 13, while heading to school one morning, her cousin Samir, 16 years older than her, told his father that he wanted to marry Wafaa. Later that year, they got married and moved into an apartment just upstairs from her childhood home.
Still, the schoolgirl in her hadn’t vanished. The morning after her wedding, she got dressed in her sky-blue school uniform and walked to class before being turned away.
“You’re married now. You can’t attend school,” the principal told her with quiet finality. Just like that, that door was closed.
She stood there for a moment, her heart pounding with confusion and disbelief. The world around her felt suddenly unfamiliar, the laughter of her classmates echoing from inside like a memory slipping away. She clutched her schoolbag tighter, not ready to let go of the life she loved. In that instant, she wasn’t a wife or a woman, just a girl who wanted to learn, watching her dreams disappear behind a closed door.
Ten years later, my family and I moved into a new apartment on Moutran Street, while my grandfather settled one street over. Between those two homes, life unfolded – familiar, contained, ordinary. But inside that ordinariness, something persistent stirred.
Wafaa raised my siblings and me with tenderness, her hands always warm from kneading dough or smoothing a fevered brow, her voice steady even when the weight of responsibility pressed heavily. But late at night, the only light was the flicker of the lamp on her side as she opened her schoolbooks.
She was studying for the Lebanese baccalaureate while raising four young children. She didn’t dare tell my father. He wouldn’t have approved, not out of cruelty, but because the world had taught him a different kind of contentment. To him, she had what one needed: a home, children, security.
The faint smell of ink, the scratch of a pen, the texture of paper under her fingertips all became her secret companions. She learned by whispering lessons into the silence, by memorizing in the dim glow of a single bulb, by tracing the outlines of a future she could not yet claim.
That first year she took the exams, she failed. The second year, she tried again. On the day of the results, she finally told my father. We sat by the radio as candidate numbers were read aloud. Hers came up. She had passed. Abdel Halim Hafez’s joyful song “Wa Hayat Albi W Afraho” filled the house, and we all sang along, proud. My father celebrated too, believing this was the summit of her ambitions.
But for Wafaa, getting her high school degree was only a door reopening.
She enrolled at the Lebanese University to study Fine Arts, leaving us at our grandmother’s house while she attended classes. It was not easy; between motherhood and academic demands, she struggled with attendance and failed her first year.
Still, she tried again, quietly, determinedly. One day, as my dad had his usual morning coffee at his local cafe, he was approached by one of Wafaa’s professors who congratulated him on her success. He was stunned. At home, he asked my mother, “Why do you need a degree? You’re not looking for a job, are you?! I’m providing everything.” He was genuinely perplexed, a little hurt, even, as if her desire to study and work questioned his ability to provide. He was unable to grasp what she could possibly be searching for beyond the comfort and security he believed he had already given her. Nor could he understand the hunger that kept her going. She paused her studies once more.
Years later, she quietly completed her BA and then a Master’s in Sociology, still without his knowledge. She fought to work, eventually earning his reluctant blessing to become an Arabic teacher.
Standing in front of classrooms with chalk-dusted fingers and eyes that carried both fatigue and an unspoken triumph, she shared her knowledge generously for 23 years, her voice often rising above the hum of restless students, her patience tested but rarely broken. Teaching, for her, was never just a job; it was a way of planting seeds, even when the soil seemed barren.
When she retired at 64, she began to study Arabic calligraphy, another dream pursued with patience and a kind of tender stubbornness. For nearly a decade, she traced letters with slow, precise hands, with the same fierce dedication that had carried her through her youth. The ink smelled earthy, the strokes were deliberate, meditative; the script flowed like breath across the page.
Then came 2019, a year of turmoil in Lebanon, marked by mass protests, a plunging currency, and a paralyzed banking system. The economy collapsed, banks froze people’s accounts, and my mother lost her life savings. But she did not retreat. Now 70 years old, she decided to return to her first love – art. She enrolled at the Lebanese University in Tripoli to study Fine Arts, again, where the program focused on traditional and contemporary art practices such as drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, and new media combined with art history, aesthetics, and theory.
This time, she walked into classrooms filled with students five decades younger. Her hair neatly tucked under her hijab, her steps steady, her presence quiet but undeniable. She did not try to blend in; she simply took her place.
Her daily life during those years became a rhythm of discipline and delight. She would spend hours sketching; our living room often smelled faintly of drying paint and paper curling gently as it absorbed color. Her fingers would be stained with graphite, a smudge on her cheek betraying her devotion.
Meals were often simple: warm lentil soup, olives glistening with oil, fresh oat bread, because her appetite was never for luxury, only for the hours she could pour into her craft, unless I prepared lunch.
And then there were her evenings: a cup of chamomile tea, a low hum of Fairuz playing in the background, the soft clatter of her brushes being cleaned one by one, each rinsed like a ritual. She would often pause, looking out the window at the lights of Tripoli scattered like stars, her expression both serene and fiercely alive.
What does it mean to begin again at 70? To reimagine yourself not as someone nearing the end of a chapter, but as an artist standing at the edge of her first great canvas?
For my mother, it meant defying a world that told her, her time had passed. It meant showing up to class in the rain, her scarf damp, her sketchbook dry beneath her coat. It meant accepting the slow ache of her joints as the price of leaning over canvases for hours. It meant laughter with classmates young enough to be her grandchildren, and sometimes, quiet solitude when the gap between their worlds felt too wide.
Then the pandemic came. Overnight, everything turned digital. Online platforms, uploaded assignments, logins and passwords. This was a new language, and not one she had ever learned. Each unfamiliar word was a mountain to climb, but she climbed it. With a dictionary in one hand, and me, her daughter, on the other, she translated, interpreted, and persisted. I would sit beside her, scrolling, typing, and showing her how to search and save, turning screens into steps she could climb. Word by word, image by image, she made her way through. Technology was never her comfort zone, but her determination made it her companion.
Her classmates, though sometimes helpful, didn’t always understand what drove her. They watched her arrive each day with her canvases, brushes, and paints, unsure why someone their grandmother’s age would endure the same critiques and late nights. To them, she seemed out of place, an unfamiliar presence in a space they thought was meant for youth alone. And while a few professors supported her, others held back, saying simply that “the system was not built for seniors.”
We speak so loudly about inclusivity, but where does age fall on that promise? When it comes to education, do we truly mean everyone, or only those who move at the expected pace?
Aging is not a decline; it is a continuation. And for people like Wafaa, growth is not about career advancement or recognition, but for the sheer fulfilment of becoming. Her art is not filtered for trends or algorithms. It is shaped by memory: the plumeria, pomegranate and blackberry trees of Qoubbeh, the echo of Abdel Halim on a summer night, the long ache of postponed dreams. Each brushstroke whispers a moment lived. Each sketch carries a quiet defiance, a sheer fulfilment of becoming.
Living with her these past nine years, I have seen the cost of chasing her dreams. The fatigue that settles on her shoulders, the hesitation before submitting a project, the flicker of doubt that sometimes crosses her face. And then, the light, those rare, radiant moments when something works, when the effort feels seen, when she presses “submit” and breathes out a soft sigh of victory.
She rarely asks for praise. What she needed was a little more time, patience, and presence from those meant to guide her. Often, that is all it takes for someone to keep going.
And she did keep going.
This is not just the story of a mother who went back to school. It is the story of a woman who refused to let a marriage at an early age, a conservative city, a collapsing economy, or the invisible lines of age decide where her life would stop expanding. That grit is not loud or fast, but steady and luminous. That beauty is often painted slowly, in colors long kept waiting.
Her courage does not shout. It moves softly. It puts on a school uniform the day after marriage. It traces calligraphy at 64. It logs into a digital classroom at 70. And it holds a paintbrush still, drawing new chapters in a life that never stopped unfolding.
