It started with the Talabat driver.

He calls, asks where the house is, and calls my son ma’am. Every single time. Different driver, same call, same ma’am.

My eldest has not hit puberty yet, so his voice is still up there, and he had clearly had enough.

So he dropped it.

I heard it from the next room. The phone rang, he answered, and out came a voice about two octaves below anything he owns, saying the building name with the calm authority of a man in his forties. Then he hung up and went back to being eleven.

Then he tried it on Alexa.

Alexa will not let him into certain things because it can tell he is a child. His normal voice gives him away. So he used the other one.

It worked.

He is a tinkerer. Like me.

I cannot leave a thing alone if it does not work properly. I see a problem and my hands start moving before my brain has decided whether they should.

That is exactly what happened here. He did not complain. He did not ask me to fix it. He did not argue with the driver or file it under things that are simply how they are.

He found the one thing he could change, and changed it. In about four seconds.

Nobody taught him that. There was no lesson. He has just spent eleven years watching a man take things apart.

And the little one is at it too

Eighteen months old, about ten words, and on some days one.

Which I had assumed was a delay. It is not. It is a decision.

He has looked at the problem every adult struggles with, which is how to communicate a great deal while doing as little as possible, and concluded that one word plus a tone plus a face will cover most situations.

And he is right. It does.

Which makes me think about what my mother gave me

القناعة

She handed it over the way a torch is handed over, without ceremony and without saying anything, and I am fairly sure I was the only one who took it.

But it did not come out of me the same way it went in. What I passed down was not القناعة. It was tinkering. Which is almost the opposite, because القناعة is being content with what is in front of you, and tinkering is refusing to leave it alone.

So the torch changed hands and changed shape on the way.

Maybe they will find their own way back to it, and build a version out of whatever they have lying around, the way they build everything else. Or maybe it skips them entirely and turns up in one of their children, the way it skipped everyone else and landed on me.

Either way, I will be here.

Because I still have my mother’s, and there is enough left to pour.