Letters from a Muslim Woman Podcast

Noha Beshir
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I share the joys and challenges of being a Muslim Woman in a sometimes unfriendly world. Exploring the multi-generational immigrant experience at the intersection of mental health, motherhood, and faith. nohabeshir.substack.com

  1. Names, a Segmented Essay from WAYF Journal

    06/03/2025

    Names, a Segmented Essay from WAYF Journal

    Happy June, my friends. This week, as a treat for paid subscribers, I wanted to bring you my recently published essay in WAYF journal. You can purchase a digital copy of the whole journal here if you are interested. It’s full of beautiful poems and pieces, including a stunning one by Ambata Kazi. I’ve been eagerly awaiting publication so I could share this piece with you. It’s a segmented essay that explores themes I come back to again and again in my writing: belonging, faith, the immigrant experience, but all through the lens of Names and what they say about us and who we are. Instead of simply sharing the essay with you, I decided to try something fun and read it for you on video. (A short excerpt is available below for free subscribers.) Let me know how you like it, and what your own feelings are about your names. Are they complicated? Do you feel as though your name fits you? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    14 min

  2. 12/03/2024

    Not for the faint of heart

    A couple of weeks ago, the boys and I had an epic sleepover in the basement while M was away. We inflated the air mattress, draping bedsheets over it to make a fort from one side of the room to the other. We brought down blankets and sweet and salty popcorn and a bowl of jelly beans and sour peaches. Then, we watched a cheesy Will Ferrell musical and sang karaoke, belting our songs out at full volume, the Apple TV remote our microphone. The boys are 13 and 11 now. They are fairly independent when it comes to the hard work of keeping them alive. We get the groceries, but they make their own breakfast. We double check that their homework is in their backpack. That they’ve packed a hat in case it gets cold. Still, those heady days of heavy lifting are over, at least physically. There are no car seats to lug from the back seat into the house. No strollers to fold and open one handed. No babies hanging on hips. Nine years ago, M was away for two weeks in July. This was the stage of our life when summer was choreographed down to the day, with scheduling and coordination starting in March. Daycare spots booked. Day camps reserved. Vacation requested. The boys were 4 and 1. I gave M my blessing and booked off work for the same two weeks he’d be traveling. My mind, my delusional mind, imagined regular sleepovers with my sisters and the niblings. There would be no need for day camp, because the kids would be in a camp of sorts with their cousins, my sisters and I the counselors. I saw late night shenanigans. I saw my own idyllic childhood, replayed. No so. Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience Somehow the date approached and I found myself alone with a toddler and a kindergartner for two straight weeks. No childcare. No camp. No sisters or cousins to entertain us. Grandparents dispatched to another country, to the aid of another mother, her hands full with another set of grandkids. What I remember most was the oppressive heat of that July. The air still. The windows and backdoor opened in the desperate hopes of a breeze that never came. Without my sisters’ company, I didn’t have the energy for the city pools. Instead, I would muster my strength and gather the big blue Ikea bag of sand and water toys, loading it onto the back of the stroller. Then I would wrestle A in and buckle the harness, keeping an eye on D to make sure he hadn’t followed a rolling ball into the road. In this way, we would make our way to the water playground, where I would pray for them to get into a groove. To find wonder in the water splashing and gathering in their buckets. In the way an older kid might spray them with a soaker. In the way their feet left a trail of little wet prints as they ran to me in anger or delight. Sometimes, we’d last 3 hours at the park. Sometimes 30 minutes. And then we’d come home and the whole rest of the day would yawn ahead of us. Endless meals and snacks and dishes and diapers and baths and tantrums, and I would kick myself for my poor summer planning. Once the boys were asleep, I would reach for the remote, craving the voice of an adult, even one who would only talk at me, rather than to me. One night, I clicked on The Walking Dead. Even though I despised Zombies, even though M had asked me again and again if I wanted to watch it and I had said no, again and again, afraid of the gore and the nightmares. Still, it was hours of plot and character and stakes. And I needed stakes after negotiating between two small children all day. By the time each episode ended, I would find myself sucked all the way in. Too invested to stop, but also too afraid to be alone with my thoughts in the dark. My husband, my parents, my sisters all hours away, and me alone in the night. The adult in charge. The next day, D would wake me bright and early. His chubby little hand shaking my heavy shoulder, his thick little voice repeating, “Mama, mama, is-hee”. Or A would demand release from the crib across the hall by screaming with all his might. And we would start all over again. I have long felt guilty about being a working mother, a mother whose children spent hours each day being fed and cared for by another adult. More than once in those early years, I would Google “homeschooling” and find myself scrolling a fantasy on Pinterest. Idyllic images of women in flower print dresses baking in sun-drenched white kitchens. Their children gathered around enormous quartz islands. The youngest finger-painting. The oldest midway through a baking soda - vinegar volcano. The problem with all of this, of course, was that I hate finger paint, I hate crafts, and I am a terrible teacher. But the guilt? The guilt was real. That summer, two warring ideas became abundantly clear to me. The first was that I would have made a terrible homeschooling mother. That my children were definitely better off at school and camp, where educators would tend to their learning. The second was that I felt like a horrible mother. A mother who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) conjure art projects out of thin air. A mother whose pancakes and cookies did not take the shape of beloved Disney characters. The boys and I would bake and run and play with Duplo. But the house was a mess. And I never cut the crust off their bread. And I had kept a baby book for maybe one week before the whole charade of tracking memories in anything other than a hard drive had collapsed in on itself. I love to play with babies. To tickle their little bellies and watch them howl with laughter. To hide my face and hear them cackle when it is revealed again. I love to chat with 3 year-olds. To watch their delight as they find the shape of a sentence, to discover their ability to make magic. My niece, Rania, called me her second mom when she was still a toddler. “Khalto Noosa!” she would shriek at the sight of me, running over to be scooped up and cuddled and loved. And yet, for all the precious joy of babies and small children. For the miracle of having them melt into your arms for a nap. For their impossibly chubby cheeks and pudgy fingers, I am more at home in motherhood now than I have ever been. The boys are little humans now, which isn’t to say they weren’t always humans. But before, their babyhood trumped their personalities. Now, I can see them more clearly. Their curiosities and their habits. Their favourite books. Their favourite games. Not so long after that summer where I momentarily experienced single parenthood, I read an article online that soothed my guilt, called This stage of life? It’s hard. “In this stage of life, you are bombarded daily with a whole host of decisions. Some of them life-changing, some of them not. None of them with clear cut answers… Do I send (my kids) to public school? Homeschool? Charter school? Do I continue to breastfeed? Do I blow the budget so that I can buy all organic? Do I force my child to apologize, even though the apology will be insincere? You don’t know the answers to ANYTHING, but you feel constant pressure to figure out EVERYTHING.” Reading that article, something finally clicked for me. Nobody doing that early parenting had it together. Not me. Not my friends whose houses were always clean when I went over. Not the moms in the photos on Pinterest. It’s supposed to be hard, I realized. I’m not failing because it’s hard. The nigh of our sleepover, when we finally went to bed it was nearly 1 a.m. The next day I woke up cranky and a little annoyed with everything, and of course, the guilt kept trying to resurface. Cue the inner voices shouting over each other: ‘Don’t undo all the bonding by snapping at them’ versus, ‘You spoil them so much! You’re doing it all wrong.’ This time though, I recognized the turmoil for what it was. Parenting is not for the faint of heart. If you’re lucky, you walk a never-ending tightrope of struggle and reward. And the guilt? The guilt will never go away. We just learn to recognize it. Soothe it, lull it to sleep the way we used to lull them, when they needed us simply for survival. Let’s chat in the comments: * Are you a parent? Do you have a lot of mom guilt/dad guilt? * Are there other things you feel “not enough” on? * How do you quiet the “I’m not doing enough” voice in your head (yes I’m looking for advice) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  3. 11/12/2024

    In the face of great beauty and great horror

    A couple of weeks ago, Soraya, Baba and I took a trip the Grand Canyon. I’ve written about Soraya’s wanderlust before, and about my lack of it, but I’m grateful to her for inviting me along on the short trips. For dropping an itinerary at my feet that is too tempting to resist and dragging me along to see the world’s wonders. We were in and out in 4 days: landing in Phoenix, driving north through Arizona, staring at this wondrous, cavernous beauty, and driving south again through the Red Rock region of Sedona. Every moment seemed tinged with anticipation, both good and bad. Here we were, in America mere days before the election, before the re-ascendance of Donald Trump. Here we were, so close to a cliff’s edge, both literally and figuratively. The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is wider and deeper than it has any business being. You expect to see the whole thing with your eyes. And then you get there and you realize that you can see maybe 2% of it at any given time. And the 2% you’re seeing is as far as your mind can fathom, and even that is overwhelming. Just looking down is enough to feel as though you’ll tumble. Enough to feel as though there is no end to the drop. And yet, it is breathtakingly beautiful. It is mindboggling and mind blowing. It is perspective shifting. Last Wednesday, after being home for a few days, D and I went to a presentation by a Canadian astronaut and he spoke about the wild shift in perspective you get, looking down at Earth from the vast emptiness of space. I think the next closest thing to that is looking into the Grand Canyon. Perspective. We are so small. We are so small so let’s not sweat the small stuff. And yet. On our last morning there, Soraya and I saw the sunrise over the eastern-most point of the South Rim. The earth around us there was desert-like, dusty and red. Everything felt precarious. If the magic of what we had seen the two previous days was wearing off, well then, that moment brought it all back. Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience I try to remember the glory of God in these moments, to look at the Sun, a miracle, rising over the Canyon, a miracle, and let my remembrances accompany my awe. So I was watching the sun come up, and praying, and taking photo after photo, when I noticed that the glove of my right hand was missing, had fallen away from me some time between the shuttle bus we’d gotten off and the craggy walk we’d taken to the cliff’s edge. It’s amazing how much the loss of a $10 Costco glove will affect your mood, even when you are witnessing a natural wonder, a miracle of creation. We are so small, not only in size but in perspective, in heart, in the things that might worry us. A perfectly replaceable glove. “We can look for it,” Soraya said and started to walk around, so caring is she for her older sister. “After,” I told her, “We’ll look for it after. We can’t get this sunrise back.” And so we stood and we watched and we prayed, but now our utter focus had been pierced. The loss of a $10 Costco glove loomed over our moment, and the future of a Trump presidency, and the anxiety of flights home, and every other potential moment of fear or loss. There is a verse in the Quran that says, Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. This translates to verily, humanity was created anxious. I think about this when I’m spiraling. When I’m in the middle of contemplating literal miracles and I’m derailed by the most ridiculous of things. When I’m overtaken by a sense of foreboding. In the chapter in question, God goes on to talk of the healing power of prayer. How that anxiety can be mitigated. I think of Marcellus Williams and his last words, and I think he understood that. I am a long way, but I am trying. The sunrise, by the way, was glorious. The red rocks around Sedona where we drove later that day were incredible. My heart yo-yoed, falling to the pit of my stomach and rising to the opening in my throat as Baba drove the car along the switchback roads on the mountain in Oak Creek Canyon. We descended from 7000 feet to 4000 feet of elevation. Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. Earlier that morning, Soraya and I looked for the second glove as we walked back to the shuttle bus stop. We didn’t find it. “Never mind,” I told her as another bus pulled in to the stop. If the cost of the sunrise over the Grand Canyon was a glove, I would pay that a hundred times over. And yet I still felt disappointed. By what? The loss of control. The smallest thing having gone wrong. And then I noticed something black being held by a small rock on a larger boulder. My glove! I snatched it up quickly and we boarded, my heart buoyed. “Oh good! So that was yours,” a man said. He’d been there on the cliff too. “Thank you!” I told him and we sat down, flushed and energetic. I’m not sure why this moment is cast in such prominent relief. Why the smallest thing having gone wrong is so crushing, and the smallest thing having gone right is such a boost. But here we are. Sweating the small stuff in spite of ourselves. Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    6 min

  4. 09/24/2024

    They said motherhood would instantly fill me with love...

    The day we brought our baby home from the hospital nearly 14 years ago, I felt like I was wading through water. The air itself was thick and viscous. Exhaustion had descended so that people’s voices seemed to travel through a tunnel to reach me. M and my mom were carrying my bags and the car seat, respectively. I was carrying my weak body and unsettled heart. We had left our 18th floor apartment two days earlier in the maddest rush I had ever experienced, missing an emergency car delivery by a matter of minutes, gotten through the insanity, and come home with a healthy baby boy. And yet, rather than feeling tethered to a line of women through time immemorial who had managed the same feat, I felt oddly, increasingly isolated. D was born in the middle of December in Montreal, where dusk falls at 4:25 p.m. Mama, (my mama, even though apparently I was now a mama myself,) was with us for 8 weeks, tending to my every need so I could tend to the baby. She brought me bowls of chicken soup and buckwheat bread, lest my wheat sensitivity trigger his indigestion. Glass after glass of fenugreek and caraway tea, an old Egyptian concoction for increasing milk. Sliced pears and frozen mangoes and little pieces of broccoli to scoop up hummus. Mostly, I just wanted coffee with too much cream and sugar, and a croissant from the bakery in the underground metro tunnels five minutes away. Despite Mama’s waiting on me hand and foot, I never emerged from our bedroom before 2 p.m., barely grasping at the remains of weak sunlight the winter sky had to offer. Mama held the baby while I slept, and encouraged me to sleep when he did. But I couldn’t, despite my exhaustion. My body was both lacking and restless. On the fifth morning after we came home, we ran out of apples and tomatoes. Before either M or Mama could argue, I blurted out, “I’ll get them.” There was a small grocery store two blocks away where we made minimal purchases because it was so overpriced, but this was going to be my outing, high prices be damned. M and Mama looked at each other, looked at me, and nodded. All day, I dreamed of this walk to the store, of how I would make my way down the street, alone. I would pace the aisles, taking my time, considering random sauces and marinades, rolling firm fruit around in my palms. After D was fed and swaddled, I left him with my mom to burp and put on my winter coat and boots. It was the first time I’d walked out since I’d come home from the hospital as a mother. The store was bright and airy and I walked through it slowly, attempting to savour each moment. When I was done, I came home, put my shopping bag on the kitchen counter and went to sit on our bed, where I started to cry. I couldn’t have explained to you what the tears were for, beyond the fact that I had expected my grocery run to be life-changing, and yet here I was, still swimming through the soup of my new existence. In hindsight, I think I was mourning the woman I had lost in gaining my motherhood. Every day, I wept. Sometimes, it was because D wouldn’t burp, or because he would manage to extract his little hand from his swaddle and hit his tiny face with his tiny fist. Sometimes, it was for no reason at all. Sometimes it was because I didn’t want to cry, and the shame of the tears brought them on all the more. Mama sat with me, hugging me and telling me again and again, “you’re a wonderful mother, Noha. All of this is normal and all of this will pass.” I am so grateful for her faith in me. For telling me I was doing a good job when I had no idea what I was doing. For not shaming me when I was ready to shame myself. And then by some miracle, 6 weeks after they had flooded my system, the tears stopped. It was as though someone had found the source of the leak and plugged it. Winter still dragged on but the days grew ever-slowly longer. My little baby, who ate like a champion, became the love of my life. His smiles rejuvenated me, his burps delighted me, his little fingers and little toes were delicious and so, so kissable. I am lucky that my postpartum blues didn’t morph into full blown depression. That my mother was there to tend to my every need. That my husband held my hand through it, despite being as lost as I was. I am lucky that the feelings inside me subsided into love and connection, and that my heart reset its sensitivity gauge. But I remember that sense of being untethered when I see a soul in the throes of depression, even when everything on the outside looks and sounds and seems normal. What kindness can I hold for those souls? How can I pay it forward? Let’s chat in the comments: * Is there something you experienced that was supposed to be “all good” but wasn’t the storybook version? * If you’re a parent, or have a parent in your life, have you seen someone struggle post partum? * Do you think there’s enough honesty in the culture about how hard the first few months of parenting really are? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    6 min

  5. 09/10/2024

    How to hold a baby (while cycling)

    The day before school started again last week, D and I went out for long, languid bike ride. The weather was perfect, just a hint of cool in the air, and a bright, clear sky with loads of sun. We only had an hour or two, so we headed south through Little Italy to Dow’s Lake, took the route by the Rideau Canal, circled through downtown and headed home. D mostly rode ahead of me, too tall for his bike, shoulders set, the wind catching in his t-shirt like a sail. I caught myself 5 or 6 times about to call out safety reminders. A little warning about the loose gravel on the path, a reminder of sudden drops and sharp turns. Instead, I held my tongue. This boy was heading to high school the next day. Whatever I have taught him of bike safety, he already knows it. Along Queen Elizabeth Drive, I saw two figures ahead of us. A man on a bike, and a small child beside him, riding in perfect unison, side by side. I marveled at their synchronicity. Because our pace was leisurely, it took some time to catch up, to see them in the light of the sun instead of always turning ahead at the next curve in the road. When we were finally close enough to see them clearly, it all made sense. The man was riding with only one hand on the wheel, the other on the little girl’s shoulder. And now, instead of marveling at them I marveled at him. At his balance. At his self trust. How much maturity, how much confidence, not just physical, but psychic, must you have to continue along, threading forward, only one hand to yourself and the other so clearly guiding? She didn’t have training wheels, she had him. My own confidence is still a little shaky since my fall, still focused on the worst case scenario. Despite the glorious whether I couldn’t help but widen sharp turns, avoid curbs, go very slowly. My son, for his part, didn’t seem to notice. He rode easily and silently. Not in a boasting way but just the way a boy might enjoy the open air and the trees and the grass, and the acorns littering the path and the water running alongside. Every once in a while, a bike would come along behind us and overtake us, and sometimes, they would only overtake me for a bit, before they sped up again and passed him too. And I noticed that this was new. Strangers had never separated us along the path before. He’d always been so clearly my child, but now, he was taller than I was, and so clearly his own person. They didn’t realize we belonged to each other. And this made me both very happy and very, very sad. We overtook the man and the little girl as we approached downtown. I looked over as we pedaled by, and for the first time, now that we were at their level, I noticed a baby in a carrier in front of him. He caught my eye and we both smiled. He couldn’t have known that in that moment, he’d made me consider the possibility of trusting things to go well. The possibility of believing you can ride a bike with one hand on the wheel and the other on your daughter’s shoulder, with your baby in the front. The possibility of the gorgeous day instead of the potential fall. Of beginnings instead of endings. Let’s chat in the comments: * How’s the “back to school” fall vibe treating you? Are you caught up in it? * Are there kids in your life who are suddenly bigger than you can believe? * How do you manage riding your proverbial bike with one hand while guiding others, or do you? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min

  6. 07/30/2024

    Asynchronous Love in Broken Arabic

    My mother and I send each other voice notes crossing oceans and time zonesmessages sent in the early morning in the westand received late at nightin the east. I know we haven’t talked in days,I might say I just wanted to tell youI’m thinking of you,I just want you to hear my voiceto think of youlistening to my voice. The messages are a blend of English and Arabic — my English and her Arabic most of the time, but not always. Sometimes, my Arabic makes its way in. I say Arabic things I know how to say properly. Prayers. Comments on the weather. Updates about the kids. Other times, I try to get poetic. I tell her, inti 3ala alby. Inti fi baaly. You’re on my heart. In my mind. Flipping the prepositions in a game of reverse grammar psychology. I don’t trust my Arabic, so whatever sounds wrong is probably right, right? This is the source of my mistake above. I thought in English. I started in the first person, with myself. Mama replies a few hours later. After her updates on the heat, on her sleeping patterns and fasting routine, on my sister and my nieces and nephews, she gently corrects my Arabic. So you know for next time, habibty. It’s fi alby and 3ala baaly. I write it down, knowing I will never commit it to memory. How much affection have we traded in broken grammar? Does it lessen the value of the words? Or maybe it elevates it, that effort in spite of the discomfort. The attempts to tell her, in her native tongue, just what she means to me. My memory is filled with a litany of traumatic language faux pas. There is the time, at 12, I stood in front of my entire extended family in my grandparents’ house in Alexandria and said, “ya koll had” when everyone who knows their Arabic knows it’s “ya kollokom.” There is the time, at 23, I left a voicemail for the seamstress who was making the bolero I would wear over my dress at my sister’s wedding. Arab etiquette dictates that, in any business transaction, you frontload your messages with layers of superlatives. We are obsessed with niceties. Why say thank you once when you can say it a hundred times in a thousand ways? Nervous as I was, I switched the subject and the object on one of those phrases. I said, “Ta’abtoona ma’akum” when I should have said “ta’abnako ma’ana”. Effectively, I told her, “You’ve caused me so much trouble” when I meant to say, “sorry for the trouble”. Arabic has a class of verbs, like French, that invert their subjects and objects. To say, I miss you in Arabic or French, you don’t say I miss you. You say, Tu me manque. Wahashteeny. You are lacking from me. The focus is on the object. And the lacking. The focus is on the one being missed. This is the source of my mistake above, when I insulted the poor seamstress. I thought in English. I started in the first person, with myself. My mother must have a litany of English mistakes, but she doesn’t dwell on them. I want to be eloquent. She wants to be understood. And so she has spoken in her second language to full lecture halls, government officials, principals, teachers, tv stations. Classes full of snarky 6th graders. To my mother, there is no ego in this equation. The message is more important than the medium. I think about the difficulties of conveying your heart in another language as I watch my children struggle to express themselves in the tongue of their ancestors. The inverted sentence structures. The sounds that come from different areas of the throat. There is the 7a and the kha and the gha and the qa and 3a. There is the soft t and the thick t, the soft d and the thick d, the soft s and the thick s, and on and on. I take my overwhelm and multiply it by orders of magnitude. I wonder if they hear the beauty in the simple Arabic poems my father used to recite. In the folk songs that lose so much in translation. In the verses of our holy book. I wonder about the loss of nuance. About the translation of both 7ub and wud as love, when there is more. Always more. My children are polite. They sit before me, eyes glazing over but bodies still, when I launch into impromptu explanations of Arabic linguistics. Did my mother feel this way about me, too? Let’s chat in the comments: * Do you struggle to communicate with a loved one? Is the communication a linguistic issue, or is it due to something else? Age? Culture? * How do you think language affects the way we think? And do you think language is changed by place? For example, is Arabic in Canada different than Arabic in Egypt? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    5 min

  7. 07/23/2024

    Tell me you have sisters

    If you enjoyed this post, hit that 🤍 button to help me reach more people. Thx! How to Spot a Girl-Family I grew up in a family of sisters, the third of four girls. Then my husband and I had two boys. The world looks different when you go from girl-sister to boy-mom. Today I’m exploring life as a girl-sister through vignettes of my born family. In a later essay, I’ll write about life as a boy-mom. 1- The family that cries together, stays together When I was pregnant with D, my sister Zeinab was pregnant with his cousin. In the summers, we all spent time at Mama and Baba’s house, piling onto the couches and beds. Someone always walking in or out of the backdoor, in or out of a bathroom, in or out of a conversation. I had a weepy pregnancy. Come to think of it, I was consistently weepy until I turned 35. Now, at 41, I’ve dried up. Shriveled? There are no more tears. I rage sometimes. I roll my eyes with frustration, but the tears are rare and precious gifts that overlook me. As if to say, there! you wanted to be free of us and now you are. How do you like that? That summer of the double pregnancy, I walked in one evening to find my other two sisters, Soraya and Aminah discussing open houses. Aminah lived in California. Soraya lived with me in Montreal. Why were they looking at houses? By this point, I’d been in Montreal two years, but my homesickness had not yet abated. I cornered Soraya. Promise me you’re not moving. You have to stay. Promise me. Promise. And the weeping began. Soraya was non-committal. Look, I don’t have plans to move, but I can’t promise anything either. She’s always been a vagabond. At 17, she finished high-school a semester early and absconded to Egypt, coming home with loud clothes and a louder voice, all brash comedy. Mid-way through the pandemic, she left me and went to London. My adult life can be charted by a series of repeat incidents of Soraya, leaving. Mama stopped tidying in the kitchen. Came and sat next to me. Held my heaving shoulders, started the ruqya. But a dam had been breached. The tears were tidal. Sobs wracked my whole body. I couldn’t get over the possibility of Soraya moving back to Ottawa, but if I could block it from my mind, perhaps my tears and I might reach a détente. The storm of emotion took thirty minutes to pass. By the end, I had the hiccups. Soraya and Aminah watched their every word, careful not to set me off again. That’s when Zeinab came down from her nap. How were the open houses? she asked brightly and they all leapt to their feet, waving their arms - danger! danger! Zeinab recoiled, not sure where the attack was coming from. Noha’s just barely calmed down, Mama told her, recounting the whole ordeal. To me, Zeinab’s response was the summation of what it means to grow up with sisters. I’ve been crying upstairs for the last 30 minutes. If I’d known, I would have come down so we could cry together. 2- Pregnant and hiding My sisters and I traded off being pregnant the way you trade off a relay race. Nausea. Food aversions. The smell of flowers delivered to the door by one fiancé sending another to the bathroom to throw up. The sight of chicken. The smell of chicken. The taste of chicken. Sometimes we didn’t trade off. Sometimes we broke the rules and decided to run the relay together. Zeinab and I spent hours in Mama and Baba’s walk-in closet, nestled between the hanging clothes, shifting this way and that to make room for our bellies. We didn’t start out in the closet of course, but in the hallway, where the smell of chicken and onions cooking on the stovetop threatened to send us into bouts of gagging. Step one would be to barricade ourselves in the first place we could find, which was my parents’ master bedroom. Step two would be to notice that the smell was still discernible to our oversensitive olfactory nerves. Step three would be to put another door between us for fortification. Step four would be to wait. Zeinab’s kids would inevitably find us, needing this or that. Complaining of a brother or a cousin who had hit them, taken their toy, said something mean. Close the door! Close the door! We’d say, in a panic, needing to protect our gag reflexes before we could mediate and send them on their way. The closet was stuffy, a cocoon of summer heat. The A/C hardly reached us. But we were back in each other’s confidence. The interruptions few and far between. And wasn’t that something like our childhood? Like the nights we’d spent, whispering late, taking turns falling in and out of sleep and waking? 3- Dolls and Pretend We never bought new Barbies when we were little. Mama would scout garage sales for cast-offs, dolls no longer loved by another little girl within a 6 block radius. We would fight over the blonde ones, but only if their hair hadn’t been chopped off. Someone was always stuck with Christie or Becky. We had lots of brand new paper-dolls, flimsy cutout cardboard drawings you could dress any way you wanted. For the office. For the park. I have a memory of sleeping over at Tante Lynne’s house, of her buying a new paper-doll for each of me and Soraya. Of eating candy and drinking hot chocolate. For all the paper-dolls we accumulated, only one entered our collective consciousness: Wishnik. Aminah, my oldest sister, had invented this name out of thin air. Long after Wishnik the doll was gone, Aminah played pretend as Wishnik the schoolgirl. In the game, she was a naughty student who had to be scolded by a stern teacher named Mrs. Soraya. Soraya was maybe 6 at the time, and there was nothing she loved more than scolding her oldest sister. Wishnik! You didn’t write your name neatly enough! Wishnik, come back and clean up your desk! Wishnik, why didn’t you finish your homework? Mrs. Soraya’s arms would be folded across her chest, her eye-brow perpetually arched, her lips pursed. Aminah was game then and she’s game now. She’s always been the sweetest, the smiley-est, the easiest to amuse. I keep saying when I grow up I want to be Aminah, but I’m grown now and I’m still much more snarky than she’s ever been. 4- Thirteen Tangents Here is a story that has been told repeatedly to illustrate conversational dynamics in the Beshir household. One night over dinner, many moons ago, one of my sisters started to tell us all about something that had happened at school that day. Twenty-five minutes later, Baba quietly interrupted us all to say “thirteen”. We stopped to look at him. Thirteen what? Thirteen is an unlucky number, but we don’t believe in luck? Thirteen servings of bissilla. Thirteen rides to school and back? Thirteen tangents, Baba told us, since the sister in question had started to tell her story. And we still weren’t at the end. Poor Baba has always been the ragil ghalban in the midst of five female voices, the outnumbered, out-talked, out-storied man. But Baba is a girl-dad, through and through. He may never have untangled the knots in our hair, but he taught each of us to ride our bikes, and then he took us for long rides along the river. Or he played soccer against us and our friends, one to 7, and dribbled the ball as though it was tied by a dainty little rope to his foot, a dance partner, refusing to leave him. Or he watched hockey with us, and tennis with us, and Columbo and Get Smart with us. Or he bought us secret ice creams at the mall before dinner, secret donuts at Tims on the way home, picking us up late from the bus stop when we had to stay at the library, working on group assignments. Baba is my inverse identity, a man with a wife and daughters to my woman with a husband and sons. I look to his example when I’m struggling to read a complicated Lego manual, when the boys are yapping my ears off about an obscure Batman villain. I look to Baba’s shrugged shoulders, to his pretend resignation hiding secret delight. He loves every minute. I know this because I do too. Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A shoutout to our newest paid subscriber, Karima. Thanks so much for the support, Karima! A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week, and my full archive. If you’re enjoying my perspective and want to support me, consider upgrading to help me spend more time on writing and share a voice that isn’t often heard. If you can’t commit to a monthly subscription, but still want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee below. It helps me more than you realize. Let’s chat in the comments: * Do you have sisters or brothers? Was your family dominated by one or the other? How did it affect the vibe in your house? * Were you an emotional kid? Are you still emotional? Has your threshold changed as you grew? * Were you a mama’s boy or a daddy’s girl? How did that manifest for you? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  8. 07/17/2024

    A bruised hijabi

    I am looking at my face in the bathroom mirror at 5:45 on Wednesday morning. The bruise on my right cheekbone is more pronounced than the night before. It gives the impression of contouring, of those fake Kardashian cheekbones I don’t have. I press on it gingerly, waiting for the feedback of the pain. Will my Nars tinted lotion be enough to cover this? My other hand comes up to the red-brown on my chin. This one whines like a high-frequency radio station, the feedback sharp and sudden. No Nars will cover it. Riding my bike home from work last week, I miscalculate the height of the curb and go down hard. My right side takes most of the impact - cheek, chin, knee, both palms for good measure. By the time I untangle myself from the bike, there’s a crowd of 7 or 8 around me. Water bottles are offered, pupils checked. What day is it? Where are you? Thankfully, I know the answers — there is no concussion. My phone and my glasses, by some miracle, aren’t broken. I call M, who comes to retrieve me and the bike. The ringing in my opposite ear doesn’t stop for ten minutes. When it does, the sound waves are replaced by waves of pain and pressure. The right side of my jaw may have taken the impact, but the left side is suffering the after-effects, silent but screaming. At home we apply ice and Advil. Call my mom-in-law for a virtual consult, take down instructions to rest. No chewing, no stretching or yawning. “Think of this like an ankle sprain for your jaw.” The emergency having passed, I am on to the next worry. What do you think of when you see a bruised hijabi? Is her husband beating her? Did her dad trap her in a room for refusing to marry a man 20 years her senior? My mind is filled with snatches of scenes from the procedurals I’ve flipped away from on TV. Brown women with light eyes, poorly wrapped hijabs, and thick accents. Bruises painted on their cheeks at exactly the spot mine sits. “I fell down the stairs,” the woman on the tv says, unconvincingly. The white detective raises an eyebrow. He cares so much that he stays after her terrorist husband/brother/father until the bad guy slips. By the end of the episode, the woman’s face will have healed. She’ll stop by the precinct to thank her white saviour. She is free. She is in America. What more could she ask? What do you think of when you see a bruised hijabi? Do you think she might have fallen cycling? Do you ever picture a hijabi cycling? Swimming? Paddling along down a river? Exhibit one of why I assume the worst: My father has four daughters. He is a tall Arab man with a beard. Because he has been happily married for 50 years, and he’s a girl dad four times over, he is often surrounded by women. It has happened more times than I care to admit that we’ll be out and a stranger will say something about my dad and his wives, looking over to me and my sisters. I have no broken bones, no open wounds. I have no need for a hospital, and if I did I’d have an embarrassing number from which to choose. I stay home and ice my face and rest in the air conditioning. I take multiple paid sick days. M goes to the grocery store and calls me (perfect reception on our functioning cell phones.) Do I want corn chowder soup? Minestrone? Chicken noodle? I turn down each one — I’m not in the mood, and I have cupboards full of food I can slurp right here at home. I start with the cherries I love so much - bite through them with my front teeth and gum them up by pressing down on them with the roof of my mouth. I imagine I am woman who’s teeth are gone, and who can’t find her dentures. The juices release. I can swallow the cherries down, nearly whole. The red skid marks on my cheek fade in 3 days, but my chin takes longer. I search longingly in the mirror. Is my jaw tilted to the right? If that was the case, wouldn’t I feel it? Or is the bruise under my chin swelling on one side, making me lopsided? In the grand scheme of things, my jaw is fine, and yet I can’t look away from the slight asymmetry. I saw a picture last week of a little girl in Gaza whose jaw had been blown off one side of her face. Two days later, I saw another picture of her, post stitches, a bandage holding things together, and I thought of Picasso. I read an article about doctors performing surgery in rooms so hot, their sweat drips into their open patients. Flies buzz around the operating theater. There is no electricity. There is no anesthetic. I wonder about our capacity to care. I wonder if I’ve lost you, my reader. If your sympathy is blunted. If you feel as though I’ve taken advantage of your concern for me, a woman on a bike (personal, relatable) to instead give you a lecture about tens of thousands of dead Palestinians (political, not what you signed up for). Do we still have room in our hearts for this? Are we too tired to hear and read about it? Do we all just want it to go away? Let’s chat in the comments: * This whole essay felt very navel-gazing to me, the point where I thought about not sharing it. The reason is that I know it shows just how much I care what other people think. Do you care what other people think? Do you worry that someone will see something in you and jump to conclusions? * What do you do with your feelings of privilege? Do you express gratitude and leave it at that? Or does your privilege lead you to a sort of survivor’s guilt? I’m trying to find the balance between these two points for myself and would love to hear how others manage it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min
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I share the joys and challenges of being a Muslim Woman in a sometimes unfriendly world. Exploring the multi-generational immigrant experience at the intersection of mental health, motherhood, and faith. nohabeshir.substack.com

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