From the blog Ex-Hijabi.  Those who do not understand or cannot comprehend the circumscribed life of a Muslim woman should take the time to read this article.  It made me both angry and sad. Angry because women should not be living as second class citizens or treated like servants and sad because the treatment that this woman got is not a fraction as bad as many women are treated in the Islamic world.  The respect for which this person holds her mother and the strong desire not to live like her shines out from this piece.

Ex Hijabi said:

“My mother is great at oral storytelling. She’s better than anybody I know. And I have to admit. I’m jealous. Because even at the mere mention of public speaking, my heart beats madly in my chest. I’ve taken speech classes and have done countless book reports standing at the front of the class, and my voice still wavers. I trip over my words, stumble through passages I can say better in my head. I used to hate raising my hand in class because I hated the sound of my voice in other people’s ears. I can only now stand it when I’m sitting down. And when I confess this all to my mother, she says she’s the same way, but I have a hard time believing it.

I love it when she tells us happy stories. When it’s late at night and we can only see her by the orange light peeking out from the hallway. She comes into our room, telling us about a funny memory of a friend or an old fairy tale from her home. And the way that she says it, you’re there. You’re standing in that story, with those characters. And when she can’t contain her smiles, you giggle. And when she laughs, you listen, because she has the best laughs. No one’s laughs contain as much joy as my mother’s. And she’s so good at storytelling, so much better than any book I have ever read that when it’s over, I want to beg her to stay.“Tell us another one, please.”

I love it when she tells us scary stories. We’re in our blankets, wrapped up tight. She’s sitting on the floor, her back against the wall. Her stories always sound true and though I know they aren’t, there is always a part of myself that believes they are. When she tells it, she goes quiet at the right moments, lowering her voice until we have to lean forward to hear her. And then she delivers the punch, painting an image so terrifying, closing our eyes would do nothing to protect us. Her scary stories always have some sort of moral in them, too. The one that stressed the importance of listening to your mother? The kid in it died after disobeying his and three days later, he sat up in his grave with a donkey head, scaring off nearby wanderers. And it never makes sense, but we love it. And though it is my father who used to always take us to the library, I think my mother is the reason why I love writing stories so much.

My mother is great at everything.

I truly believe that. She is the best chef, the best hairstylist, the best teacher, the best author, the best interior designer, the best mother. And yet…

I don’t want to be her.

I must be crazy, because she’s perfect in almost everything, but her perfection is only limited by the role she was raised to play. A role I want nothing to do with. My mother had her life stamped on her forehead before she was born. My mother, the only girl of four, was charged with the task of motherhood before her first period. My mother, whose schoolwork suffered, always tells me to stay in school. The day I complained about homework, I told her, “Why does this matter? I’m going to be a housewife anyway.” And for that one moment, she took off her mask and stared directly into the muddy brown eyes she gave me. “Take school seriously,” she said. “Don’t do what I did.”

Because while my mother is the best chef, the best hairstylist, the best teacher, the best author, the best interior designer, the best mother, she was also depressed. She spent so much time in bed. I remember the familiar look of her maternal hips outlining the thin shawl she covered herself in. I remember the way that she didn’t even let her face poke out, as if her bedroom walls were too much for her to look at. I remember she spent hours in bed until she had to get up to be the best chef, the best hairstylist, the best teacher, the best author. I remember how much I loved it when she was in bed. I remember climbing over her, burying myself into her warmth and talking to her shoulder blades. I remember the way she ached from loneliness, how she relied on me and my siblings to connect her to the world. I remember how she desired babies and religion because she didn’t know anything else.

I remember how she fought against herself, trying desperately to raise me and my sisters to be strong and independent. Go to school, get that degree, support yourself. I remember how her patriarchal upbringing won out, how she compared us to the girls in town. Why don’t you dress like that? Why can’t you cook? Why are you so lazy?

            What kind of man would ever want you as his wife?

I remember until I don’t want to anymore.

During my first semester in college, I signed up for a class that I didn’t know just to take it with a friend. I was still new to the whole process of adults trusting us to be adults that I didn’t check what the class was, I just signed up for it. I think it was about interpersonal speech, but the way our teacher taught us, you might have thought it was a course on feminism or how not to be a bad person. In between lessons, she drilled into our ears lessons that would follow us for days like a shadow we didn’t know we had until the sun moved or we moved and it caught our eye. I learned more in those three months than I did in my whole life and now, years later, the one thing that sticks in my head is this sentence in the book. One that she might have skipped over in class but found its way to me anyway.

“We don’t appreciate it when we ask you to call us women, and you insist on calling us girls.”

And at the time, I thought it was stupid. I rolled my eyes. I could see the woman who had said this in my head. Some faceless, college educated “Femi-nazi” who had nothing better to do. There are worse things than being called a girl. And then I let it go, but it followed me, trailed after me, stuck to my shoe like a piece of pink bubble gum I couldn’t scrape off. It sat at the back of my head until it sat at the front. And then I’m back at my old school and my Islamic Studies teacher is telling us that in Islam, it is a man’s job to provide for the woman. And then I’m sixteen, first job and getting paid and my mother, too embarrassed to ask my father, wonders how much I got paid and would I give her a little?

And then I’m eighteen, and a relative I only just met asks for my hand in marriage. And then I’m twenty and my father’s on the phone with another marriage proposal, reminding me my mother was twenty when she chose him and I wonder if they were just biding their time, waiting for me to finish my second decade of life until they could ship me out. And my mother says to take school seriously, but you won’t be young forever. Girls I grew up with are becoming mothers. Their introduction to womanhood was through the price they negotiated to be his wife. Their college degrees are now the decoration they hold over the dinner they spent all day making. And then they will soon become my mother, limited by the role their parents stamped on their forehead. And sure, my mother dropped out of high school and they graduated from university, but what is the difference if they both have to ask their husbands to give them money and “yes, sweetheart, I’ll be home by then and not a minute later.”

And I don’t want that.”

Read the rest at:

http://exhijabi.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/my-mother-is-the-best-at-everything/