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Finding Stillness on the Rug
We are often told that prayer is a sanctuary—a brief, quiet retreat from the friction of the world. And in its essence, it is. But if I am being honest, in the middle of a restless afternoon, it can feel like one more weight on an already full day. Sometimes, the adhan doesn’t sound like an invitation; it sounds like a clock counting down the moments I don’t have. The Friction of Focus In a home with ten children, “silence” is a luxury I rarely find. I have stood in prayer while a toddler used my dress as a tent. I have recited verses while my mind was calculating how…
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Laundry, We Will Always Have Laundry
There is a woman—me— with a house full of twelve people. Alhamdulillah. It is loud. It is full. It is alive. And always— we have a hill of laundry. I fold. I sort. I have my kids on folding duties. Small hands matching socks, older ones complaining in silence, everyone moving somewhere between help and chaos. And somehow, it still multiplies in the dark. Sometimes we fold as best as we can and just tuck things into drawersthe ones we promise we will revisit in six months. Maybe. We fold once a week, on the weekend. Five, six, seven,basketfuls of clothing. It is an everlasting job. Sometimes, I just close…
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My TV Memory Lane, from Oshin to Si Komo
Memory is a funny thing. When I look back at my childhood in Indonesia, I often lump all my favorite shows into one giant, sunny morning. But if I’m being honest, they didn’t all happen at once. They were a patchwork—some were for Sunday mornings, some were for rainy Tuesday afternoons, some for those times after school, and others were the quiet, heavy dramas we watched with our parents in the evening. They didn’t just occupy a timeslot; they occupied different seasons of my soul. Oshin Taught Me About The Lessons of Resilience: If I think about my very first “telenovela” experience, it wasn’t a glitzy soap opera. It was…
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How I Feed 12 People Every Week (The Logistics of Barakah)
People say the kitchen is the heart of the home. In a house of twelve, the kitchen is something else entirely. It hums. It spills. It overflows. It is less a heart and more a high-traffic terminal … where someone is always arriving, leaving, asking, hungry, or waiting. Between ten children (from a twenty-year-old with a real appetite to a three-year-old who survives on whims), my husband, and me, we are not just cooking meals. We are managing an ecosystem. Somewhere between the rice cooker and the sink full of cups, I realized: this was never meant to be done alone. Feeding a large family is not about culinary perfection.…
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Iqra, When My Mind Is Full
A quiet reminder for the days when everything feels like too much. When my mind is full, I don’t usually think about revelation. I think about what’s next. Who needs what. What I forgot. What I’m already late for. My thoughts move quickly—like tabs opening and closing faster than I can keep up. And in the middle of that noise, it’s hard to imagine a cave. A quiet place. A single word. Iqra. Read. In a world that constantly demands we do—to produce, to cook, to manage, to solve—it feels like a quiet mercy that the very first command given to our Prophet ﷺ was not a list of instructions.…
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The Forty Days Postpartum Rest We Forgot
We spend nine months preparing the nursery, but we spend zero minutes preparing our souls for the “void” that comes after the storm of birth. In Java, where my roots are, we don’t “prepare” for postpartum with a shopping list; we prepare with a shift in tempo. There is a quiet, deeply practiced understanding that a mother must be held for forty days. Traditionally, her body is considered “open” and her energy fragile. She is surrounded by her mother or her mother-in-law—whoever brings her the most peace. There are helpers, traditional masseuses, the warming heat of Jamu tonics, and specific foods designed to “seal” the body back together. But for…
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Birth and The Raw Truth of Surrender
I have birthed ten children. My journey has taken me from a delivery room in Surabaya, through the busy hospitals of Riyadh, into the sacred quiet of my own bathtub at home in Riyadh, and finally to a hospital room in Sharjah. I have been the woman handled like a procedure on a hospital bed, and I have been the woman surrendering to the water in her own home—bringing life into the world on her own terms. If I could sit you down in my home today, I wouldn’t teach you how to prepare a “birth plan.” I would give you the truth about what it actually means to surrender…
