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The Eid Al-Adha 2026 Allah Chose for Me
The Unexpected First Day of Eid There is an Eid we imagine. The one where everyone wakes up healthy. The children are dressed beautifully. The prayer goes smoothly. The food is ready on time. The family photo turns out perfectly. And then there is the Eid Allah chooses for us. This year, the two were not quite the same. On the morning of Eid al-Adha, the sound of takbir drifted through the humid air in Sharjah while I sat curled up on the downstairs sofa. A sudden stomach pain arrived unexpectedly when I woke up for Fajr, bringing my plans to a sudden halt. I had planned to be at…
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Nobody Claps for the Mother Who Remembered Everything
Nobody claps for the mother who remembered everything. Usually, they only notice the one thing she forgot. It’s the child suddenly announcing at 9 PM that they need green cardboard for school tomorrow. It’s the “Mama, did you sign this?” paper appearing exactly when everyone is already wearing shoes. But beneath those frantic moments is a vast, silent ocean of things that did happen because you remembered them: the favorite snack you bought, the way everyone’s different food preferences live permanently inside your brain, and the small emotional tensions you noticed before they ever became arguments. I don’t think most families do this maliciously. Invisible labor becomes invisible precisely because…
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Faith Is Also Built on Ordinary Tuesdays
I think when I was younger, I imagined faith would feel more cinematic than it actually does. I imagined spiritually strong people as calm and refreshed all the time. People who prayed every salah with perfect focus. People who read Quran peacefully for long stretches without interruption. People who woke up for tahajjud with glowing skin and emotional stability. I thought closeness to Allah would feel quiet and uninterrupted. But adulthood, especially motherhood, feels very different from that. On a Tuesday morning in Sharjah, faith sometimes looks like searching frantically for one specific white school sock while the clock is ticking and we should have left the house five minutes…
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Ordinary Mondays Feel Like Mercy
Today I opened WhatsApp to do one thing. I still do not know what that thing was. Somewhere between replying to a cousin, checking a message from another mother, and opening Telegram for a school update, my original reason for picking up the phone disappeared completely. For the past couple of weeks, the sky had been quiet. No interceptions. No sudden sounds overhead. Just stillness—the kind of stillness that slowly tricks you into believing life has returned to its normal rhythm again. Then last Monday, there were a few interceptions again. Suddenly, the Telegram school groups became alive all over again. The groups themselves are actually very organized; alhamdulillah, only…
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An Example of My Jumbled Mind (The Forty-Tab Brain)
I talk a lot about having “forty tabs open,” but let’s be real—it isn’t just about being busy. It’s a survival mission that lives entirely inside my head. And look, I’m not trying to make myself sound like the center of the universe. I know, deep down, that life would go on even without me. The world doesn’t stop because a mom takes a break. I also don’t want to belittle the massive part my husband and kids play in keeping this family moving—they are the ones spinning the wheels every day. But even when the wheels are rotating perfectly, the mental load is just… there. It’s the invisible architecture.…
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The Trail I’m Leaving Behind
I really have to share why I started Barakah Roots—not as a “brand” or a project, but so you can understand why I am here, opening up my house and my head to you. I was born in 1981. I’m a child of that bridge generation—the ones who remember the silence of a house before the internet lived in our pockets. Now, it’s 2026. I live in Sharjah, managing a house of twelve. Ten children. A multicultural marriage where we are constantly translating our very souls across different languages and unspoken codes. Most days, I am the logistics officer for a small army. My mind is a Forty-Tab Brain. I’m…
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The Tuna Heist and the Moussaka’ah Mistake
Before I was the mom of ten, I was a girl with a tangled tongue in a very cold room. My husband and I were traveling to California to meet his parents. They hadn’t been at our wedding; they had never seen my face. This wasn’t just a trip; it was a Grand Opening. And looking back, it was the first real test of my Hayaa, my nerves, and my stomach. The Tangle of Tongue The US Embassy room was clinical and freezing. I sat there, a new bride, feeling the heavy weight of a secret: a tiny life was already beginning inside me. When the interviewer asked about my…
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Hayaa in a Loud World
Hayaa is often translated as modesty.Bashfulness.But for me, lately I realize thatit has never been just about what I wear. It is a feeling.A boundary.A quiet awareness.A secret cave. I’ll be honest,be truly honest.I don’t show much.I don’t always know how. There is a bashfulness that sits heavy on my tongue,making me shy to reveal my needs,shy to say what’s in my heart,shy to let the world see that I am tired. I used to wonder:Am I being too difficult?Is my silence a barrier to love?Am I expecting them to read my mind? I stayed quiet to avoid being a nag.I stayed quiet to keep the peace.But I am learning…
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The 10:00 AM Ramadan Heist
We like to think of our childhood memories as deeply spiritual milestones. But if I’m being truly honest? One of my most vivid Ramadan memories involves a storage room, a locked door, and a very poorly timed snack. I wasn’t even hungry. That’s the funny part. It was only 10:00 AM. But the house was quiet, the day felt long, and I was… bored. And in the mind of an eight-year-old, the best cure for boredom is a forbidden banana. I remember the strategy. I snatched the fruit and made a run for the storage room—that dark sanctuary of old suitcases and dust. I didn’t just hide; I locked the…
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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.…
