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The Quiet Vulnerability of Financial Dependence
Sometimes I stand holding an item in a store for far too long before quietly putting it back. Not necessarily because we cannot afford it. But because I am already mentally tired imagining how to explain why it matters. I think many women understand this feeling immediately. The small internal rehearsal. How to make the request sound reasonable enough. Necessary enough. Useful enough. Worth asking for. Especially when the thing is not pure survival. A notebook. A new prayer dress. Comfortable shoes. Skincare. An iced matcha. Containers you genuinely believe will finally organize your life this time. Tiny things. Tiny things that help tired women emotionally survive adulthood. And honestly,…
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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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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 Books That Built Me
Before I was a mother of ten in Sharjah, I was just a girl in Indonesia with a book in my hand… and a very specific obsession. British stories. I know exactly how it started. My paternal grandfather and grandmother were the ones who paved the way. I still remember my first encyclopedia; my grandmother bought it from a walking salesgirl who came to our door every month for a year. My grandma paid for it in installments—month by month, page by page—investing in my mind before I even knew what a “future” was. Then there was the time in Grade 2. I had broken my arm at school and…
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Rewatching Titanic as a Grown Muslim Woman
Around 10:00 PM, the house is finally quiet. My kids sleep early (Alhamdulillah), so by then, the noise of the day—voices, footsteps, little arguments—has softened into stillness. I sit with my laptop, the glow of the screen lighting up the room, and decide to watch Titanic again. I remember watching it twice in the cinema back in the 90s. Back then, it was everything. And yes… I had a huge crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. Watching it now? He’s… very meh And that alone tells me how much has changed. I’m not watching it as a girl dreaming of escape anymore. I’m watching it as a wife of twenty years. A…
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Vulnerability as a Woman’s Strength
In our Deen, the roles of men and women carry a divine logic that is both simple and profound. The husband is the provider and protector—the Qawwam. The woman is the heart of the home, the one who nurtures and builds what cannot always be seen. On paper, the balance is clear. But in the lived reality of a long marriage, the heart often feels the gravity of that arrangement. The Smallness of Asking There is a specific kind of vulnerability that comes with not having your own income. It’s quiet. Subtle. Hard to explain to those who haven’t stood in those shoes. It shows up in the smallest moments.…
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The Lockdown Chronicles (Part 3): The Lonely Hallway and the Chorus of Cries
The adrenaline of a home birth makes you feel invincible—until it wears off. Then, reality hits. Heavy. Sudden. Cold. After that surreal car ride—with my newborn in towels and my eldest son holding the placenta in a bucket—we reached the Emergency Room. I was wheeled through sliding doors into a world that felt alien. Everything was masked and sterile. The silence wasn’t peaceful; it was tense. The Separation Almost immediately, the doctors found my baby’s blood sugar was low. Before I could even process that he was finally here, he was gone. Straight to the NICU. My own body began to buckle under the trauma. My blood pressure spiked, and…
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The Lockdown Chronicles (Part 2): Six Computers and a Car Ride
If you ask me what it was like to be pregnant during the peak of 2020… I have to be honest. I don’t really remember it. Not clearly, anyway. The months blur together into one long, exhausting hum. When you are managing an indoor plastic playground, rationing eggs, worrying about family across the ocean, and trying to keep eight children sane during a lockdown—your brain simply switches into survival mode. There was no sitting quietly, holding my belly, or journaling about the pregnancy. My body was just… doing its job. It was quietly growing a life, while everything else around me felt loud, frantic, and overwhelming. The Madrasati Chaos By…
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The Lockdown Chronicles (Part 1): “Shollu Fi Rihalikum” and the Great Egg Hunt
In late 2019, as whispers of a strange new virus started making the news, I was busy doing something I had waited years to do: I was relearning how to drive in Saudi Arabia. By December, I had passed my test. By early January 2020, I was holding my official driver’s license. I felt a surge of freedom. The open roads of Riyadh were finally mine. And then, just a few weeks later, the entire world stopped. Lockdown. My brand new driver’s license stayed tucked in my wallet, useless. Malls closed. Parks closed. The roads I was so excited to drive on were suddenly empty, heavily guarded by police checkpoints.…
