Jul 23, 2019
Finding My Freedom Within Marriage and Motherhood
Navigating the burdens of expectation as a married woman in Nigeria
Navigating the burdens of expectation as a married woman in Nigeria
The story is no longer me and my vehicles but my mother and hers. We called it an accident, but it wasn’t.
Spending my childhood preparing for the Apocalypse exacted a price on my ability to trust, particularly in the concept of family.
“Dealing with someone else’s culture, someone else’s media, and trying to Americanize it is something I can’t understand.”
I’m longing for the day when folk like me and Trayvon and Korryn and Lennon and Aiyana and Botham don’t need to be lucky to stay alive.
Wrestling never stops, so I couldn’t stop, and thus I am still here.
My relationship with food was a combination of deep love, reverence, and guilt—making it impossible for me to give it up.
A part of me, the part trained to put my father first, thought I should allow him into my home, regardless of his threats.
Like a drawing is and is not mine once I’m finished with it, my son is not mine, not really, because he is himself.
A new period in my life started when Abu could no longer fast for Ramadan.
Well, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The answer so often is, simply: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that it actually matters, anyway.
As biracial people, my husband and I should know how to raise a mixed-race child. But I find myself wondering just how much I’ve figured out.
The secret of the beauty of our bodies is slowly starting to get out, becoming less and less niche each day. And I hope it moves faster.
After you have a preemie, but before you get to take your baby home, the world keeps going without you. It’s shocking, honestly, how much the world keeps going.
Rozha fled an abusive marriage, and survived the death of her son. Now she claims what is hers.
It felt as though I had been evicted from my own body, and it had been trashed in my absence. My resentment was as precise as any recipe.
I want to believe that I inherited too ways of feeling joy, ways of finding pleasure, ways of being with other queers in raucous and wild ways.
“I found myself dwelling on these parts of Korean culture as a way to reconnect with my identity and also the memory of my mom.”
Suddenly, miraculously, it was no longer dismay that I felt. It was freedom. It was Death doffing its blackness and revealing itself to me as life.
In the battered barbershop chair, Faris sits slightly camouflaged and crumpled, as though he is a mystery even to himself.
