“Just get the hard part over and done with, make sure you get a big epidural, and after that, it’s going to be amazing.”
“Sounds like you want kids one day?” Samirah asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve never really thought about it before. My mother wasn’t the best mom. She tried, I guess. She did her best. She worked really hard to put food on the table and to pay school fees, but she was very critical of me, you could say. She treated my sister and me very differently, as if my sister was better than me or something.”
Samirah looked at me for the longest time. “It makes sense then that you would go looking for admiration and affirmation online from strangers,” she said quietly.
I smiled at her. “Are you a psychologist too?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not. But for the record, you’d make a great mom.”
“Nah, I don’t think so.”
“Look how you took care of Harun, you’re maternal!”
I smiled wryly. “Trust me, that surprised me.”
“I’m sure a lot of things have surprised you lately,” she said in that mysterious, sagey voice of hers again.
There was a pause in the conversation. A serious one.
“Can I ask you something?” Samirah enquired in a soft voice.
“I guess.”
“What were you thinking about at meditation?”
“Um . . .” I paused for a while before I spoke. Trying to figure out whether or not to tell her. I met her green eyes and she gave me one of those kind smiles of hers, the kind that you knew meant she cared. And I knew I could tell her. “I was thinking about when I was younger how I was bullied a lot. The kids teased me nonstop because I was much bigger than I am now and it was . . .awful.”
A meaningful silence filled the car.
“That kind of thing really stays with you.” Samirah broke the silence.
“You too?” I asked.
“Try being a darker-skinned Muslim girl at a mainly white school.”
We looked at each other for a while; it didn’t feel like we needed to say more. Explain further. We each understood being treated as an outsider in our own ways.
She gave me a smile. “You know, my mother used to say to me that true beauty is defined by how we treat each other, it has nothing to do with what we look like on the outside.”
“Wow. I wish someone had told me that when I was growing up,” I said. “Things might have been different for me.”
“Things were exactly how they were supposed to be,” Samirah said.
“What do you mean?” I raised my brows at her.
“You were meant to go through what you went through, because it made you stronger,” she declared.
“Did it? Really?”
“Well, look at you. Leaving all that crap behind. Independent woman in a new town with a new job, starting a new adventure.”
I nodded. “I hadn’t thought about it like that. I sort of just thought I was running away in fear.”
“You did in the beginning. But look at you now, you’re running towards something unknown, fearlessly. You just helped a sheep give birth!”
“I guess I did.” I beamed at her. “We’ve totally become friends, haven’t we?”
