Eastern European Muslim

"Did you write it about me?" - said my friend with tears in her sparkling blue eyes that still carried all the enthusiasm I have always known her for but also a deep sadness. She referred to my piece "My three friends and other women". "I had no idea about you, darling" - I told her surprised. Then she started to speak about all the humiliation and suppression she had to endure the past years. "There's also her" she told me about another friend who had recently divorced, with very strong reasons "and actually there are many more couples peacemakers are attending regularly nowadays." My first reaction was: "why?" Why do peacemakers attend couples of 10+, 20+ years, explaining the unexplainable, sticking to the letters of the law while gaslighting women's feelings and inducing guilt in them? Actually, wrong question. Wrong and naive. Why? Because that's what's convenient for men. They realised this is...

First time I recognised it was at the birth of my second child. I had a female doctor back with my first delivery too, but that was completely different. I felt surrendered to outer forces. My husband at my head telling me which supplications to say and my doctor, an older, respectable lady at my legs, telling me when to breathe and to push. And there I was, in the middle, just following orders while an immeasurable pain was tearing me apart. It was followed by two years of untreated depression and utter emotional neglect and my only happiness was the smile of my child. My second baby was born in a very different way. I was alone. My soon (well, officially 2 more years) to be ex husband was already gone for months and I had to leave the apartment we were living in. We moved to a southern town to my mother's small house and I gave birth in a country hospital where I knew the head of the neonatology and pediatric departments. That was a privilege but without husband, with...