I wanted to be a boy when I was young.
My brother and our cousins would be allowed to play in the garden behind our house until late, but not me.
They used to hop the fence, play hooky, then come back and lie about it, make up stories.
As for me, if I even so much as tried to call my cousin at night they’d tell me
“Why? Aren’t you going to see each other tomorrow morning?

I got married after 6 years of being in love.
During that time,
I found out he was cheating on me with the live-in maid,
Who took care of his mother.
I confronted him at first,
but he denied it.

My father used to beat me up pretty badly over trivial things.
I used to get beaten if I used the bathroom too many times at school,
Or for telling my teacher that my father was being hard on me.

I had just turned thirty.
Fifteen years ago,
It wasn’t normal to be single at the age of thirty.
At every wedding I went to, my aunts would tell me,
“We hope you’re next, dear.
May God reward your patience.”
They’d say it with sorrowful eyes,
You know the look.
domestic violence, gender violence, physical violence, motherhood, marriage, divorce

My parents separated when I was young.
My mom, my sister, and I were living happily after the separation,
Until my mom got remarried.
I couldn’t bear living with her when she got married,
So my father sent me to live with my grandma.
I wish I had never gone.
My grandmother and aunt both gave me a hard time.
I would cry myself to sleep every day,
Because of how they treated me.

I was in middle school then.
My little sister, who was three years younger than me, was also in middle school.
I was in 9th grade and she was in 7th grade.
My mother is ignorant and uneducated.
She harms others and herself.
She was never loved by her parents or siblings.
Girls to her were mere servants to their brothers, their mothers and their fathers.

Unlike most girls, I never had any expectations or dreams about my wedding night. Nor did I exert any effort to think of what would happen once I was alone with my husband—whom I hardly knew—for the first time.

When my father died,
My brother decided he’d be the man of the house.
That didn’t mean that he’d help us.
It meant my sisters and I would be his servants.

I was always humiliated and beaten up over the most trivial reasons.
He’d hit me and flip the dining table over if there was just a little extra salt in his food.
I was never allowed to open my mouth and give my opinion.
Cooking zucchini was always a frightening experience, because if just one piece of zucchini turned out smaller than the other, it’d be a disaster.

If, while baba was beating me, I cried, he’d hit me again for crying.
“If you cry, you’ll get hit. Men don’t cry”, he’d tell me.
Whenever he beat me, my main concern was to not cry.