My first divorce was because I wouldn't have sex with him,
But there were a lot of things I didn’t understand.
My family didn’t tell me anything.
I didn’t know anything at all.
To the extent that I wasn’t quite sure what the bridal cloth was for.
domestic violece; gender violence; physcial violence; sex; motherhood; addiction; social pressure; marriage; divorce

I just finished reading one of your stories,
About a mother who body shamed her daughter.
My relationship with my mother has been traumatic.
My mother always did the same thing:
She’d make fun of how I looked generally,
Not just my weight,
Even though I wasn’t fat before I got married,
But she always said I looked poor.

He was always suspicious of me.
Whenever he went out, he’d wedge a single hair between the door and the doorframe.
When he’d get back home, he’d check the door to see if I’d gone out.
His suspicions were very hard to deal with.
When God was going to bless us with a baby, my husband gave me an ultimatum: “It’s either me or the baby.”
So, I went and got an abortion.
motherhood, social stigma, domestic violence, prison, physical violence

I work in the field of life coaching and training.
I’m not from Cairo.
I’m from Upper Egypt,
From Minya specifically.
I came here alone.
Meaning I left behind my family—
And I come from a big family—
And my job, life, and friends.
And I’m a sociable person,
And I like maintaining close relationships with people.
So, my family and friends mean the world to me.

Why tie yourself down with a kid when you’re divorced?
No one will want to marry you.
It’s better that her father and grandmother raise her.
She’d belong to them and you could finally live your life freely.

I have been suffering, even before I got married, from a disease in my uterus.
It prevents me from having children.
I underwent several operations in the hopes that, one day, I could be a mother.
The disease also induced other health-related problems.
Being sterile makes me feel like a second-rate woman.
motherhood, social pressure, social stigma

I got married shortly after graduation.
I hadn’t yet figured out what marriage really meant.
I found out he was a psychopath after we got married.
He started hitting me three days into our marriage.
He cursed me and accused me of infidelity.
He humiliated me in every sense of the word.
motherhood, marriage, divorce

I spent 10 Eids and 10 holidays in prison.
The day before Eid makes everyone sad.
That was the case for the cell I was in.
Everyone would be sad from the day before Eid until the following morning.
prison, motherhood

Every day, I feel guilty towards my daughter.
There was a time in my life when, unfortunately, I had looked up to certain people in my life and felt that I had to act like them.
One of those people was a cousin of mine.

There was an uproar on Facebook a while back over the group rape of children at a school.
The children were forcefully gathered and put together in one place.
It’s said that they were put on the roof once, and in the school theatre another time.
There were a lot of rumors surrounding the incident,
So it wasn’t clear what exactly happened.