I used to tell myself that we’d be better off,
If my mama left him.
We had our share of violence.
We used to get beaten with a belt,
And any other object along the way,
Until I would pee myself.
I still remember when he broke my finger when I was young.
He wouldn’t take me to the hospital for two days,
Thinking it was just a bruise,
Then it turned out to be a fracture.

My cousin used to molest me when I was 6.
I didn’t understand until I was older.
gender violence, sexual violence, child molestation, parents

I am a mother now.
I didn’t realize how tired I’d be.
I didn’t know what the fear would be like.
Because mothers get scared.
When I was a child,
I didn’t know how scared my mother would get,
When dealing with a situation.
Or that she did certain things out of fear.
The kind of fear mothers experience is present 24/7.

“Why do you talk to boys?
Why’d we send you to an all-girls school then?”

I was brought up to be a doctor.
That’s why I love science.
I became really good at it,
And was famous for being a good student at school.
My parents are regular people.
They didn’t know there were good or bad upbringings.
They didn’t have the best upbringing.
They worked hard to raise us the best way they could.
But it wasn’t always perfect, of course.

It was 9 pm on a Thursday.
My mother gave money and sent me to buy a box of tissues.
Three guys appeared.
One of them was holding a knife.
He pressed it to my cheek and told me to walk without saying a word.
They took me to a strange area and called out to another guy to join them.
Then they took me to a warehouse and raped me,
One after the other.
gender violence; sexual violence; rape; parents; social pressure

Being a woman is hard. Really hard.
Everything is exhausting.
It requires tremendous effort just to live a normal life.

I’m in my late twenties.
When I was 5 years old,
Something happened that made me quite mad at my parents.
I saw baba beating mama.
I remember sitting on the floor in their room crying,
terrified of the violence I was witnessing.
She fell next to me when he was beating her.

I understood what a period was was,
But not very well.
Mama never talked to me about it.
When I got it for the first time,
I couldn’t tell her,
Because I could never talk to her about anything.

Ahmed: “What do you think of that hottie over there?”
Amr: “Which one? The veiled one?
I love veiled women.”
Ahmed: “Really?
Why?”
Amr: “You know when you get a wrapped present,
And you take your time unwrapping it?”
Ahmed: “I’m talking about the girl walking with her, man.
Of course I wasn’t talking about that woman over there.
She looks like the potential brides my mother makes me meet.”
Amr: “Your mother makes you meet potential brides?”
Ahmed: “Yeah, man.
All the time.
She thinks they’re all like her,
Or will be like her in exactly two years.
I’ve stopped meeting them,
So, now she sends me their pictures on Facebook.”