Afraid of Sex

As salaam alaikum,

Hahaha, now that I've surely gotten your attention...just to clarify, I am not afraid of sex.

But one of my exes thinks I am, apparently.

One of my exes? Thought I only had one, right? There was actually, if readers may recall, a short rebound after my relationship with B. I guess I needed to feel wanted? Bad idea. If you find yourself rebounding, get away from yourself as soon as possible...and run!

Anyway, ex the remix called me yesterday to talk. After months of my assuming that he would have moved on. Not so much. He told me he just wants to be friends with me, but I can tell he's not over me because (1) he told me not to tell him about my ex or any other guy I may have dated (same thing I did with ex the prototype) and (2) his mother wanted to say hello to me.

When you know you should get off the phone...

But honestly, he was a really nice guy, and still is...nicer than ex the prototype (hahaha, I like these names...I'm going to capitalize them, make them proper, and continue). It's just that...

I just wasn't that into him.

It was an informative experience...clued me into what must just happen in relationships sometimes. I think either gender tries to rationalize it and have it make sense to them, and really, all that's happening is that the other person is trying to soften the blow of "I just don't want to be with you, you are not the one," etc.

It took me a long time to get that, and it took me having to be that to another person to understand all that went down with Ex the Prototype...and maybe I gained a little insight from reading a little bit about President Obama's ex, and all of the embarrassing ways that she tried to rationalize why he was distant with her...

Not that into you, babe. You were no Michelle for him. Sorry!

He's just not that into you is not only for women. It's for men, too.

Surprise, guys! Happy un-birthday!

It just happens that Ex the Prototype actually told me really indelicately (to the point that I burst into tears) and tried to make it better later, leading to the chaos which was the year it took me to get over everything. I did not tell Ex the Remix that, really, I thought I could do better...because seriously, who would do that?

What did I tell him? I didn't know if I was ready for a relationship, that I didn't know what I wanted, and that I didn't think we would work out in the long run. I'm in a very different place, religiously and spiritually. And that's the version I sold.

The truth is...it's not that I don't know what I want. It's a combination of...I don't know if I can get what I want and I'm not sure if what I want is, in fact, what I need. So I tread very carefully over relationships...but I know when I absolutely don't want something, and what he wanted and what he was, I didn't want. I could have told him that, but...he sometimes (many times) doesn't understand my logic (because he assumes that women are illogical...this is actually his primary demerit, that he doesn't understand me most of the time, and it makes communication impossible...).

Translation: I'm just not that into you. He'd understand that. But he'd be hurt. So no, I didn't tell him that.

So he thinks I'm afraid of sex, most likely for "religious reasons." He thinks I should start dating immediately. And he made sure to warn me not to get too attached to my husband when I get married if that is my first time, because he noticed that females get "sprung" the first guy they "smash" with. He asked if I understood ebonics before he made this blunt admission...

What the eff ever!

Just because I talk "white" doesn't mean I didn't at one point and still am able to speak "ebonics," or otherwise understand it. You ain't never seen no doctor talking no ebonics up in the office, though, now, have you? Or any other professional office, for that matter? I don't know what you think this is...

I have to be like my mother right now...black people! That's why y'all ain't running nothing. Get over this white talk/black talk bull and maybe focus more on being proud of and supporting each others' endeavors, whatever they may be, and maybe we can elevate ourselves... This is no longer about the infamous white man. We do enough to relegate ourselves and to keep ourselves down. All anyone else has to do is sit back and laugh at us, because they are. They most certainly are.

Okay. Sorry, the black nationalist blood runs thick through my vessels.

Anyway, warning me against getting too attached to a future husband? What is marriage, one, and two, it's evident this fool guy doesn't know me from Eve.

Nor, thankfully, in any other Biblical sense...

And that was on purpose! No, I didn't have sex with you, and it was not because I'm afraid of sex. I don't like you and you patronizing me and treating me like a silly little girl is not helping. First thing, I fear God, and while I have done my fair share of bounds-overstepping, generally speaking, when I know for sure I'm about to make a mistake, I stop. And sex with you, my friend, would have always been a mistake because...you were not the one, second thing.

But that's fine. I'll let you go on thinking that I was afraid of sex, that I have no idea how to conduct myself in relationships, that men scare me. It makes you feel better to believe that, and that's fine.

I pray to God that I don't have to put up with anymore BS male sexual politic philosophers who will try to tell me about myself and instruct me in relationships. I may not always know where to draw my lines and I may be a virgin but I knew exactly what I was doing when I said no to you.

I am not afraid of sex. I look forward to it with tempered anticipation...in a controlled emotional and spiritual environment full of trust, respect and understanding, as God intends for us, as a protection for both of us...

And I guess, for you, that equates fear.

Hehehe...I guess it's like, the difference between someone thinking that one is afraid of heights for not skydiving while they are perfectly fine in tall buildings in observation decks. It's not the heights I'm afraid of...

It's the fear of the falling.

[uncensored]: Love in the Time of Autism

As salaam alaikum,

This was the runner-up for the loveinshallah.com post I contributed this week. As such, it has not been edited as well as that piece, but I still find it worth sharing:

I was sitting in an observation room in the developmental medicine center in the children’s hospital, watching a psychologist administer the ADOS to a young child who would most certainly be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder when I came to the conclusion that my ex-boyfriend had Asperger’s syndrome.

That would explain a lot. That would explain why sometimes, when we went out, he preferred not to talk to me and we ate in silence. It would explain why he told me he felt like he wasn’t from this world, like he was an alien that no one could relate to, and he couldn’t relate to them. He couldn’t relate to me, either. Maybe it’s why he saw older pictures of me and didn’t recognize me because my hair was different. This is why he laughed when everyone else laughed but didn’t understand what was funny. Why he thought it was appropriate to break up with me and tell me that it was because of my weight, and everything else that went wrong in the dissolution of even our hopes of being friends after he eventually apologized for the weight comment. Why he was able to disconnect so cleanly from me, in spite of all that we had shared, just like unplugging himself from a socket.

That would explain a lot, but I can’t count on that. I have to stop coming up with excuses for him. He was mean to me and for whatever reason he didn’t want to be with me, he isn't. I am better than him, end of story.

But maybe he is on the spectrum…

Before learning the DSM-IV criteria for autism spectrum disorders in medical school, like my mother, I suspected different people in my life of being on the spectrum. There was the friend in high school who was very socially awkward and whose conversations seemed to be based in scripting, taking phrases and dialogue from movies and shows to supplement language.

Then, of course, there is the broader autism phenotype theory within my own immediate family. My grandfather is suspect, with his decades-long love of reading the dictionary and highlighting everything with his red, ballpoint pen, one of the many fixtures at his table of things that is arranged just so. I’ve briefly wondered about myself and my odd fixations on things, like, most recently, the history of the T, the subway, in Boston, and my fascination with discontinued lines and hidden tracks…

I don’t think I’m on the spectrum, but I wonder what loving someone on the spectrum, my brother, has done to the way I love men.

I loved that my ex was quirky. I loved that when he thought, he thought in moving objects. Like thinking about sports then imagining a spinning football and how that would translate into a mechanics problem for his students. It was okay that he went days without speaking to me, that he sometimes wanted to be left to brood while with me, that he sometimes seemed distant. When he was present, he more than made up for it with surprise moments of intuitiveness and concrete ways of sorting through my torturous stream-of-consciousness conversations with him. But that did not a relationship make. I didn’t realize this until I started getting over his breaking up with me, though.

I went to a conference for parents with children with special needs, and attended a session on supporting the siblings of these children. They mentioned something that gave me pause. That sometimes, siblings of children with special needs have problems establishing healthy romantic relationships because they don’t understand that someone who loves you shouldn’t hurt you. Was that me?

I mean, siblings of children with special needs were more likely to go into service fields. I’m in medicine. That’s me.

But Emeka never treated me badly. When we were growing up, yes, sometimes he seemed to completely ignore me, to be content with my not existing. He was non-verbal in the beginning, so he didn’t talk to me for years. My mother tells of the time that I reported to her, frustrated, that “Emeka won’t play with me.” And he didn’t. My mother described it as him having “his own agenda.” Professionals in the field refer to it as self-directedness.

There’s something about the way the brains of people on the spectrum work that they process human faces as they process objects. Parents and siblings are often used as objects to obtain other objects. Little eye contact is made and the individual seems very independent simply because they are living in a world all their own, with no other people, more excited by objects than human contact. So Emeka preferred to line things up and to scan the order of things than to look me in the face and engage in play.

But I always loved my brother for who he was. He embarrassed me with his tantrums in grocery stores, but that was his greatest offense. I protected him at school but I still smacked him upside the head with pillows and paper plates at home when he got on my nerves, just as I imagine I would as a big sister to a neurotypical brother. I loved him though, for years, I got nothing back.

Was this why I let my ex be so distant while we were together? Is this why I wanted him back so much and felt like he was the best thing that ever happened to me, and ever would? Because he was verbal and had moments of relatedness?

My mother disagrees with this analysis. From her vantage point, she says that my relationship with my brother has given me high expectations for my relationships with men. She says that my relationship with Emeka has made me empathetic, patient, generous and kind. I am very careful with my relationships because relating to a brother with autism over the years has required special care. So I expect the men I am in relationships with to take the amount of care with relationships that I do, and they don’t.

And I don’t understand why!

Yeah, I kind of like that explanation of things. It’s more empowering. I struggled with the way my relationship with my ex ended because it was so abrupt and messy. “I’m no longer satisfied with this relationship,” while he was really the one not satisfying me because I saw him so seldom though he lived less than a mile away. And somehow, he dumped me. Meanwhile, I was ready to say, if you don’t want to see me once a week, we can see each other once every other week. No longer satisfying? And he was shocked when I broke out crying. He had been thinking about that for two weeks, came forward, and was shocked that I was upset for months afterwards. What is wrong with you? And you told me I was fat? How could you be so cruel? You apologized and then gave the same lame-o excuse, “I’m not ready for a relationship,” and then almost immediately you’re in another one with a young, skinny chick. And you want to be friends? How is that okay?

His gross mishandling of our relationship, which was always more bumbling than malicious…makes me wonder if he is, indeed, on the spectrum. Maybe I want to believe that because in addition to all the things that my relating to my brother has made me, it’s also made me forgiving.

I forgave my brother for embarrassing me and ignoring me all those years. I forgave him for cramping my style at school. He made up for it as a teenager, when his language began blossoming. One day in particular, I remember playing a VHS tape of a show we used to watch as kids. In a way that would later become characteristic, he told me that he remembered that we used to watch the show together. He told me, “It’s from the years! It’s from the years we did.”

My baby brother remembered something we did together. Even though he was running around, spinning, not making eye contact, not sitting for the duration of the show, he remembers that it as something we shared. And I cried the first time he told me this. I cried in spite of myself, because I thought I was stoic to the fact that my brother just couldn’t share with me, but I wasn’t. It still meant a great deal to me to know that he was there all along.

My little brother who I once called “Fuzzy Joystick Head,” in spite, by God’s grace, developed language and social skills that were sufficient for us to share in experiences. And I rejoiced in that, and I don’t even remember what it felt like to be embarrassed by him these days…how can I when…he’s come so far, and teaches me so much every day as I watch him continue to develop and make milestones we didn’t think he ever would…

I forgive my brother, and in wanting my ex to be on the spectrum, I guess I want to forgive him, too. But unlike my brother, my ex has done nothing to deserve a pardon.

It hurt, because I loved him, but I should move on. Before I met him, I had decided to give up on relationships and dedicate my life to becoming the physician that I want to so I’ll be able to support my brother when my parents are no longer able. I think I’ll just go back to that.

[uncensored]: Breaking the Fourth Wall

As salaam alaikum,

So, I started up this blog, and it's predecessor, (the xanga version), with the intention of living Islam in every aspect of my life, including my blog. If I intend to submit my entire self to God, I figured, and if I wanted to be able to do nearly everything in my life in the name of God, then what I blog about should be no exception. I wanted a place where I was comfortable reviewing what I was learning as a Muslimah (the original, xanga version) and just reflecting on my life through my Muslim lens (this blog).

Sometimes, I have these entries called [uncensored]. I never really explained them, but I will now. I usually label entries as [uncensored] when I feel it's important to express myself in a raw way without employing my usual purity, my Muslimah censor. That includes using curse words on occasion if my spirit so moves me. That includes talking about things I wouldn't usually talk about, or revealing details about my life that I usual don't. I hadn't done one in a while because I didn't feel so inclined. I was happy about life and possibilities seemed to abound.

How fickle that feeling is.

So, in this entry, I need to vent. I'm breaking the fourth wall. What does this mean? You can wikipedia it, but I learned about it in the context of television shows. Will Smith on Fresh Prince broke the fourth wall a few times, notably when the actress for Aunt Vivian changed or when baby Nicky grew up form an infant to a preschool age child in one season. Perhaps one of the most famous instances in television history of breaking the fourth wall (and also in the literal sense) was when Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad danced off the set of The Cosby Show on the last episode, revealing to the television audience for the first time what the set looked like.

I still get emotional when I see that! That show brought so many happy memories for me, though surprisingly, has little (consciously) to do with me wanting to practice obstetrics.

So that's breaking the fourth wall. So now I'm going to break the fourth wall, if just for one entry. Because there are just some things that happen in my life as a Muslimah that I either censor or omit, and I just have to be real for a little bit.


Before I decided to become a better Muslim, I was known as the sweetheart. The good girl, don't ever change type of deal. I still am, I guess, but it's brought me mostly pain and isolation.

Being a good Muslimah in the way I see most fit has brought me mostly pain and isolation. I pray to God for solace, and maybe it is that I'm getting it, and things would have been much worse if not.

Maybe.

Like my story in the anthology, most of the time, I feel like I'm an unfortunate, hybrid bird doing his mating dance alone in a field, and any mates that would have otherwise been interested are passing me by. The one thing I struggle with in my faith is believing, and actually believing, that someone, one day, will love me for who I am, for all of who I am. I struggle believing that. I so struggle believing that. I always have.

I have faith in God when it comes to my career, residency, all of these things. I have faith in God when it comes to the future of my family, my parents and my brother. My faith is weak when it comes to my future, wanting to have a family of my own, my own children. And it causes me a lot of despair, because I know how much I want it and I feel like God may not want it for me, and I don't understand why, but I feel trapped. I feel like I'm trapped in a world where I may really want something and God, in His infinite wisdom, doesn't want it, and I'll not know why until I return to him.

And it's so painful, and I'm so lonely.

I've hoped and prayed for so many things. I've hoped and prayed for my husband to fall out of the sky. I've searched for my husband in some of the men I've known. I've been rejected in a way that was really painful for me. I've been passed over. I've been ignored. All the while I've been lonely, hoping for the companion that I could share my Islam with, hoping for a companion that I could share my life with.

And I guess I'm only 27. This is a wait that really has no bounds. This is a wait that has no limit. And that's maddening to me. Absolutely maddening. It's one of those things I wonder why and I despair because the only answer I have is that God "knows what [I] know not."

I have to repeat to myself, over and over, "Consider the bright morning hours, and the night as it grows still and dark. Thy Sustainer has not foresaken thee, nor does he scorn thee. For, indeed, the life to comee will be better for thee than this earlier part [of thy life]! And, indeed, in time will thy Susatainer grant thee [what thy heart desires], and thou shalt bee well-pleased." (93:1-5)

The truth is, I'm despairing because I finally just cut B out of my life. I just had an elaborate dream about all of the possible women his new girlfriend could be. The reality is, I was talking to a Muslim man, Y, who I thought was interested in getting to know me for possible marriage. He called me last night, and I didn't pick up, because he informed me that he's talking to another woman and his ex is back and wants to learn about Islam. I talked to his ex about Islam. What else is there for us to say to each other?

The truth is, I struggle in a world where Muslim men will perhaps disapprove of me for the way that I practice, the way I comfortably do not don the hijab and would not do so for a future husband, the way that I do not really believe in the obligatory-recommended-discouraged-forbidden scheme of things when it comes to my religion and depend on saying salat "because I want to because God knows what's best for me." I struggle in a world where my pool is small. I struggle in a world where I am open to non-Muslim men, but where they are basically looking for free sex and are disappointed when they find they won't find it in me.

There's no place that I can look to find a future husband. I'm afraid that no one will accept me as I am. I am a 27-year-old Muslimah. I've never had sex but, God have mercy, I have known some intimacy with men. I was in a short relationship with a non-Muslim man who randomly was no longer attracted to me, and I suffered from that rejection. My Islam is simple and organic, more spirituality than law. I don't like living strictly by dos and don'ts and I live in a way that makes sense for my well-being, with the spiritual wisdom of revelation. I have no doubt that people who don't call themselves Muslim who believe in God and are good people and do good deeds overall will have a place with my Sustainer in the Hereafter along with me, insha'Allah, so that one says it's obligatory for me to do X, Y and Z as a Muslimah doesn't make sense to me if I know believers of other faiths who do not do this will also have their place with my Sustainer. It is obligatory, or what? It is a sin if I don't do it? Obligatory or hellfire? Is it that they don't know better, but I do? It could be. But the God I grew up with, the God that my mother taught me about...isn't like that.

Allahu a'alam.

We all try to do our best, anyway. I've tried to do my best as I've come into Islam and formed my own opinions of things. I've tried to do my best to understand why God wants me to be single right now and why I stumbled in a past relationship instead of finding a man who fit in my life. I don't understand. I struggle to understand. I struggle.

It was something I needed to live, that relationship. Something I needed to get out of my system. I had a pent up notion of sexuality and a pent up sexuality that I thought I needed to validate that I needed to get out of my system before I could begin healthy abstinence, meaningful abstinence and a healthy relationship with someone else.

I know that.

I wondered why, when I looked at him, I had this feeling, "You're going to end up with him." I was surprised, because he wasn't my type, and distressed, because I didn't get a sense of timeline. I just knew we were going to be in a relationship, but I didn't know how long it would last. I just heard it like a voice, like I've heard other things that will perhaps materialize, surprisingly, in my life. You're going to end up with him, the voice said, and I recorded it in my old journal back in April 2010, and I tried to ignore it, deny it.

And there it was. It happened. Now what?

So I'm breaking the fourth wall. I struggle with my beliefs. I'm an invisible Muslimah because I don't wear the scarf and there's not a lot of other ways that you could recognize that I'm Muslim, besides the times I may disappear for salat, but I usually pray when no one is around. Besides the content of my character and the goodness of my heart, masha'Allah. Besides my sense of justice and charity. But you can't see those things on the outside. So maybe I'm still invisible.

I struggle with trying to find what I feel is the purest sense of my religion and the purest way for me to live in this society. I believe in ways people will disagree with because of my trepidation with the law. I struggle to believe that God wants for me what I want, even though it's half of my religion, simply because it's not come yet and I have no signs of it. And I've touched men before.

This is me, breaking my fourth wall. This is me, no longer just reflecting on the more halal parts of my life. This is me being rough around the edges as I always was, and always will be. This is me taking a break to be human.

This is me imploring God for guidance, as always, and hoping that, every day a little bit, and cumulatively to the end of my life, that He is pleased with me.

This is me.

Have a Talk With God

As salaam alaikum,

(6:48) "And We send [Our] message-bearers only as heralds of glad tidings and as warners: hence, all who believe and live righteously -no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve" (emphasis added)

I am also called to mind this song by Stevie Wonder, haha, my favorite musician ever:




Masha'Allah and Alhamdulillah!

There are worldly solutions to many of the problems we face in our daily lives. You can mediate, you can think in terms of statistics, like, really, what is the chance that this plane I'm in that's suffering this terrible turbulence over this mountain range is going to crash? This flight has never suffered a crash, people fly every day and most days there's no plane crash...it's said that the most dangerous parts of the flight are the takeoff and landing, and we're in neither, and how many crashes take place mid-flight, anyway?

Or, one could place their trust in God, in whose dominion there is no error, there is no weakness as therre is in our ability to meditate on the positive or be consoled by the statistics of life.

This is one example of an anxiety that we face, but not all of us. I was informed by a friend that she never thought of the precariousness of flight, or the wonder of a plane to propel itself into the atmosphere and remain adrift in the air, just because she "always" assumes that everything will work out. She found my anxieties unhealthy, and maybe it is. I wouldn't call it a disorder, though, because it's never paralyzed me in my daily life or kept me from aspiring and achieving my dreams.

But it just takes me to a different level of God consciousness.

I never assume things will work out. I know, alhamdulillah, that everything will work out, insha'Allah, the way it should. I just also know that the intermediate outcomes may not be to my liking, because as He tells us, "it may well be that you hate a thing the while it is good for you, and it may well be that you love a thing the while it is bad for you: and God knows, whereas you do not know" (2:216).

And while I knew, insha'Allah, that everything would work out, the God knows and you don't part was what caused me anxiety, and basically caused me to revert to doubt, anxiety...

That plane could crash, I may not be the great physician I aspire to be, I may never get married, and if I do, I may be infertile...and though I may hate these outcomes, God knows what I do not.

Alhamdulillah, I am no longer burdened by these thoughts and insha'Allah, this respite from these anxieties should continue. And it's not because I'm meditating or thinking of statistics, nor is it really because I'm thinking of what God in general wants for us, and why what He should want for me is the marriage and family I desire, at least...

Because the truth always remains, God knows what we do not, including the future, including His intent for us in this existence and the grander intent He may have for us as our eternal selves in the Hereafter. I will not know, and that is part of the beauty of the human experience. I will struggle in pain but I will also be pleasantly surprised, and the reward is with Him in the end, greater than any reward in this life and greater than the balance of the cumulative pain felt in this world.

It helped me some to meditate in this way: to recognize that sometimes I will feel pain, that sometimes I will be anxious or lonely, or sometimes a remembrance will bring me sadness, but this is okay. I have the tendency to get anxious when I'm sad and it ends with me downward spiraling into a self-pity fest, or, to be less hard on myself, desperation. I tend to be haunted by the thought that maybe I'm not strong enough, that I was made weak, and that this is manifested in my occasional depression. It helped me a few months back to meditate on the fact that this is how I feel now, and that it's permissible, if not justified, that I feel the way that I do.

But that didn't help always, and I found myself in a desperation at one point that I had little patience for and no longer wanted to be in.

This meditation did not work because God was absent in my considerations, and my methods were therefore weak.

So instead, I will "meditate" in prayer.

I began feeling anxious upon talking to a friend of mine who is also applying in family medicine. She's planning to go to a program in Chicago that sounds like an excellent program. I began to doubt my decision to not apply to any Chicago programs, began second-guessing my first choice program in favor of another that would be closer to her, began wondering if there were similarly other jewels of residency programs that would have been in places that would be better fits for me than my top choices, and I began wondering how I would ever make this choice.

And then, that ayah above (which comes up multiple times in the Qur'an) came into my mind, and I smiled, smacked myself on the forehead and said, "Duh!" I'll pray on it, I decided, like everything else. Why hadn't that occurred to me?

Well, let me be real on two fronts. One, of course praying about these things occurs to me, but I think often I pray on a macro level and do not recognize the opportunity to seek guidance (because that's really what prayer comes down to in this context) on a micro level. Like, here is an individual doubt that could possibly breed anxiety. If I let that anxiety blow up on a big scale, I'll find myself doubting my training, my community, my career. It's not about that. Alhamdulillah, I'll become an excellent family physician whichever program I match in out of my top three. The question is, which one should I go in order to realize the full extent of my blessings...

And that is why I have payed istikhara and have faith that I will be heard, as I always have been, masha'Allah.

And my life is as it should be, masha'Allah.

On the second front...I know this new security comes in part due to the fact that I am now talking to an interesting, admirable and intelligent brother in Islam. And while I let anxiety and insecurity overtake me shortly after hearing the news of this interested Muslim from a non-Muslim friend of mine, I calmed when I talked to him a few days back and got to hear his voice and know how easy it was to talk to him...for two hours.

It's easy to have this security in my faith now and trust in Allah (swt) once I see the possible synthesis of a prayer I've had over the years fall into place...or at the very least, understand some of the reasons why it could be a while in the making (or at the very least be inspired to another strong story idea)...but what if this were to go away? Will I be strong enough to talk with the conviction that I do now about the ease with which I can make decisions by simply having a talk with God, asking for guidance, praying salatul istikhara?

Insha'Allah. In the meantime, instead of letting these doubts degenerate into anxiety, I will also take this issue to prayer...as I did my burgeoning relationship with B, that I nearly through a tantrum about in the course of letting him go, but that I should have realized was the answer to the softest of my prayers while with him.

The answers are all with God. If I believe, and do righteous deeds, and strive as I am striving and aspire to strive...there's nothing I should be afraid of, and I will not grieve.

And I didn't need to have Stevie on repeat to tell me that. None of us do.

(2:62) "VERILY, those who have attained to faith [in this divine writ], as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Christians, and the Sabians -all who believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds-shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve" (emphasis added).

Insha'Allah

As salaam alaikum,

Who knew? Who knew the oft-repeated phrase, a phrase some of us repeat more times than we do Fatiha in a day, would be one so difficult for so many of us to wrap our minds around.

I know I am one, and while by the nature of a journal I speak for myself, I know I am not alone. Insha'Allah. God-willing. Or, as my parents used to say in English, by God's grace. Some of us sprinkle our language with this phrase, some of us place it purposefully and thoughtfully, some of us omit it, incidentally or purposefully, but what does it mean?

I thought about this as I was riding home from my grandparents' place yesterday. My mother makes the weekly drive an hour north to visit my grandparents, who are aging and whose health is failing. My grandfather is malnourished and frail and my grandmother has very limited mobility and early stages of dementia. It's early because she has insight into everything as she begins to exhibit paranoia and short term memory loss. It's hard on the family, but especially on her children.

My mother and father were talking about how hard it was to pray so vigorously for her, daily, for years, and not see the fruits of this prayer. Why hasn't the dementia go away? I don't even want to believe, pronounce that this is God's will, my mother says.

But in her daily salat, and in her du'a, and in everything she does, I know because she raised me this way, she pronounces by God's grace, by the grace of God. That ever-present insha'Allah that we Muslims take care to observe, acknowledge, pronounce...so, why does she fear? It's in God's hands.

Because she struggles to fit into her mind why God wills her mother to fall into dementia that distresses my grandmother, my grandfather, their children and their spouses and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who recognize what's happening.

But we were never promised understanding of all of the ways and wills of God in this existence.

It is sad to see my grandmother succumbing to dementia but at the same time I feel blessed that I have been able to exist a few more years with her, experience her all this time. She almost died in 2004, and this year marks 8 more years she's had with us that she's been able to live in the house. Times are hard and I have not yet experienced the pain of declining parents as my mother and aunts and uncles have, but from the first time I ever saw this strong woman cry (a few months ago) to hearing her talk about people who are not there that torment her, I cherish the fact that she is otherwise lucid and her long-term memory is in tact, and she can tell me stories from her life.

I'd hoped to help my grandmother write a story about my grandmother's life...insha'Allah...

Insha'Allah.

There it goes again! So many of us struggle with this, Muslim and non-Muslim. When I went through my phase of deconstructing religion as I knew it and arriving back there again, I did contemplate, as many did, how God could exist in a world where so many terrible things happen to innocent people, from starvation, war, rape, natural disasters. I didn't ruminate on these long, however, because, like many, I selfishly oriented my belief in God around personal circumstance. While I credit my mother for raising me with a strong and organic belief in God early on, my faith in Him was something that was highly conditional...dependent on my own personal circumstance.

I had faith in God for everything but my own partnering. Marriage. Relationships. Whatever you want to call it, and I still struggle with that. Insha'Allah, I will be happily married...does that mean that maybe God will not will it?

While other women are praying that they will not have to be raped again, or lose their children again, or contract AIDS, or have to kill their female child, or have to sell their bodies again...insha'Allah.

Some of us are afraid to pronounce it lest we are disappointed. Some of us absolutely do not believe in it.

And I think it's human nature to always have some level of discomfort with it because, in the end, we cannot understand it. Even the angels ask (2:30).

Insha'Allah. God-willing. I say it all the time, but admittedly, I don't really know what it means.

It makes me feel a lot of things. It makes me feel hopeful and helpless, free and imprisoned, safe and precarious. It makes me excited and fearful, enlightened and lost.

It reminds me of B, a man who I loved and lost, who I miss relating to, who I miss sharing everything with, who I still struggle with tied hands to not contact, not email and tell him what's on my mind, what I've been going through, how I've been living, what I've been thinking. It reminds me of how it wasn't God's will for us to be together and how I felt that all along and ignored it and continued forward until things came to a head. It was never completely comfortable, my being with him, knowing he was not Muslim, knowing that the way he believed in God was very different from mine, but never imagining he would be so out of my life that I'd no longer have that person to share myself with, tell everything...because I was never that person to him. And I wish I could reflect and tell him that, but I can't. Insha'Allah, I'll be with one who fits better.

Insha'Allah. But I don't know.

And I cry sometimes over this silly thing because I don't know. Because I felt like I needed him, needed him so much, or needed someone like him so much, it just felt like such cruelty to be pulled away from it, but it's all God-willing.

And I can only imagine such trivial pain as compared to the pain of a mother who listens to the hungry cries of dying child. And it's all God-willing.

God-willing? "Verily, I know that which you do not know," He tells us (2:30).

For atheists, it's so hard to fit in their minds, they don't believe it. For Agnostics, they scrape the surface but prefer not to delve further than the possibility. For believers, it's still a struggle. It's an every day struggle, it's growth every day, it's reckoning every day, spending a little to buy a little piece of our fate every day as we live out this life, day by day, in absolute uncertainty but with faith in something, something that we'll awake the next day, that things will get better...

And as uncomfortable as insha'Allah is...I'm one of those people who prefer to believe in God by all 99 names, the only attributes that we can encarar, than in something out there, than in nothing but randomness. It's more comfortable for me.

So, insha'Allah I will be happily married to a man meant to be my life partner, insha'Allah my grandmother will find the peace we all pray she will find, and insha'Allah I will be alive to spend another day with my family together, and insha'Allah I'll wake for another day facing this life God has given me in the morning.

...as masha'Allah, God has willed, I woke up this morning, and masha'Allah I've lived 26 years and 4 months, and masha'Allah I have a loving family, and masha'Allah I lived a love for a brief time that showed me what was possible...

...and too many things to fit in this reflection of an ill-conceived fear of what has not yet come to pass.

MQ

As salaam alaikum,

Hah! After I try to invite more men to read my site, I launch into an altogether more girly topic. Oh well.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and somehow, we got on the topic of my college crush, MQ. As if I haven't exhausted the subject of that then-boy now-man for my entire lifetime, what with the hundreds of pages of journal entries I've written about him, the obsessive thinking about him my sophomore year fading to the daily praying for him during Ramadan 2005. MQ, also known as MTQ, is the basis for the character Mo in my story, A Rose Much Desired, and is renamed Sadiq in my essay in Love, InshAllah. How I felt about him was so adeptly characterized by Djavan in "Doidice" that I listened to that song over and over again the spring of my first year of medical school.

Me apaixonei? Talvez, pode ser...

I wrote a poem in one sitting the first time I got a whiff that we would never be. I still remember most of it. "I wish I would not melt into you, my oblivious haunter, as you whisper to me of Some Enchanted Evening that exists not in reality but it's alternate..."

I didn't memorize it. I lived it. It was so real for so long it went without saying.

But my friend had never heard the whole story. At the time I met her, I was still embarrassed by the details. I was embarrassed that a big girl like me could have fallen so hard for someone who in real life did not completely exist as I'd imagined them. But time has passed and he's been married for some time and I've since been in a relationship of my own and I finally felt at liberty to describe him.

And it was amazing, I think one of the most beautiful experiences of the year for me of many more.

I usually do year retrospectives, but doing a retrospective of a year that began happily and then ended in a confusing and terribly disappointing breakup, a year that was unfortunately stained by that incident although everything else in the year was excellent...just seemed a bit depressing. I ended up thinking of B and crying really hard the other day as I thought of all I had hoped we would be, what we were, what we realistically could have been, my loneliness.

But I told my friend, I didn't even love B as much as I loved MQ. And, as she is wont to do, she asked why.

I hadn't thought about it in a while. In fact, my editors for "The Hybrid Dance" asked me to expand on what it was about Sadiq that I liked, and I felt embarrassed because, at the time, it didn't seem like enough...

But then I described MQ to her, and what it was about him...and it all seemed plain to me.

We were talking about B.

Her: "It's good that you didn't get swallowed in because some can't see through the pain, sadness, disappointment..."

Me: "No, did that once when I wasn't even in a relationship. Didn't even touch the man. Took me three years to get over him. A 280-page novel with a character based on him... For as much as I came to love B, I dind't love anyone like MQ, for whatever reason."

Her: "Hmm...do you ever wonder why?"

Me: "No. I know why. I loved the idea of MQ, perhaps who he wasn't. I knew B...I never idealized him."

Her: "Why did you love the idea of him? Could it have been anyone? Or was there something about him in particular?" (My friend asks a lot of questions)

Me: "No, just him... I liked him because he seemed to like me. And it seemed so unlikely that this guy liked me, and he was so unlike anyone I'd met before...I was fascinated by him. I mean, now, I know tons of Indian guys who like hip hop and R&B, so it's no longer a novelty."

Her: "Hahahaha."

Me: "Haha, but I read so much into it at the time. I mean, he was also Muslim, funny...he was different."

Her: "What do you mean by different?"

Me: "He was unlike any guy I met at the time. He was loud and boisterous, had a great sense of humor, he was like, over 6 feet but he was a teddy bear. He loved kids... But at the same time, he cursed a lot and had a quick temper... He was loud and awkward. He was a cutester, although his face was not that attractive to me... I liked how he talked to me, related to me... He told me that I amazed him... How awesome I was, how smart I was..."

Her: "Awwwww."

Me: "He always assured me that everything was going to be alright... [I] wasn't as happy as I was with him until B."

Her: "Were you two pretty close?"

Me: "Umm, after the summer after my freshman year, not really. I once went 5 months without seeing him. But I thought about him every day, almost every 10 minutes my sophomore year after that summer. Cried many nights to sleep, and cried myself awake on the last day of the semester when I realized we would never be. I wanted to be everything he wanted, and I sought to find out what he wanted. It became an obsession, for sure."

Her: "Did you tell anyone?"

Me: "I talked to no one about it. I didn't have a friend close enough to talk to about it..."

Her: "What about [your best friend]?"

Me: "A little bit. She knew the most about it, for sure...but after the first semester of sophomore year, I didn't tell her anything else. I never told anyone the depth of it. I was afraid."

Her: "Afraid of what?"

Me: "I was afraid they'd tell me I was crazy, that he never really liked me, that I needed to get over it."

Her: "Did you ever consider telling him your feelings?"

Me: "I did tell him...halfway. I told him I liked him back that summer after my freshman year...by email...after I graduated. He told me he had no idea I liked him, and nothing more...that he was flattered. And every year thereafter, he's told me happy birthday on facebook. Probably this was the last year, since he's doing residency."

Her: "Did you think about doing it earlier and in person?"

Me: "No, I never wanted to do it in person...I didn't want to if it were possible he didn't like me.

Her: "Oh...I can understand that."

Me: "Yeah, the thing was...at one point, I was convinced that we were going to get married. Like, as sure as I am that I will graduate from med school right now."

Her: "Wow!"

Me: "I didn't want to tell anyone because I was afraid they'd tell me it was impossible, improbably, or just plain crazy."

Her: "You really liked this guy!"

Me: "Told ya! I really held back with B, and every other man. I've never really liked anyone like him since...and I really don't want to."

Her: "Why?"

Me: "I have great potential to be a crazy woman and drive myself crazy. No one has compared to what I saw in him... I'm not sure anyone ever will. But that's okay. Because it may not have been real. I thought that he was transcending cultural norms to like someone like me. I thought he understood a bit about the history of black plight in this country with his love of socially conscious hip hop. I thought he looked thorugh my short, kinky hair and brown skin (we were the same brown) and saw me...and liked me... And that may have never been true.

[...]

"Gosh, I talk about him and I feel 19 again...crazy."

(Yes, this was a texting conversation...and yes, I write grammatically correct texts. I cannot but write everything as if I were writing a composition! I've done that since the days of AIM."

I go on to talk about why nothing happened between MQ and I...I think we may have liked each other at some point, but I didn't go forward because I was just beginning my quest to Islam my freshman year of college, and I didn't know how to not make the whole thing haram...and I didn't know what his standards were, and I was afraid of getting to close to him because I was afraid I wasn't Muslim enough...

And I told my friend that he probably did like me at that point, told his sister about it, and after our first "not-date," that's where the "You should meet Pakistani girls" comment came from, and we may have failed because neither of us thought that we really liked each other...

Which was...meant to be.

As I learned later on, if something doesn't work, it doesn't work. Neither of us would have been mature enough to carry forward, and I had to work on discovering what it meant for me to be a Muslimah, and getting a boy mixed up in that would have resulted in great confusion.

My friend also remarked how much I've grown since then. And I said, yes, it was almost 8 years ago that this all came to pass.

I also called to her attention how the attraction was not sexual at all...I told her that a lot of the physical attractiveness was secondary to my liking who he was. And that is what happened with B...besides the base attraction things, I liked and came to love the person, and any physical attraction was secondary. That's the way I operated, so to think of doing things any differently down the road didn't make sense to me.

But the remarkable thing was...after I talked about MQ, years after the last time I pined for him, years after the last time I prayed that one day, we'd be married...I forgot the pain of being alone, the pain of the dumping, which is now 10 months ago, the pain of the remembrance of B. It was irrelevant. I had a greater love, although it was a love for someone who ultimately was not really real, who effectively did not exist...

And I toyed with the thought that I'd feel this way about someone again, but in an actual relationship...I don't know, but even if not...I've felt more strongly about someone than B, and got over it completely. It took years, but I did. Ten months out and I almost have to be reminded of B's last name. I loved him not nearly as much. I'll be fine.

So, instead of a year in review, because a lot has happened but it's been stained by the memory of a man whose actions do not deserve to be remembered, I will do this incident in review, this love in review, the love of an imagined man that I modeled off of a friend, a love unparalleled whose aftermath I never want to live again, a love that was so hard to get over and give up for never again, but a love that I've thrived so well without time and time again.

And so shall be every other love I live in this life.



So many people like to say we are born alone and we die alone. I don't like that. We are born surrounded by our mother, literally, at the very least, and without the early love of that mother or a caregiver to feed us at the very least when we could not feed ourselves, we wouldn't live to die. And many do not die alone. It just doesn't feel right. We are born by the grace of God and surrounded by God, and we die by His leave and return even closer to Him. I have felt lonely without the physical or emotional presence of another but I've never been alone.

God was with me as I was a silly 20-year-old girl crying over a man who would never love me, a love that would never be. God saw me through to be the 26-year-old woman I am now, who never cried herself to sleep over a love that was not to be again.

God is with me now, and will be with me this new Gregorian calendar year, 2012.

Happy New Year.

Next Lifetime

As salaam alaikum,

I'm not going to lie, I miss B. Not because he was the perfect match or even a good match for me, just because he was who he was. I think it was really not cool of him for me to wait until I got close to him and bail out. In fact, I think many men are emotionally lazy. When they discover that it is takes emotional effort to be with someone, they bail. They don't want to share their life, they don't like the idea of being with only one person, even when the alternative is them being alone. That's what B is doing right now. And he won't hear of otherwise. So after trying one last time to be friends with him, I let him go. Let him wallow in his sorrow, let him exist in and of himself, whatever it is that he is intent on doing. According to my premonition, I have other things to worry about in the upcoming months, no time to would've should've could've with that...

Residency is looming, and while my bedside manner is tight, alhamdulillah, I need to make sure I have the skills and the knowledge behind that to make me a really phenomenal doctor. No time to worry about men who are not worrying about me. He is now added to that list.

It's also really hard to relate to someone who you'd know would accept Islam if they'd open their eyes beyond the radius of their nose. Everything was in place. He had a best friend that was Muslim...but we didn't even get that far before he bailed. I wonder why it was that we were to be in each others' lives. I wonder what purpose it served besides convincing me to stay even farther from haram.

Anyway, as I realized we were drifting apart, this song went through my head...so now, it won't have to be next lifetime until the next one comes around...

State of Grace

As salaam alaikum,

Last night, while I was helping a woman labor (and she did quite well, actually), delivering her first baby, I had another premonition, similar to the one that I had in April of 2010 when I looked at B and knew, oddly, strangely that we would be together later. This one was so strong, I don't even want to pronounce it, lest I jinx it or come to disbelieve in it. Suffice it to say, I'm now filled with an overwhelming sense of peace, that everything is going to be alright for me, and God will provide beyond measure for me. I don't have to worry.

It was a great night! I delivered three babies...it would have been four, but I got myself together too late to deliver the last, that just came out with one and a half pushes. Mom was like, yep, I knew it would be like this.

Then there were two sets of happy first-time parents who had beautiful baby girls. It struck me that one of the moms was my brother's age, and as she got prepared to push, she stuck her tongue out at me. I realized...oh my gosh, we're adults, but we're so young!

Anyway, I think because I was in my zone last night, moving from delivery to delivery, that I felt that state of grace. I've had this feeling before. Back when I was in college and came home for Christmas break, there were a handful of times I'd be riding in the car with my mother and brother and think, "Oh, I want to hear this song." Then, I'd get home, turn on the television to VH1 Soul, and that song would be just starting to play. I've recorded a few of my favorite songs that way. One of them was, "Gone Til November" by Wyclef Jean, and the other, "It Never Rains (In Southern California)" by Tony! Toni! Tone! There might have been a few others, but I mentioned to my mother then that I must have been in a state of grace.

(This was in the days before YouTube, by the way...now a song that I want to hear is virtually at my fingertips...crazy to live in this time of so much sudden innovation).

When I looked at B in April and knew, alarmingly, that we would be together...I mentioned it in my old journal, but then I gradually came to deny it. I was like, no, maybe it means that I'll be with someone, not him. And then, it bothered me that this was the only sense I got. I didn't know if we would be married, if the relationship would last, what it would mean...just that we would end up together. Similarly, right before we broke up, I had the feeling that we weren't meant to be together as he began to slip away, and frustratingly, I didn't know if that meant we wouldn't be together now, or never...

This premonition...is of a different subject matter. It changes my perspective on life completely, makes me ever grateful to God for what he has given me, makes me even more submissive to Him, makes me realize how much He can say "be" and it is, makes me realize how much life can completely change from one moment to the next...

And, I'm applying to residency in family medicine and got an interview offer from one of my favorite programs! Keep me in your duas as this nerve-wracking interview acquisition process continues!

Anyway, life is exciting and scary on all fronts. I have to talk about this premonition somewhere, just not here.

And this segment on the Daily Show is so true...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Interlude: Where I Want to Be

As salaam alaikum,

When I was a child, for some reason, I wanted to be really spiritual. Before I even knew a lot about Islam, when my whole world was what my mother taught me, I wanted, from a young age, to be really spiritual, really as close to God as I could be. I wanted this before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, before I began praying to be married someday. And I remember it clearly and I don't know why I felt this way.

As a teenager, I kind of strayed away from this dream of mine and began to search frantically for a spiritual home with all sorts of ideas about God that were not true. When it came time to decide whether to date a guy and what religion to mark on my college applications, the answer to both was that I was Muslim. I was Muslim, so no, I won't date you. I was Muslim, so I'll put Islam as my religion on my college applications.

And thus it would be. I would come to college, learn more about Islam, return to salat as I had with my mother, and this would be the way I would realize my desire of spirituality, closeness to God, and all else.

In short, the Islam that I encountered in college was much more difficult than I ever imagined. I had learned salat in both English and Arabic, but I learned about the importance of Arabic in Islam as the language of revelation. I learned about the importance of recitation. I learned Arabic words and phrases that I felt the need to punctuate my language with in order to make sense as Muslim, not just my parents' favorite and oft repeated, "Praise be to God." Now it was alhamdulillah. No more "God-willing." Insha'Allah.

And these were little things. What, when I was little, seemed like an organic process now seemed rigid and almost impossible for a girl like me to enter. I was just learning about Islam...and on the other side were sisters who could recite the Qur'an, those who had memorized part of the Qur'an.

I went through all sorts of changes. I wore khimar and then I stopped. I was intense in my learning about Islam and then I stalled. Somewhere in there I lost that desire I used to have, the desire to be so spiritually close to God, in the midst of being really confused about where I fit in Islam, as a Muslimah.

And then I went to medical school and a lot of things went to the wayside. And now, four years in, after getting my masters in public health and relating to non-Muslim men, I'm nearing the end of the 8th Ramadan I've practiced, hoping to make this one better than the last, better than all others. I made a pledge to God explicitly, something I've never done before and something I will uphold with the fear of my life here and the Hereafter. I needed to do it, or else things would quickly spiral out of control.

It's something that I choose to keep to myself.

I need to get back to where I wanted to be in life. Sometime in the past, I used to regret coming into Islam, because our burden of righteousness is greater because we have in our possession the final revelation and a clear guide to the straight way. It seemed harder for me than if I were just never exposed to Islam and I just believed in God and tried to do good work. This was a foolish regret that I always knew in my heart was wrong. In my heart, I've always known it was a blessing. That my mother found Islam, that my grandparents found Islam, that my aunts and uncles who still cling to Islam found Islam is a miracle of divine proportions. That millions of African Americans arrived at Islam after being part a spontaneously forming black nationalist organization in the United States is amazing.

That I chose Islam is the grace of God.

This is not supposed to be hard for me. When things get hard, I will take a step back. But I will approach this all with humility and patience, insha'Allah, but also I will approach it organically. The innocence of the child I was makes everything simple, but a child is not always wrong to simplify. I think we make things harder than they have to be, and I often made coming into Islam harder than it had to be. It can be as organic as I imagined spirituality to be as a child...

...and if I don't fulfill this desire, I'll only be hurting myself, that innocent self that exists within me, somewhere, that expected, as my mother says, "with open eye," to live this life a certain way. I'm following this because I know we come here submitting ourselves to God, and as a child I must have been close to that, so I must have known.

But ultimately, where do I want to be? I want to truly submit myself to God in a way that I haven't been. God has granted me with the gift of consciousness of Him from an early age, and I need not let the distractions of this life cloud that consciousness. I want that consciousness and my submission to permeate through everything that I do and all that I am, from my being a family physician, insha'Allah, to my being a wife and mother, insha'Allah. I want to find a community as well. No more of this being invisible.

No one around me right now understands me. I'm trying to find a way to be with little context. I need to find a home for myself, a way for me to make sense. That's where I need to be, and all else will flow forth more smoothly.

Congratulations on Waiting Until Marriage!

As salaam alaikum,

About a year ago, before B and I were together, my mother did this strange thing. She congratulated me for having waited so long to have sex, for not having had sex...for having preserved myself for so long, something like that. To that, I said, "Uhh...thank you?"

I then told her that, really, the only reason I had is because I hadn't had the opportunity to do anything. I hadn't met a guy that I really liked. I couldn't say the story would have been the same if I had actually had even one suitor in the first 7 years of my adult life.

So then B happened...and while I did have my first kiss(+), I did not have sex.

And now, there's someone else...I'm not exactly seeing him, but he's trying to be in my life. I'll call him K (hehe, if I stayed true to the patter, B should have actually been O, but that's neither here nor there). And no, I still haven't.

And I know my fellow Muslimahs right now are all like, wait a second, of course you're not having sex with these men! You're Muslim, we've gone over this, you seem (semi-)dedicated to the deen and Ramadan is less than a week away. Are you even alone with these guys? Shaytan is the third!

Yes, I know...I'm just putting that out there...

If you can tell, I don't like using the term virginity. I'd like to prefer that the word didn't exist. I've disliked it since I was 15 years old. I feel like there's too much BS attached to it, too many false expectations, too much patronizing and too many antiquated ideas linked to it to use it.

And calling myself a virgin sounds dirty, sounds like I'm something to be exploited, sounds like I have something to give up.

It's overall a construction I dislike.

Anyway...

Most of my female friends in medical school are waiting until marriage to have sex (or waited...some of them are married). One of my friends in particular intended to not even kiss her then-fiance before marriage, or share any intimacies at all...

Haha, the kissing part, she did not succeed in doing. The rest, she actually avoided until she was married.

After which she was like...hmm, sex was not what I expected.

Haha, that's because she was told lies about the wedding night...like, it'll be more special if you wait, so she was expecting to fly amongst the clouds John Legend style...

"Ooooh, it feels so crazy. Owwww, this love is blazin'..."

I love that song, by the way.

She's really into me waiting until marriage. When I was dating B, she begged me to please, please wait. This was before she was married. I wonder what stock she has in it.

In fact, I was going to talk to her and see what her perspective, as a Christian woman, is.

Because honestly, I don't value beign a "virgin" at marriage as much as I value marrying a good man. Not saying I'd sacrifice the former for the latter, but I don't see virginity at marriage itself as the key to a successful marriage or even more security of Jannah. Chastity is important on several levels, yes, but say a woman has had sex before in life but she decides to wait with her next relationship until marriage. I don't see that as any less valuable.

Because you can be a virgin and end up marrying someone who wastes your time, get divorced and now you are not a virgin.

So what am I getting at?

I think, in the end, people attach meanings to waiting until marriage that are unnecessary, untrue and ultimately misleading. Am I saving sex for marriage? Insha'Allah. But it's not because I'm expecting it to be better, or more special as someone who has never had sex before. It's because sex is so important to me that I want it only to take place in a protected environment, and that protected environment can only be marriage, which is the only relationship between an unrelated man and woman recognized by God.

Without that paradigm, I feel naked, haha...pun intended.

No, it's not glamorous. As my friend's relatives told her the day of her wedding, don't be surprised if you are disappointed, be prepared for it to hurt, and if the guy also doesn't have any experience, expect that mess to last all of 5 minutes. And it'll take a while for it all to come together.

But I'm not going to be mad at people who wait for those reasons. It's like, whatever gets you there. For me, for a while, it was easy to avoid all questionable contacts with men. It's harder when you call yourself in a relationship with a man...they try to be sneaky, but since I'm home schooled in street smarts, I know most all the lines.

I do appreciate the ability of going into a marriage with a clean slate, not having the memory of random, undeserving men floating around your marriage bed. I appreciate not having baggage otherwise.

Now, I just have to have faith that Allah (swt) desires marriage for all of us, and that even in these times, it will be promised for those of us who want it. I have a hard time believing that it can work, but I have to hold out and have faith and pray yet another Ramadan for patience and strength...

But in the meantime and forever in the future, please do not congratulate me on being able to wait until marriage. Congratulate me instead on being able marry a wonderful, God-fearing man for the sake of Allah (swt). Don't think of me as a virgin bride, think of me as a dedicated Muslimah who struggled through life to stick to her standards and marry someone who is a worthy life partner, and congratulate the two of us on beginning our lives together and growing in our understanding of our Creator.

Congratulate us on finding each other and making it work in these times when it's so hard to find someone with similar values.

Because while sex is definitely important, it's significance is often distorted, and I think some of that has to do with what people tell themselves to justify waiting until marriage to have sex.

I also think that people need to approach marriage with a greater sense of duty and less of a sense of marriage as a source of happiness, because I think the latter encourages people to go out and look for that happiness elsewhere during the hard times of marriage, like cheating.

Marriage is protection, protection that is there whether we waited until marriage or not.

May Allah (swt) forgive us our transgressions in the course of this life!

Back to Life

As salaam alaikum,

So, an update on me and my life...

I'm on my sub-internship right now, and even with strict sign-out and no overnight call, my time is at a premium. I've been out of the hospital for 3 hours now and I'll just be going back in another 9.5...7 of those I plan to spend sleeping, at least. And there goes my day. I get a day off on Sunday, then I work 13 days straight, then I get a day off on Saturday, then I work six days, then I'm done...

I hear the sound of the bed alarm in my head now...one of my wily patients set that mug off every five minutes...poor nurses.

I just watched and thoroughly enjoyed my novela, which makes me wonder...what am I going to do if I ever don't have a novela to watch? I'll switch and watch an old 6pm novela...and therefore, I know I'm going to be one of those old ladies watching their stories...except, mine will be in Portuguese!

Ramadan is in a little bit over a month! I need to make sure I'm ready...I can't believe a lunar year has passed since the last one. So much has happened in this year...so many regrettable things. I wish I were still with B, and that'd we'd still be making plans to marry. Life goes on, I guess.

I think I'll go to sleep now and read up on my patients in the AM, because I'm post call and sleepy. Being that we potentially admit patients every day except post-call days, there is no respite. I'll take it and run with it...I'm enjoying the experience.

In summary (as I'm getting used to summarizing notes): I'm enjoying my sub-I so far, my novela is tudo, Ramadan is in a month, and I miss B. Men, however, are never there when you need them or want them to be (at least largely in my experience), so life goes on.

Fin.

This Non-Muslim Business

As salaam alaikum,

Back when I first started going out with B, I wrote a journal entry called The First Conundrum in which I outlined my problem - for our first date, B had invited me to go to the First Annual Nigerian Conference at Harvard for the 50th anniversary of Nigeria's independence. I liked him and I wanted to go, but on the same day, there was a conference being held at the Boston ISBCC by the founder of the Ta'leef Collective, a project which I am very much a fan of that really creates a forum for reverts and, as I call them, Muslims at the fringes to have dialogue, to learn about Islam, to return to the masjid in a way they wouldn't have before.

It was a one-day intensive for young Muslim students and professionals. It would have been perfect for me...but instead, I went out on a date.

So I liked this guy, I was Nigerian, it would be a great event, but I also was interested in what dude had to say, and he would only be in Boston for a limited time. In a sense, I was making a decision between my Nigerian identity and my Muslim identity.

I decided that I didn't do a whole lot with my Nigerian identity, so I chose that over the ISBCC event. Of course, it was also a decision to try dating, so I went there.

And thus began something that will impact the decisions I will make for the rest of my life. I began dating a non-Muslim, an issue that I had turned over in my mind but something that I assumed would never happen.

And now another non-Muslim, a Christian, is interested in me, and at the cusp of something else happening, I'm just going to have to take a time out.

For one thing, the way that B and I broke up had unnecessary drama cultivated by him, but besides that...he broke up with me because he needed space, and he didn't want me to wait for him. He'll need to be with himself for a long time. The thing is...the point that we got into our relationship, even with the unnecessary elements of our breakup, I still cared for him, and I still do. I want to check in on him, touch base with him periodically, all of these things.

Just talking to this guy I'm currently talking to, and he's a nice guy, I realize that I can't be doing that if I'm ever in a relationship with someone else. Like, that's a big no-no, still talking to your ex. I mean, it's all inevitable. If I don't end up with B I'm going to end up with someone else, so eventually our friendship/contact/whatever is going on right now would have to end. I just worry about him and want to check in on him and make sure he's okay and not continuing to go at life alone.

It's especially after a conversation I had with this other guy, and he was talking about what he felt constituted cheating...

The other big issue with this other guy is that he's not Muslim, and he'll have not Muslim expectations for a relationship that I did not fulfill with B...okay, let's be frank. He'll want to have sex. I did not have sex with B (haha, I feel like Bill Clinton right now), but let's say that before him, I had never kissed a man, and that's no longer true. I don't have to do that with anyone else, I realize. I don't regret the intimacy I had with him, and at the same time I do not regret that we did not have sex, by my demand.

I realize that if I cross that line, a lot that makes up my morals, my values, who I consider myself to be will dissipate. A lot of people remark at how different I am from most women they know (non-Muslims), and I think a lot of it has to do with my integrity in that regard. Not my virginity--I never liked that construct. But, the standards I live by, and how I struggle to uphold them...it's not the standards themselves that make me, it's the struggle that has shaped me.

But non-Muslim men have this expectation of sex in relationships that is real, and I understand now why so many Muslims see dating as synonymous with sex in this country because, oh Muslimahs, if you survey your non-Muslim friends, that's usually the case. My roommates of old and new, most of my friends...it's all true. They all assume that sex is part of a relationship...

So I don't think I can relate to non-Muslims anymore. I think the reason that B didn't pressure me to much is because he's a softy. Other men will not be as patient or understanding.

The issue is, it will take a very specific type of man to make a match for me. Even if I were to assume the manners and the dress of a hijabi again next month, I'm not the Muslimah that most Muslim men would expect out of a woman who wears the scarf. I once tried to fit into what I thought was the mainstream American Muslim world in college, and I didn't. I failed miserably.

I don't want to fit in, at the end of the day. I've never fit in really anywhere, and I love who I am. I just wish I had a way to go about finding a life partner without having to compromise my values any more than I already have, but for me, that seems a little bit impossible.

I don't know. Pray for me, as always.

Full Circle

As salaam alaikum,

I just wrote an email to my cousins that turned into a short story, so I'll spare my readers here (unless you really want the detailed, juicy version of the story...yes, there is some juice). Anyway, long story short, I met up with B last Monday and we had a two-and-a-half hour long conversation that yielded the following fruits:

(1) I got him to apologize to me. What started off as a standard, unimpressive apology quickly became what I always wanted to hear from him after the telling-me-I-was-fat incident: He told me that he didn't mean it, he never meant to say it at all. All along, he was going through issues, so it never was about me. He also revealed that I was one of the most beautiful, greatest people he'd ever known, and he felt like he effed it up. He said he should have done other things, just asked for a break, some space to figure things out, and recognize that I gave him those routes and he didn't take them. Okay. That's everything I wanted to hear.

(2) I got to say everything I wanted to about his behavior over the last three months. I told him how not even a jerk would say what he said to me to a woman, that I felt like our relationship didn't mean anything because he broke up with me over crap, that I felt really bad about myself and really angry at him for a long time because I had trusted him, etc. I got all of that off of my chest. I never have to do that again.

(3) He did not try to get back with me! I mean, this is a victory. I knew he wasn't ready as things started falling apart in February, and I knew his mental health was poor. That he recognizes this and is striving to take care of himself is excellent, and I have major respect for him on that front.

In short, he owned up to saying something really hurtful, not meaning it, being truly sorry and recognizing that what was really up is that he was going through times (I haven't said that in a while) and needed a break from what we were, and he didn't want me to wait for him. That is all I ever wanted...boys are remedial sometimes, though, so it took him three months to do it.

I am now at peace with the entire thing and can look back on our relationship with fond memories and lessons learned. We came full circle, this chapter is over and I'm excited for the next!

Moved Out! New Lease...

As salaam alaikum,

I meant to post yesterday, but I was so tired, there was no way that was happening.

Yesterday, I moved out of my place of the last 2 years and 3 months.

Well, it's complicated, because I'm there right now. At my old place. I couldn't move into my new place because the girl's current roommate cannot move into her new place until May 1. I moved my stuff in so I could go to my friend's wedding in STL on May 1. And then I'm using today to clean. My floor is covered in crap, some of which I may want to keep the rest that is going into the trash. I also have to go sign my new lease tonight, which will be the opportune time for me to drop off my office chair...which I somehow neglected to pack onto the truck yesterday.

I was basically up working at 6:30am and did not stop until we dropped off the truck at 5:30pm. My feet really hurt when I was done. All that is left in the house is my trash and a few nick nacks that I forgot that I plan to drop off in my new place this evening at 6:30pm when I go to sign the lease.

I also feel like I have a new lease on life, too, during this time.

Time was, I would have crumbled under the stress of everything I have to do. I am really stressed out, though...next week, I have four presentations, and the week after that, I have three papers due and two exams. My friends wedding is this weekend and I'll miss a day of class because of it. I have an assignment that is due on Monday as well, lest I forget. I basically don't stop until the last day of class May 13...and even with this, I'm okay.

I mean, it may also be due to the fact that my MPH grades don't matter for anything. But I do need to do all of this stuff to pass and get my degree in the first place...but...

I don't know. Now that I know what I want to do with my life, I'm comfortable with the stress. Before, it was more or less going through the motions with the future being a level of uncertainty that just brought more stress. I think that part, having clear aspirations towards my career, has put everything into perspective for me and I'm more than willing to endure the tough to get to where I want to be as a clinician and a public health practitioner.

The other thing is that I think yesterday I finally came to terms with the fact that B is a jerk. I don't care what he used to be anymore...that's irrelevant. He is a jerk. My friend who helped me move told me so, simply, succinctly in a way that only guys sum things up. "He's a jerk. Don't worry about it." Everyone reacts the same way to the story. Did I need a critical mass for me to recognize that it was true? I guess so.

But even before I made that realization, I've long moved on. How have I moved on? Well...I've rejoined the world of online matrimonials/dating for the past three weeks or so, with tremendous yield! I think I'm more ready for it than I was a couple of years back when I tried and I didn't feel as if it were halal for me to be talking to so many men at once. Hah, for a lot of reasons, I no longer have that feeling anymore...

And I'm tired of every month of PMS getting to me, me ending up somewhere lamenting my perpetual single life and wondering who I will be able to marry. This is unhealthy, and this is how I let B happen. Not saying that I regret B coming into my life or what went on between us...no, it taught me some important lessons and solidified for me my own morals. But if I were in the place that I am now, for as "nice guy" as he was at the outset, he wouldn't have made the cut.

Insha'Allah I have a lot of years of life left. I've worked so much for my career, that which I always said would be second to family life, and yet, I was not doing anything active toward attaining that family life until I met B, and I don't want that to end with him. So, forward I go.

I'm set to meet a couple of the eligible bachelors, but as with B, I won't mention them or name them until they actually actually become a part of my life. I say it like that because there are a few promising ones. I have two favorites for sure, two more that are like runners up.

Oh yeah, and then I found out that MTQ is not actually really married yet, and that really confused me. And then for some reason that gave me more fuel to go forward and take care of my business and find myself someone who makes me feel the way TQ used to make me feel about him...and not settle for less any anymore.

I'll be moving to a new place with a purple bedroom that I may paint a pale green if I'm so inspired. Insha'Allah I will put my own hand into finding my husband instead of expectantly waiting for "the one" to drop out of the sky. I handle stress better now because I am in control of the parts of my life that I can have control over, though ever cognizant of my God and that at the end of the day it's His will that reigns...

[uncensored]: The Song I'll Stop Singing

As salaam alaikum,

Sometimes, there are songs that I start off singing and then I decide to stop singing because I either no longer like them or I just can't get with the lyrics.

An example are the following lyrics to this song that used to come up on my Pandora from Toquinho: "As vezes quero creer mas não consigo. É tudo uma total insensatez. Aí pergunto a Deus, 'Escute, amigo. Se for pra desfazer, por que que fez?"

Which translates: "Sometimes I want to believe but I'm not able to. It's complete nonsense. Then I ask God, 'Listen, friend. If it tends towards entropy, why did you make it?"

It's a question a lot of us encounter on either side of the believing pole as we develop spiritually, but I can't bring myself to sing lyrics such as these. While as part of my spirituality, I don't cut out the music, I am media literate and spiritually literate...I don't take things into my body that are more harmful for me than good, and that includes music with lyrics that are "not edifying," as my parents told me.

So while I am a believer alhamdulillah and while I don't cognitively shake when I hear lyrics like that...why would I take it into my body?

Allah (swt) made us so wonderfully...we make associations. Towards the end of my relationship with B, I started hearing the song in my head, "Silly fool, how'd you lose such a good thing," lyrics from Teddy Pendergrass, in reference to him, and also "Next Lifetime" by Erykah Badu when I started to realize that he wasn't the one. Our minds make associations like that, and since I listen to a lot of music, I make a lot of musical associations.

So I don't want to be going through a trial in life or witnessing the hardship of others and hear, "As vezes quero creer mas não consigo..."

But that's not the type of song I'm talking about. The type of song I'm talking about is like the one I wrote about in one of my chapters of RMD (it's been a long time!), a Desirée chapter called, "The No-Sex Violators." It goes a little something like this:

   No sex before marriage. At fifteen, this was just another song that Desirée heard her parents sing. It wasn’t one of their favorites yet, but Desirée knew it soon it would be.

The school is Godless was Desirée’s mother’s favorite tune these days. If her mom could, Desirée knew that she would forbid her from tenth grade health class because of the way they taught sex outside of the context of God. If her mother knew about the whole putting the condom on the banana thing, she’d probably be appalled. Desirée appreciated her teacher’s respect for her ability to make her own decisions, at least, with the safe sex curriculum. It was all in principle, though—a different principle than the one that made her refuse to put the condom on the banana she was given. She felt as if she were being mocked. In reality, she didn’t know what she stood for as she dodged the condom water balloons made by the guys in her class and made her way to Western Civ during passing time.

 No sex before marriage didn’t mean much to her because marriage at that point seemed so far away. It seemed a near impossible feat. She couldn’t even get a boy who was worthwhile to like her, so marriage and, she guessed, sex, were far away.

Oh yeah, putting the condom on the banana in health class...haha, Desirée chapters at some points were more autobiographical than fiction. This was one of the points. I didn't tell my mother until years later about putting the condom on the banana...and I did not participate. I figured I wouldn't be having sex any time soon...

...though as my roommate maintains, I just avoided having a teenage pregnancy. And it's true...I was a bit of a boy-crazy little girl. I had a different crush every year from the time I was five until I was 12. That last one, seventh grade, was a heavy one because the estrogen had kicked in...I had been menstruating for two years and puberty was behind me. I was ready. Me and this boy were going to get married at 20, move to Detroit and I was going to have a boy that I would make his junior. Yeah. I also got propositioned for the first time at 15 while at a conference in a hotel away from home. I knew nothing about birth control and was not that concerned that I didn't know. Teenage brain alert!

The little boy tried, too. He was 16...had his eyes set on me. I felt validated, as a teenage girl would, but I think what happened was this other guy who liked me, who was 14, kicked the other guy out of my room, telling him to, "stay away from [his] woman!" Yeah. Shenanigans.

But I digress.

So songs are powerful, whether they're actual songs or figurative songs, our own personal refrains that we repeat at intervals, that we're known for...

My mother's picked up her grandmother's: "Be thy labor, big or small. Do it well, or not at all." I'll pick up my grandmother's...no, not "I'll beat your ass until you shit," but maybe the, It'll be alright, "Eat a little shit, won't hurt," refrain. Me gusta.

But from here on out, actually, I vow to stop singing the following songs: Guys are all full of crap, men aren't worth two craps, the quality of men is zero right now, there are no good men out there...and all variations. Chose your favorite. I personally like the two craps one.

Why am I going to stop doing that? Because I realize what I've always known...it's not true!

I know it's not true, because if I didn't know it was true, I wouldn't be so frustrated by so many of the men who are before me...I would be resigned. If I didn't know it was true, I would have given up long ago. If I didn't know it was true, I wouldn't have been willing to take the L with B and taken the chance in that relationship...

It is not true!

I'm also going to stop singing, "All the good ones are already married" song, because that's also not true.

I look at this guy in my global reproductive health class. He's a really smart OB/GYN from Nigeria (Igbo kwenu!) and I'm really inspired by the work he's done and the perspective that he brings to the table. He's one of the good ones, yes, and he's already married, yes.

But then, there's this other guy. I've gotten to know him in the course of my year here...I think he was in my roommate's ethics class. He's a funny guy, usually sits with us during lunch and distracts us from work telling us stories about what it's like in Nigeria...he has one of those personalities that pops, really. I've gone to a couple of public health school parties and people have commented about us together...our interactions and whatnot. And at first I dismissed it, like, oh, that was just us acting silly. But now, the tone has changed now that he knows I'm no longer with B...who he met when we went out for the first time to Harvard's celebration of the 60th anniversary of Nigeria's independence...gala...I know, that's a long name. Anyway...

He's a physician in Nigeria, he's going to go back to Nigeria to complete his training after he's done with the MPH, and we're all done in about 3 weeks. I'll be his facebook friend, so we'll keep in touch. I've purposefully kept myself at bay because I feel like he may like me and I don't want to encourage him, but I'm to this event that the Nigerian student organization (that mysteriously I was not invited to join) is putting on this evening...

...and I was coming home to eat after an interview this morning and I just had to stop myself and reflect...wait, this is a good guy. I don't see him in class because he's in a different major, but he probably has a lot to offer. He's funny, he's kind...haha, he reminds me of a short, young, Nigerian Santa Claus, haha. He's shorter than me. And here I am, doing what I know how to do best...keeping myself aloof and avoiding.

He's actually not unattractive...you know, besides been a little short-n-stout, but you know...there's also the thing of him going back to Nigeria soon...and me thinking of him more like a cousin than someone I'd be interested in...more like a friend.

So no, there are good guys around! I'm friends with many many of them, and most of them are not attracted to me, but sometimes, they are...and I'm the one who doesn't respond. I pass them by because, realistically, someone better will come along for these guys, someone who shares the passion for them, someone who fits into their lives...but they are good men.

I'm just not going to like all good men, and not all good men will like me. That's fine.

But the more I've sung the song about no good men being around, the more I've come to believe it, being blinded to the fact that most of my guy friends are good men...including the brother friends, these are good men who, if they were so interested and if I were so interested, I wouldn't mind...I guess, going forward toward a nikah?

Haha, I'm still not sure what to do in terms of courtship with Muslim men...I think it's all a very individual path.

But yes, let me stop believing that so I can see more all of the good men around me, so maybe next time I'll pay more attention when there is obvious interest.

So I'll stop singing that song.