Page 160 - A Woman Is No Man

so busy.” Deya was quiet, but Isra could tell she was listening. She pulled
her closer. “Sometimes I felt forgotten. Sometimes I even thought she didn’t
love me. But she did love me. Of course she loved me. She’s my mother.

And I love you, habibti. Always remember that.” Deya smiled, and Isra
held her tight.

In the kitchen that evening, Isra and Sarah seasoned a chunk of ground
lamb for dinner. The men were craving malfouf, cabbage leaves stuffed with
rice and meat, and the women only had a few hours to prepare it before they
returned from work. They would’ve had more time if Nadine had been
helping, but she was upstairs breastfeeding her son, whom, to Fareeda’s
fury, she had named Ameer, and not Khaled. More than once Fareeda had

called on her, shouting from the end of the staircase that she should stop
breastfeeding so she could get pregnant again, only for Nadine to call back,
“But I already gave Omar a son, didn’t I?”
Sarah passed Isra a smirk, but Isra looked away. Deep down she
wondered why she couldn’t be like Nadine. Why was speaking up so hard
for her? In the four years she had lived in this house, she could not name a

single time she had spoken up to Adam or Fareeda, and it felt as though
someone had struck her when she realized this. Her pathetic weakness.
When Adam came home and asked for dinner, she nodded, eager to please,
and when he reached across the bed to touch her, she let him, and when he
chose to beat her instead, she said nothing, sucking down her words. And
again she said nothing to Fareeda’s constant demands, even when her body
ached from all the housework. What did the rest of it matter then—what she

thought or felt, whether she was obedient or defiant—if she could not do
something as basic as speaking her mind?
Tears came, rushing to her eyes. She shook them away. She thought
about Mama. Had she felt as Isra felt now, a fool? Holding her tongue in an
attempt to earn love, teaching her daughter to do the same? Did Mama live
as she lived now—full of shame and guilt for not speaking up? Had she

known this would happen to her daughter?
“She must have done something wrong,” Fareeda said into the phone,
both feet propped up on the kitchen table, a small smile on her face. Umm
Ahmed’s eldest daughter, Fatima, was getting divorced.
Isra looked out the window. She wondered what she had done wrong to
provoke Adam’s beatings. She wondered if he would divorce her.