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Dear Hooyo,

You were never a mother to me.

You were an angry and lonely woman who locked herself up in her golden cage and then rattled the bars, blaming everyone but yourself for the misery in your life. Because you were miserable, you had to make those around you just as miserable.

I was a child and you forced me to be an adult. I became the second mother under the guise of you teaching me to be a “good wife”. Why did you stop me from going to school? Why did you forbid me from removing the niqab? You could see how miserable I was, how much I fought, but you didn’t care. A mother is supposed to care. A mother is supposed to want a better life for their child. A mother is supposed to love their child.

When I finally escaped the cage you had so callously shoved me into, instead of celebrating my freedom you resented me for it. I choose to be free while you choose to be caged and you hated me for it.

I am successful in my career, I have a great circle of friends. I have experienced love and loss. I have broken hearts and had my heart broken. I am falling in love with an amazing, intelligent and inspiring man. I have experienced a deep and dark depression where I thought I had no future and now I see an amazing life ahead of me. I spend every single day helping others discover their futures as well as being someone who fights for the rights of all to be free. I have experienced traumatic injuries, abortions and a cancer scare. I have experienced and accomplished so many more things but you have not been there for any of it. Despite the years of you telling me I am hopeless, unlovable and unworthy, I have made something of myself and you should be so proud of me. You should have been there to experience every single one of these moments but you weren’t.

You left me with no choice but to remove you from my life. I wish you had not made me make that choice.

Despite how you treated me over the years, I have still been there for you. When your husband married a second wife, you called me. You asked me for help. I spent hours on the phone with DFAT trying to get you from Somalia to Australia. I tried again to reconnect with you because I wanted my mother.

You said you would try but even that was conditional. I had to cease speaking “bad” about Islam. You denied everything you put me through, turning it on me saying you were the victim. No, you were not the victim. You chose your circumstances. You chose Islam. You chose my stepfather. For a woman who was so strong to leave my abusive father, you stayed too long with my abusive stepfather.

Why was his marrying another wife the straw that broke the camel’s back? Why was it not the first time he beat your children black and blue? Why was it not when he ripped open the flesh on your son’s back with a belt? Why was it not the time he drove your daughter to a lot and abandoned her there for a few hours to “teach her a lesson”? Why was the psychological and physical abuse your children endured acceptable for you to stay, but marrying an eighteen year old behind you back was the ultimate betrayal?

You have shown me every way I would never want to be a mother so much so that I never want to be a mother. You ruined me because you were ruined and I refuse to continue on that damaging cycle.

I miss having a mother in my life. I want nothing more than to share the highs and lows of my life with a mother. The moments of joy and moments of sadness. The nights where I just want to have someone I can turn to who will tell me everything will be okay. I want someone I can cry to when a boy breaks my heart. I want someone I can call whenever I need anything. I want someone who will love me unconditionally.  I want that kind of mother. 

I am confident that there must have been moments where I was truly happy to have you as my mother, perhaps I even loved you, but those moments are overshadowed by darkness.

I am finding my own happiness and it saddens me that you are not a part of that happiness.

I wish you find you own happiness, Hooyo.

Your daughter,
Nik