When I was six, I was left in her care.
My mother was always working, and I only saw my father once a week. Most days were spent with her. At bedtime, one of her dutiful daughters laid two thin mattresses across the carpet.
Those were our beds.
On good nights, my hands became airplanes, and the shadows on the wall turned into wild animals. On those nights, sleep arrived easily. On worse nights, I tossed and turned, demanding more bedtime stories until I knew them all. Falling asleep became a skill I never quite mastered.
Sometimes I pretended to sleep until the room was empty. Then I wandered.
On impulse, I rearranged objects around the house. When I could, I tiptoed into the backyard and stared at the sky and its stubborn stars. Other nights, I listened to the neighbors. Their voices carried stories I had never heard.
I was left in her care. She was in charge.
Yet it always confused me why she was the one in charge and never the one who put me to bed.
She slept in a separate room with my grandmother. Their room was sacred to me. It always smelled faintly of frankincense, and it was always locked. Inside, they prayed their five prayers, brushed their hair, and anointed their bodies before beginning their day.
It was the only room in the five-room house that our guests never saw. Each time I lingered there with questions, I failed to capture their attention. Eventually, I wandered off to another room.
Whenever they stepped outside, they carefully locked the door. I knew they kept a spare key marked with red nail polish. I stole it once.
I had to see what was inside. The room must have had a secret in it.
I searched everywhere, under the beds, inside the closets, through jewellery boxes, and stacks of papers I later learned were legal documents and a will.
Then I noticed the tall glass armoire. The trinkets inside were visible through the glass, so perhaps the secret was hidden on top. I climbed onto my grandmother’s bed and lunged forward.
My body clung to the corner of the armoire just long enough to realize my mistake.
The cabinet wobbled, then toppled.
Glass shattered across the floor.
Minuscule pieces surrounded me as I stood there in the middle of the room. My stomach felt hollow, and my heart felt shaken. I checked my arms and legs. Not a single scratch.
Then I saw my younger brother in the doorway. His eyes were as wide as a cow’s. He must have followed me.
When the family rushed in to see what had happened, instinct took over. I stood beside him. He was the only man in the house. They never punished him. So I blamed it on him. They picked him up, kissed him, and checked his arms and legs. He never protested.
I was indebted to him.
Still, my hands trembled long afterward.
Why did they lock that door?
When I was twelve, we lived in a different country, and I missed her funeral.
A part of me was obligated to be there, but fate decided otherwise. Still treated like a child, I was excluded from any travel arrangements. I never had to face it as a reality. Being so far away made it easy to believe she had simply gone somewhere else.
For many years, I would not think of her. Not until I was a bride.
Today, I keep a small photograph of her in my bookcase. It is the only photo I have of her. She took it for a passport when she needed to travel abroad.
Her face is honest, yet full of sorrow and exhaustion. Not a drop of makeup, not even her eyebrows were done. She did not care for those things. Somewhere beneath her features, her story was buried.
The more I look at her image, the more she resembles her daughters. Eventually, her image becomes indistinguishable from mine. We look different, yet somehow we are the same.
Still, not all my feelings toward her were love.
Her name was Fatima, just like her mother, my grandmother. But no one called her by it. She was always Omah to me, another version of “mother.”
My grandmother was Omi Kabereen, the great mother. Fatima, my aunt, was Omi Sagheeren, the small mother. And my own mother was simply Omi.
Somehow, she was everyone’s mother. The Matriarch. She reliably took care of everyone. Yet I sometimes resented her.
She cleaned my clothes, washed me, and fed me. She was the only woman who attempted to teach me the basics of the household, the skills every girl was expected to learn. She never went to school, though she could read and write. Still, I was left with her.
She cared for me, but she would not sleep beside me. I was not allowed to sleep in her room, and she never called me her daughter.
There was love there somewhere, but it never translated tangibly. A child can be unforgiving. It grew worse whenever she cursed my estranged father for stirring trouble.
I stopped obeying her demands. I refused to wash my own dishes. I stopped learning how to cook. I stopped recreating miniature versions of her meals.
In my defiance, I protested for my “real mother”.
I never knew much about Fatima until she passed away.
She was around five feet tall, short and curvy. Her body resembled the Neolithic figure of the Venus of Willendorf. Fatima was the firstborn daughter, destined to become the Matriarch to care for her siblings.
While her mother assumed the social position of a judge’s wife in the city of Taizz, Fatima remained responsible for the household.
Like her mother before her, Fatima was married at thirteen. Her husband was a young military man from the Old City of Sana’a. Together they had two boys and three girls. Her three daughters and son were left without the woman who nurtured them when tragedy struck their lives.
One of her boys, the handsome and clever one, as everyone remembered him, travelled with his father on a bus from Taizz to Sana’a.
When her youngest daughter was six, the news arrived. Their bus had run over a landmine. An explosion that killed everyone.
Later, they said the father had wrapped his arms around his son at the moment of the blast, their bodies bound together by the explosion, father still holding his son.
Fatima’s father had already passed away from old age when, years later, tragedy struck again.
From then on, it was a house of women, as people often called it.
Perhaps someone had cursed us all. The men who stumbled into our lives stumbled right back out again, leaving the women in worse condition through tragedy or betrayal.
Fatima became her mother’s right hand. She was the mother to all of her brothers and sisters, and the mother to her own children. When my mother divorced my father, my brother and I also belonged to the house of women.
We became part of her monarchy.
Fatima, the Matriarch, would wake at five in the morning, just as her peach-colored pigeons, each with a thin black stripe around its neck, began to coo. She would put on her white garment and pray when no one was watching.
By eight, food was ready for all six women and my baby brother. My school sandwiches made, my uniform cleaned.
By the time I returned from school, lunch was served.
On my days off, I ran into the streets to play soccer with boys until someone from the house dragged me home. My responsibilities were there, but I was disobedient.
Once or twice a week, as the youngest girl, I was assigned a peculiar duty. I had to scrub the backs of the older women.
They sat on small stools inside the bathtub while I worked behind them with soap and a rough scrub stone. Their back hygiene depended entirely on my firm hands.
I abhorred it. But I was the best scrubber in the house, so I continued doing it as long as it excused me from other chores.
My relationship with the Matriarch began to dwindle as I grew older.
With a mother, a stepmother, and six women in the same house, I refused to comply. I decided the Matriarch would not have my allegiance for cursing my father. My loyalty, undeservedly, lay with him.
The last time I scrubbed Omi Sagheeren’s back, she sat on her stool in the middle of the bathtub, her body hunched forward.
She was shyer than usual.
Before I finished, she asked me to leave. I did, relieved that my duty was over. Then I realized I had forgotten my bracelet in the bathroom. I walked back in and noticed something different about her body.
Her chest was gaudy pink, as if someone had punched her. Even though women surrounded me, I did not know what breasts were meant to look like.
I asked her about the discoloration and the strange shape. As I questioned her, I pointed to her right nipple.
She simply told me, “I was born this way.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “We are all born special.”
I left.
Who was I to argue with her about how she was born?
I assumed I would revisit the topic when I had my own breasts and see what fate had in store for me.
Since that day, her behavior toward me changed.
I knew something private about her, and she did not like that I knew it. She began avoiding me. I only saw her at lunch and dinner. She stopped asking me to wash dishes, cook, clean up after myself, or even scrub her back.
A few months passed that way. Then one day, my mother sat her three daughters down.
My mother’s face was stripped of color.
I was not meant to be there, but it was the perfect opportunity to sip from my mother’s forbidden cup of Nescafé. She told them she had seen Omi Sagheeren undress. Her chest had hardened, and her right nipple was slowly decaying.
“She was born that way!” I shouted.
Her daughters, now stripped of color as well, stared at me.
My mother turned toward me.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “YOU SAW IT?”
“I asked her about it months ago when I scrubbed her back.”
My mother’s face flushed red.
“WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY ANYTHING?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What was I supposed to say?”
I clearly did not belong in that conversation, so I left the room before the scolding could continue.
In a cruel twist of fate, the family’s Matriarch had stage four breast cancer.
The next year, I watched as she went through chemotherapy in three different countries and eventually a mastectomy.
Throughout the entire process, she was coerced into seeking treatment.
“Just let me die,” she pleaded.
To a woman like her, nothing was more shameful than having a disease in the breast. She was a modest woman who had only ever known one man, her husband. Now her body was exposed to strangers in clinics and hospitals across the world.
She became withdrawn, surrendering the rest to God. She was silent, but her pain was written across her face. After her mastectomy, I was responsible for cleaning her stitches. I was the only one who did not get sick when she fell ill.
The last time I saw her, she had stopped all treatment. She had no eyebrows, no hair, one breast on one side, and organs slowly blending into disease on the other. The cancer spread through the rest of her body, and we watched.
Every step became a struggle. She could no longer raise her arms high above her head. Despite everything that was happening, I never understood that she might die.
Death was not yet real to me.
I did not know how to love her before, and my only contribution now was obedience.
The week before her death, my mother left our new family of four and went to stay with Fatima.
I made my mother swear that she would let me come if she believed the Matriarch would not make it. We struck a deal.
On the day the Matriarch died, my stepfather told me that Fatima had passed away. Our deal was broken.
I did not see it. I did not hear her say goodbye. Surely she was just somewhere else, dressed in white.
As an adult, I understand that she died, but her death still feels like a hallucination. On her final day, she was no longer awake. Slowly, her body and her soul began to part ways.
Her secret room, now open, held the women gathered in a circle around her bed.
They watched her leave, taking all her secrets away with her. She entered the world without trouble, and she left it the same way. Her last breath was heard by them all, long and peaceful, followed by silence.
Then the mourning cries began.
Twenty years later, I was living in Portugal. A grown woman now. I had drifted far from the path laid out for the women in my family, so far that I lived in a place where I had no roots at all.
In 2020 and 2021, during the years when movement was constricted and the world had grown quiet, I learned of a Portuguese city called Fátima. The name lingered with me. In the Iberian Peninsula, it is widely associated with the Virgin Mary and with one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Europe, second only to Lourdes in France. Yet the name itself belonged to another tradition. Fátima was also the name of the eldest daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.
I am the eldest daughter in my family, too.
In the city of Dhamar, where my mother’s family comes from, it was once common to name the firstborn daughter Fatima, like the daughter of the Prophet of Islam. Later, she would be given a nickname formed from the family’s surname, as if the name itself had to stretch wide enough to carry both devotion and lineage.
In Arabic, the name Fatima comes from the root fatama, to wean a child from the mother. A bond that must, at some point, be broken.
One bright Sunday, I convinced two female friends to visit the city of Fátima. The three of us arrived together, unintentionally echoing a trinity. Neither of my friends knew why the name mattered to me. I had done no research and arrived like someone wandering into a story already unfolding.
The pilgrimage complex was vast and quiet. In the surrounding shops and corridors, wax figurines were displayed everywhere. They looked old, like relics from another century. Small and large wax feet, hands, ears, hearts, and limbs lined the shelves.
The city tells the story of three shepherd children who, in 1917, claimed the Virgin Mary appeared to them. Months later, thousands gathered in nearby fields to witness what became known as the “Miracle of the Sun”. Many said the sky darkened and the sun spun wildly before descending toward the earth, only to rise again into its place. Since then, pilgrims have travelled from across the world seeking healing.
Many people had arrived that day, despite the travel restrictions. Some sat in wheelchairs. Others moved slowly on their knees across the stone ground. Elderly people wept quietly as they prayed.
At first, I did not understand the purpose of the wax figures. But as I watched pilgrims buy them, carry them to the basin of fire, and drop them into the flames, I began to understand.
Each body part was a plea for healing. I walked past shelves of wax limbs until I saw it: a breast.
Not long before that day, doctors had discovered three lumps in my own breasts. I was waiting to learn whether they were benign. My friends and I were not of the Christian faith. Yet standing there, surrounded by the prayers of strangers seeking healing, I felt compelled to buy the wax breast.
Naturally, I thought of Fatima, the Matriarch, the woman who carried the suffering of a devoted daughter and a mother in silence.
I thought of the house of women that raised me. I thought of the stories that seemed to repeat themselves there: men who could not stay, women whose bodies endured more than they should.
In Fátima, I did not kneel like the others, and I did not pray aloud. But I wanted to place the wax breast into the fire. So I did.
The flame swallowed it quickly.
For a moment, I thought of the women who came before me, the devotional Matriarchs dressed in white. I thought of the child who once did not understand what she had seen.
The fire took what was given to it.
In that moment, I forgave myself. I honored the women who came before me, and I let the fire carry the rest.
Feature Image of Sana’a, Yemen by Rod Waddington,
