The Child That Killed Me
Because everything has to die, right?
There I was, in a cemetery, with my ass on the floor, my back against a tree and my legs in the air. Just metres away, my grandmother was being laid to rest, her time in this life over. And here I was, completely oblivious to the new life that was beginning inside of me; the very reason why I had suddenly blacked out, fallen and why my doctor cousin was now raising my legs above my head in the middle of a graveyard.
Sex was bad. Sex was wrong. Muslim girls sure as hell didn’t have any of it before marriage. But here I was, a Muslim girl, 24-years-old, unmarried and pregnant — the worst possible situation I could be in. I took a test — in the toilets of the city centre mall food court — exactly a week after my dear grandmother passed away. I don’t believe in coincidences, and it surely was no coincidence that the one person I loved most in my blood family but the one person who probably would have taken this news the hardest, was the person who left this earth at the same time that a new life was entering mine. Little did I know that the new life entering mine would be the catalyst that killed me, too.
One room. Four new babies. Eight sets of sliding curtains. And one me, staring through glassy eyes at this brand new baby boy who lay, wrapped up like a little white burrito, in the plastic cot beside me. I hadn’t slept yet and as exhausted as I was, sleep just wouldn’t come. The entire six months prior to this day continued to flash over and over across my mind.
Exactly six months ago today, my grandmother had passed on. My mind was going at a million a second. I just couldn’t stop it…
…the vision I’d had at 5 am in the morning of my grandmother holding a tiny baby boy; the phone call just an hour later telling me that she was no longer physically with us; helping to wash her limp, lifeless body with a feeling that my own was soon to be filled with double the life; seeing two crazily vivid blue lines on a stick and having my entire future change in just one moment; meeting my partner in person in a halfway city and wondering just what the hell was going on; that first doctors appointment alone; throwing up secretly every lunchtime in the disabled toilets at my fancy new job; lying to my younger sister when she heard me throwing up in the bathroom and telling her not to tell mum; mustering up the courage with every ounce of my being to text my elder sister that I was, ahem, pregnant and could she please, please help me?; the rushed nikkah (Islamic marriage ceremony) in her front room, a million miles away from the wedding I’d once imagined myself having; sitting with my mum and fretting about how we were going to tell the rest of the family; the arguments and the screaming and the shouting that ensued; taking my final year university law exams while six months pregnant; my husband moving halfway across the country to be with me, and me leaving my mothers house to move into our new flat, and life, together; finding out that, hallelujah, I’d still managed to get my law degree despite all of this; attending prenatal classes mainly for the amazing biscuits that reminded me of my school days and still wondering whether this was all a bad dream; all the relationships that had broken or changed or disappeared right before my very eyes; being introduced to an African Spiritual Master and not fully realising that he would be my saviour; scoffing down habanero nuts while watching Good Will Hunting and dismissing the pains in my stomach as “really bad gas”; going in to be examined and being told I was 9cm dilated and pretty much ready to give birth; giving birth in a pool and being handed this little thing with just so much thick, black hair and feeling just so numb; realising that having your vagina stitched up is definitely more painful than the childbirth part…
I couldn’t breathe. I was completely overwhelmed. The memories of six months worth of turmoil and pain and joy and confusion were wreaking complete havoc, and yet, as I sat there, I was completely oblivious to all that was still to come.
I was brought up with religion. With Islam — or I guess, what those around me believed their Islam to be — a confusing combobulation of culture, tradition and ego passed off under the guise of ‘God’s word’. I was taught this is black and this is white, this is right and this is wrong, this is halal and this is haram, and that God would be oh-so-very-angry with me if I didn’t do exactly what He told me to do.
Do you know what happens to people that grow up with this vision of God in their heads? They grow up fearful, their hearts become closed, their minds even more so… and some of them, well, they rebel.
I rebelled hard. Not knowingly, but now I look back, I did. I believed in God — that had been one thing I was sure of since being in the womb myself — but deep down inside me, I knew that the God that I believed in was not the God that I’d been taught to believe in. Even as a child, I constantly questioned what people told me. I guess even that was an act of rebellion in itself, where others would just keep quiet. What I didn’t realise, until the child that killed me, was how much of that conditioning had seeped into my psyche; I didn’t realise just how much I saw the world through the lens of my conditioning and how that had shaped the person I had become, and my life and the world around me, too.
That’s why, when the neighbour’s Muslim daughter fell pregnant in her teens and ran away from home, I was in such deep judgement of her. My conditioning and all of the ideas I had grown up around made me feel absolutely disgusted at her. How could she do such a thing? How could she do that to her parents? What must everyone be thinking? And oh, that poor, poor child.
So there is absolutely no coincidence, that just a few years later, the tables would turn and I would become the unmarried pregnant Muslim girl. I would be the unmarried pregnant Muslim girl and suddenly the whole world would be judging me. And that’s exactly what happened.
My family, all of my extended family (because in my family everyone needs to know everyone else's business), my employer who quite quickly became my ex-employer, my best friends, the Imams at all of the mosques, the neighbours, my entire community… everyone was judging me. Some even believed I didn’t deserve to live. Some thought I should be punished. Others thought I should have an abortion. It seemed as if everyone was judging me… including myself. Yet somehow, despite my self-judgement, I knew deeply that everything was unfolding just perfectly. Through all of this, one of my deepest prayers was being answered. The prayer that would lead to the death of me.
I had found God again, but for myself this time, two years prior to seeing those two little blue lines on a stick. I had found Him in the dark depths of despair and depression, or rather, He had found me and saved me.
I returned to the religion that I grew up with, but with new eyes. Where once all I’d seen and known was fear, now all I saw was Love because that is exactly what I was experiencing. Yet, despite having befriended God and having fallen deeply in love with Him, I still felt that something was missing. I felt there was so much more that I didn’t yet know; I still had questions, I still couldn’t understand why people viewed God as some angry parental figure that sat on a throne, lived in the sky and banished people to the hellfire.
And that’s why I prayed. Every night, I sat on my prayer mat and I had an open conversation with God. I told Him that I wished to know Him. I prayed from the core of my soul to know Him. To know Him fully in this life before returning to Him upon my death. I told Him how confused I was about religion, about how the way my entire family viewed Him just felt so off to me, about how even the Imams I saw on TV just seemed so far from the truth. I told Him I knew there was more to this, more to Him, more to this life.
And so night after night, like a chorus dripping from my lips, and with tears in my eyes, I prayed,
“I want to know you, Allah. I want to know You here, I want to know You now. I want to know You and be close to You, Allah. Let me know You before I return to You.”
And before I knew it, I found myself unmarried and pregnant with the child of a man who walked alongside a man of God.
There are no coincidences.
Many of us wander through this life aimlessly. We don’t know where we’re going or why. We don’t know why we’re here. Some of us don’t even attempt to find out. We don’t question anything; instead, we soak up everything that the world insists must be our identity and how our life should pan out, and we try our best to become that, even if it is unattainable, unrealistic and even if we destroy our being and our essence, in the process.
I was the same: lost, confused and trapped by the bounds of the social order, until Sheikh Aly N’Daw, a Senegalese Spiritual Master, entered my life while I was pregnant.
He was my husband’s Spiritual Master — a concept that I had always felt a little confused and wary about. Another thing that my upbringing had taught me was wrong.
For those who may not understand, think of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. Shams of Tabriz was Rumi’s Spiritual Master, walking alongside him into the depth of his own being and towards God. Shams of Tabriz was the man who pulled Rumi out of society; the man who destroyed Rumi’s illusion about himself and the world, and helped him to see who he truly was underneath all of the noise. It was because of Shams that Rumi became the Rumi that the world knows and loves today.
To become who you truly are, you must first lose everything you are truly not. Shams was Rumi’s guide to becoming who he really was. And Sheikh Aly was mine.
And I never would have met him if I hadn’t have conceived a child in sin.
It was the worst thing that could have happened to me, in the eyes of every person in my life. I thought so too when I was drowning in the thick of it. Falling pregnant before marriage as a Pakistani, Muslim girl was a sin, it was shameful, it was dishonourable and from this point forth, my life would be tainted — not to mention the shame I was bringing on my family.
But this situation that I was in, was one of the first shatterings of the illusion that had become my life. As I continued on my journey alongside the man I had now taken to be my Spiritual Master too, with each step that I took, more of the illusion was broken.
I began to realise that I am not this name, or this body, or this religion, or this culture, or this family. I began to realise that my life didn’t have to follow the blueprint that society had handed to me at birth. I began to realise that true success doesn’t have anything to do with money or social status. I began to realise that how I looked, how I dressed, how I spoke, didn’t define me as a human being. I began to uncover trauma in my life that I didn’t even know was there; I began to see how I judged others and how others judged me; I began to realise that all I had ever known about myself, society, this world, this life and God was so far from the truth.
I was being stripped naked, I was being destroyed… and I was being brought back to life.
Since I fell pregnant in 2013, this is the first time I have ever shared these words for the world to see. The world may still judge me as a Muslim girl who fell pregnant before marriage. They may still judge me without even knowing me, without knowing my story. But this, also, is part of the illusion of this world.
I fell pregnant and my child killed me. All of this absolutely destroyed the me I believed myself to be. But it was from this ending that I began again. The illusion was killed. And the me living within it. All that I was not was painfully burnt away, and I now walk this path of returning to the truth of who I always was.
The world told me that I had done the worst possible thing in the world. That God would hate me, judge me and condemn me forever.
But now I know that because of God’s love, there was just no stopping the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I was trapped before. And now I am free.
There really are no coincidences.
(This personal essay was written for the Medium Writers Challenge under the prompt ‘death’ — and is possibly one of the most difficult yet healing stories I have ever written in my life. To find out more about my spiritual journey feel free to read more on my profile. You can also follow me on Instagram and sign up for Letters of Love & Light here.)
