God Created Me But You Made Me, Mor

My mother at 25

Malali Bashir

I have known her ever since I can remember. She is a very soft hearted person yet very strict about discipline.  A very good manager and a real leader at times, she handled many issues at the same time. She cooked, cleaned, washed, she taught us how to speak, read and write. She made it possible for us to understand our rights as human beings equal to everyone else. She is the one through whose eyes we saw a once beautiful, developing and happy Kabul, the Kabul where she had lived the best years of her life. Kabul was the city where she grew up, received her higher education and got a job.

When we were kids, she was the one who sew and embroidered us beautiful clothes that stunned many well-to-do people. She was the one who had a keen aesthetic sense and decorated a beautiful home with ordinary pieces other women envied.  She had thrown the idea of a cemented swimming pool for us that we always enjoyed after the long walks from school under hot sun. She had tied ropes to the trees in our house yard to make a swing for us. She was the one who played chess and karemboard with us on nights with no electricity when my father was not in the mood of playing cards with us.

She made cloth dolls for us and houses for them out of wooden cartons. She is the woman who spent whole nights to make sure that we had hena on our hands and that we wore new, well designed and ironed clothes on Eid days. Apart from dedicating all her time to her own kids, she made sure the girls in our village had a space for having fun and so she would cook some food and invite the girls from our neighborhood to have fun, dance and sing at our house.  

She was the one who fought for our right to education and the right to education for our cousins. She was the one who sew school uniforms for us as well as for our cousins so their parents don’t make a matter out of an extra expense and they get to go to school easily. She was the one who gave her favorite fountain pen to our cousin when he passed his high school final exams (she had helped him to prepare for) and there was no one to understand the importance of his achievements in his own family.

She was the one who tried to shut hundreds of mouths that opposed our schooling as girls. She was an encouragement and support to Agha Jan in his decision of moving to the city so we could pursue our high school. She once told a woman from our village that one of her daughters might become a doctor and solve any of the old woman's health issues when the woman demanded her to stop the girls from going to school and make them work at home. The woman replied, “I will be dead by then”. And she replied, “Well, your daughter will be alive, your daughter-in-law will be alive and your grand-daughters will be alive and they would not have to run to a male doctor against their will.”

While none of us became a doctor, the whole village started to send their girls to schools following our footsteps. They practically saw that we did not have to forget about one thing (house chores) in order to do another (study). She taught us how to cook, bake bread and even how to sew and embroider apart from teaching us how to read, write, speak, socialize, recite the holy Quran, play chess, make kites, weave sweaters, be responsible and cultured citizens, be proud of being females, have an opinion and be able to decide, be what we want to be and never  give up in difficult times.

She was the one who made sure we do all the homework and motivated and encouraged us to not only pass the exams but to stand first in our classes.  She is the one who took time for the uneducated women in the family and helped them with going to hospitals and was around when needed.

Having millions of sorrows in her heart, she never gave us even a clue. She only said “I am the bird that flutters its wings waiting to fly towards it's nest. I am a refugee waiting to go home.” She spent the years of her youth in refuge in Pakistan in a hope to get back to Afghanistan some day and live there as peacefully as had once. Afghanistan was the love she had left behind in a very young age. She got to see Kabul after almost twenty years with teary eyes and a mind in denial of the state of Kabul that she saw after the wars it had endured.

I am one of the proud daughters of this woman. I love you Mor.