I was about to pass the mid-century mark.  My 50^th birthday.  The Big One, as they say. Increasingly, I found myself watching the gentle gullies at the small of my back disappear.   And I was bewildered by how much more attractive I was with mascara and foundation.  Birthdays were starting to feel anti-climatic, surprisingly similar to every other day, full of commitments and responsibility.  So, rather than risk disappointment or wallow in self-pity, I decided to give myself a birthday celebration I knew would feel spectacular:  a weekend away with my twelve best girlfriends.

Planning for my trip was stressful. Where would we go?  When? And how would we get there?  The stakes were high.  I was coordinating for friends who’d be leaving commitments and their families to be with me.  It had to be worth it.  Where could we go that’d be new, fun and convenient?  Who would pay the cost of travel and lodging, food, and entertainment?  Perhaps most disconcerting of all, how would I choose the twelve women?  Exactly whom, did I consider a “best” friend?

I relaxed a bit after choosing Santa Fe, NM as our destination.  It was a reasonable flight from both coasts.  And what woman wouldn’t appreciate its culture and shopping?  Most friends I knew had never been there, but I had.  After several prior trips, I knew the city would delight everyone: zen pampering at Ten Thousand Waves Spa; hiking the Sangre Mountains and horseback riding at The Broken Saddle; grazing art galleries, the Wine & Chile Festival, and restaurants; and schlepping for bargains at any number of flea markets.  Fortunately, a local friend offered her hacienda for my four-day celebration so I would not need to ask my friends to pay for lodging.

But how to finalize my guest list?  This was the hard part!  My initial list included fifteen girlfriends, my mother and three sisters-in-law, but the hacienda could accommodate only twelve women.  Even then, some of us needed to share king beds and rooms.  Besides, I wanted an intimate gathering, my barometer being that we’d fit at one table for dining.  The easiest thing to do would be to eliminate my family, but some of us were extraordinarily close.  I counted them as friends, not just relatives.  I considered scratching friends that I didn’t see or talk to frequently, but some of them shared such a deep history with me.  Whenever we did communicate, it was if “time had stood still”.  Perhaps I should eliminate some my newer friends, I thought.  After all, how could they qualify as “best” friends when compared to those from high school and college?  But these friendships felt dear, more tied to my current concerns about children, marriage and my life’s work.

In the end, my best friends were the ones who affirmed their availability to travel on the chosen weekend; relatives whose presence wouldn’t create any brew-ha-ha in the family (my mother and brother’s wife); and those with similar interests and dispositions.  So, should I consider the women who declined my birthday invitation for murky personal reasons less than best friends?  I’m not sure but honestly, I was disappointed and felt the absence of only one.  Surrounded by many others, it was hard to be greedy.  Was anyone angry or hurt at not being invited?  I don’t think so.  But one of the wonderful things about getting older is becoming less tortured and regretful in making decisions, more comfortable satisfying my own needs.

Santa Fe in late September is beautiful.  The weather is temperate and the light and colors, just as Georgia O’Keefe painted them.  Our stay at the hacienda was magical. I’d been thoughtful about distributing my guests between the main house and smaller casitas on the property and about pairing friends in rooms together.  I took into consideration, who slept late, exercised, talked a lot, or needed to work.  I created a well-paced itinerary, with enough group activities for the occasion, enough downtime for more private endeavors, and plenty of access to the city’s points of interest.  My friends and I had time to commiserate and bond with open and supportive conversations.  And we had time to relax.  We slept, swam, told stories and laughed, ate and stargazed.  We are rejuvenating, we said, returning home more whole.  By everyone’s account when we parted, it’d been perfect.

So, were there any moments of tension?  Yes, but minimal.  One friend’s directness rubbed others’ sensibilities the wrong way.  I chalked it up to faulty social antennae but reminded myself of her caring and intelligence – things I value — and why she is a best friend.   Did I spend too much time managing the vacation for friends?  Absolutely, not.  My best friends made me feel celebrated and free.  Helped me turn 50 on my terms.  Shared a great memory, making our friendships deeper.

Ever since I was very young, my mother straightened my kinky hair.  I have a vague recollection, when I was seven or eight, of my mother admonishing me to sit still while she carefully coaxed a hot, iron comb through my nappy hair and then replaced it on the stove’s eye to reheat.

“It smells badly,” I complained, as I watched the smoke dance away from the burning hot comb towards the ceiling out of the corner of my eye.

“Bad.  Or awful,“ she corrected me. My mother was very proper and well educated and she insisted her children speak with correct English grammar. “It’s the smell of the oils in your hair.”

She continued, “Be still, honey.  I’m almost done.”  Done. Done re-fashioning my hair in the image of others . . . and a beauty . . . so prevalent during that time.

But, mostly what I remember are the relaxers.  A rite of passage in every young black girl’s life.  A time to emerge from the plaits and pigtails of a duckling as a graceful swan.  Or as a fairy tale princess with long, weightless flowing hair.   Every six weeks or so, my mother would set aside several hours on Saturday to pin me between her knees and work thick, white cream like  mayonnaise through the roots of my hair. I knew better than to squirm or complain:  for there is a prescribed amount of time the cream can stay in your hair without it burning your scalp and taking out your hair completely.  Working fast and without distractions, my mother combed then smoothed the cream across my curly roots until they relaxed into straight strand submission.  Finally, she rinsed my hair out over the kitchen sink and rolled it in curlers for me to sit under our bonnet dryer.  I would emerge an hour later, hair falling in ringlets across my shoulders, ready to “wear it down” for Sunday school and church the next day. If I was lucky, and neither sweat nor rain ruined my hair, I could wear it down all week.

Only once in my life did I free my hair of salon and home styling and wear it naturally. When I was 12 years old, I sported an afro the size of a large beach ball for well over a year.  In spite of its size, my afro was easy.   I washed it, air-dried it and combed it with a pik. My hair, in combination with bell-bottom jeans whose tattered hems I purposefully walked over, officially made me a child of the 70s.

That same year, my light-skinned mother wore a reddish-brown afro wig.  Hers was pretty big too.  Every day, she left our largely white suburb and dutifully drove to her job as a chemist at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in suburban Maryland.  Some days, she wore the afro wig and other days, she styled her own hair in a short bob.  I still remember the summer we spent at my grandfather’s house in Mississippi:  gruffly, he muttered disparagingly about the beach ball atop my head, calling it “ugly” and “unattractive for a girl as pretty as you.”  My mother and her father fought a lot about afros that summer.  I wondered if he was a part of the reason my mother started wearing a wig in the first place.

My father was much darker-skinned than my mother.  She said she chose him on purpose so that she would have beautiful brown babies and kids wouldn’t tease them and call them “banana skin” like they had her.  He was an architect working as an urban planner in cities like Atlanta, Newark and Boston, boiling over with hatred and black pride.  Every evening, our dinner table became his bully pulpit to lecture us on the racial and political icons of the day:  Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Julian Bond and Malcolm X.  We were our own private “salon.”

On many evenings, from our dining room picture window, we watched the hippies who lived two houses away from us park their run-down, psychedelic minibus in front of our curb instead of theirs.  My mother said there probably were too many cars and too many long-haired, pot-smoking friends in front of their own house.  After dinner, we would retreat to our living room to read or watch the news.  If my homework was done, sometimes I listened to the radio and sang all the words along with James Brown, “Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud.”

As a teenager and for almost thirty years afterwards, I kept my hair long and straight again, processed by successive relaxers.  I curled it every day and wore it loose and long down my back or pulled it back in a ponytail or bun whenever it became crinkled and unmanageable.   I think I simply preferred the flexibility, but maybe I also thought I looked prettier with long hair.  Just as I had thought when I was transformed into a fairy tale princess as a young girl.   I spent hours at the hairdresser when it was time for another relaxer. If it rained, my hair got frizzy and I had to curl it again or make another trip to the hairdresser.  When my hair became damaged from extensive processing or simply thinned as I grew older, I spent even more time with my hairdresser who weaved in extensions so I could continue to wear a long-haired look.

So, when I met and married my husband, my hair was long.

“She is just like a Pakistani girl, Ammi,” he assured his mother in his effort to wear down her resistance to our marriage.  “You will see,” he promised.

It was true that I did not match the future his parents had designed for their eldest son.  Every single thing his family had, had gone into producing a successful boy like him — combed, well-educated, obedient, their best bet in the world.  He and his future with his sari-wrapped, chignon-styled wife were to shower good fortune on all the rest:  sisters’ marriages, younger brother’s studies and parents’ old age in America. Consciously, he argued in defense of my many attributes that would help to realize at least some of their dreams for him.  Unconsciously, he must have assumed my hair was part of the parade – the parade of ready-to-marry Pakistani girls before prospective husbands and their families, displaying their talents and showcasing their accomplishments, charm and beauty.

But one unremarkable day in October several years ago, I cut off my long hair and returned home with a short, wavy style reminiscent of Halle Berry.  Like all women at some point in their lives, there was a part of me that probably wanted to be like her.  I wanted her universal appeal.  I wanted her spunk.  And I wanted the glamorous, exciting life that practically jumped off of the pages of her Revlon magazine advertisements.  Perhaps, I was just . . . . simply, bored.  Or perhaps, I needed a boost that day — something that would make me feel young and edgy in my otherwise suburban and middle-aged life as a wife and mother.    Unfortunately, my husband was completely unprepared for the change.  In fact, I had no intention of cutting my hair when I left home that morning, although I had fantasized out loud about it several times over the last year.  He erupted in anger when he saw my new look.  And for a long time afterwards, I dodged a hurtful hail of commentary about my hair style.

“I can’t stand what you’ve done to your hair,” he said, walking up the stairs to change out of his suit one evening. He sounded as if he were announcing the particular terms of a deal to one of his partners at work.   He grimaced when looking at me, like a boxer sparring in the rink, waiting for me to take the bait.

“I understand you don’t like it, “ I replied.  “But I do.  Besides, it is only hair and it’s just for a change. I needed to do something different.”

I wanted my husband to ask me why I needed to do something different.  I wanted him to understand that my life had become somewhat uninspired in spite of the hullabaloo of the kids and our home.  And, I wanted him to appreciate how much I resented the wasted time styling my hair instead of enjoying our family and my hobbies, exercising and relaxing. I resented the importance of hair.  I waited.  But there was no softening of his tone or easing of his stiffened movements away from me.

“It looks hideous.”

“ You may not like my hair but it is not hideous.  It’s just your personal preference.  Other people say it looks nice.   Even your family thinks it looks great,” I offered, attempting to bridge any cultural gap that might be affecting our differing perceptions of the same thing.  The fact was I didn’t know for sure what his family thought.  But I had not overheard any whispered criticism and they still smiled and greeted me warmly whenever we met.   While I knew plenty of men preferred their women to have long hair, I thought few that I knew would have reacted so severely to a change to short hair. Tears streamed down my face.  I was angry.  I was hurt.

“I don’t care what anyone else thinks.  You’re my wife!” My husband really was worked up now and his voice rose to an stratospheric irrationality.

I couldn’t believe we were fighting about hair.  That our relationship was being tested because of my haircut. It seemed to me to be such an unimportant skirmish in the battle over meaningful cultural and gender differences – nothing like religion, in-laws, or even children.  Incredibly, my hair was to become the straw that would break the camel’s back.  And I decided to allow the camel to gasp its last breath, with its legs giving way, crumbling under the weight of it all.  I was tired.  I no longer wanted to struggle to be me instead of the person he had created in his head.

I realized then that perhaps my husband’s reaction was a reflection of his desire to control what I did with my appearance and his image of me.  It is his personality to be less comfortable with change than I am.  But it was also cultural. Not because all Pakistanis have long, silky straight hair.  Many cut their hair short.  And some have wavy, curly or downright nappy hair. But, it was cultural because he came undone when I failed to perform the WIFE role as written in his life’s play script:  I had not deferred to him and what was pleasing or important to him in changing my appearance and seemingly, I had not cared about or loved him enough to keep what he preferred.  Long hair helped to define my essence as a woman, wife and lover.  Long hair meant pretty, sexy and acceptable to him.

My husband’ s reaction was also an ugly reflection of what society had taught us both was attractive.  As ashamed as I was to admit it, on some level, long hair had meant pretty, sexy and acceptable to me too.  Old-fashioned ways of thinking — reinforced by our fairy tales and storybooks, advertising and corporate cultures — continually surface and influence our perspective and opinions. Unknowingly, my husband had charged blindly into a minefield of historic tension amongst people of color worldwide – those with fair skin and “good” hair and those without.

Sometimes I worried he might be right.  Secretly, I checked and re-checked myself in the master bath, hallway and powder room mirrors.  What if I really had messed up how I looked, as my husband claimed?  Was I really less attractive now?  Privately, I cried hopelessly when he was most unsupportive and applied salve to my wounds by reminding myself that while attractive, my husband was no Bollywood movie star.  I dredged down deep to tap reservoirs of confidence and stamina to keep from falling into a dark hole of self-doubt.  And, every time I lost my footing, I clawed my way back up to stand my ground.

But the fact was my hair had never looked better.  It had never been healthier: fuller, shinier, more resilient.  And I had never felt better about the way I looked.  I realized my haircut had nothing to do with my husband, his preferences, and most importantly, my love for him or care for his feelings.  It was all about me.  It was my right to style my hair as I pleased.  It was mine.

Some time later, I realized that except for the color of my skin, my long hair allowed me to be anyone my husband wanted me to be.  In his mind, I was no different than a Pakistani girl.   I did, in fact, share his family’s moral values on family, respect, religion and education. But, the cutting of my hair made it difficult for him to look at me and see the woman, not the girl, in me.  I was poised, attractive, smart and articulate.  But many others did not expect these attributes from an African-American.  And, like these other attributes, long hair helped me to appear racially more neutral and acceptable. My new, short hair, however,  made it difficult for my husband to look at me and not see my blackness, especially when I left my hair to curl naturally and softly frame my brown face.  I was no longer an empty vial waiting for some identification.

Then one day, the commentary on my hair stopped.  Just like the unremarkable day when I cut it, one unremarkable day months later, after we had been out with friends, my husband said, “You look pretty tonight.”

He never mentioned it but I accepted that his compliment included my hair.  I knew that it was too difficult for him:  he was too proud to ever talk to me about his initial reaction to my haircut.  Yet I was surprisingly happy I didn’t need him to admit anything.  I loved my new hair and the person I was on the inside and out.  And I loved having the freedom to wear my hair short now and perhaps . . . just perhaps, long again later.  As long as I was the one to choose.

Published in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine (August 2010)

I caught a glimpse of her when I turned onto the narrow lane of cottages facing Ocean Park and the open sea. Something about the sunlight reflecting off her hair clip or the silver bracelets she wore on both wrists caught my eye.  Curious, I pulled the car to the side of the road to watch our daughter in a rare, unguarded moment.  She looked spectacular.

She was there with friends “hanging out” – so aptly called for the languid way their bodies slouched against one another and anything nearby. I could hear her voice, clear and high, rather matter-of-fact.  Teenagers all seem to talk that way, as if everything were obvious to everybody.  I strained to hear what they were talking about.

They all laughed, then continued talking in bursts of babble, staccato and legato, trampling each other’s sentences inconsequentially. Their glee was full-throated, the kind that challenges old people and makes them uncomfortable.

The way the sun hit her hair and made it gleam made me start.  I hadn’t noticed how the summer had fashioned natural highlights from her crown to the wavy ends against her shoulders.  “Would it be possible to do that to mine?” I might say to my hairdresser when I returned home to New York. Looking at the highlights again, I couldn’t tell if she had recently showered and whether or not her hair was wet.  If so, perhaps that would explain why her skin seemed moist and the fleshy part under her eyes was flushed.

As she spoke, she twirled in on herself to the arms of a boy sitting on the bench.  She sat on his lap and continued talking, pretending not to notice the unadulterated electricity between them.  I’m sure she noticed though. Looking away, my face burned as even I felt a charge.

I smiled. Though confident, she didn’t think herself so pretty.  Yet, everyone commented on her beauty:  her long, dark hair and eyelashes, her kind eyes and ready smile.  She had that easy way about her – easy and comfortable in the smile and easy in the swing of her arms as she walked

But my husband wouldn’t approve: of her hanging out in the park with friends, the guy whose arms crossed over one another around her waist, the way they all dressed.              “These kids are out of control,” he’d say sucking his teeth and complaining about PDA (public display of affection) and how they played their music too loudly — how inappropriate it all was and what was the world coming to.  But I didn’t feel that way.  There was a vitality and hopefulness in young people.

Besides, my husband and I had been that way too, once.  Before we gave in to grown-up ways, accommodating children and in-laws and celebrating birthdays with too many candles. Like my daughter, I also had been spectacular. In fact, my husband had sought it, a sparkly compliment to his quiet, matte finish.

I returned home needing to go to the bathroom. “Just a minute,“ I said when our boys heard the screen door slam shut after me and all began to talk at once. They were hungry and quibbling.  My husband was asking the obvious, “You’re back?”

Running the tap at full force to drown out their voices and the televisions blaring in two rooms, I reached for the soap, mushy and floating in its own milky puddle.  A single, wavy strand of hair clung to its side.  I groaned.  I glanced up into the harsh lights of the vanity to see myself stretched forward over the sink, glaring.

I stared in contemplation, seeing that entire territories had shifted. The visible texture of my skin was something I hadn’t noticed before, the thousands of miniscule craters, so evenly spaced down my nose and across my cheeks. My eyebrows had thinned and a solitary hair sprouted near the underside of my chin.  Hurriedly, I pinched the coarse stem and yanked hard.  Bewildered, I couldn’t remember exactly when my face had changed and why I hadn’t noticed it before.

I seemed ordinary.  Once, I had been almost gem-like, a delicate adornment for my husband to pull out at will and cherish.  Yet I had grown weary of being cradled for the dazzle he needed.  He had grown weary too, of my wayward sparks that eventually felt glaring or brash.  Years passed.  Upon closer observation, both of us found me scuffed.  Not always sparkling.  No longer seventeen.

Slanted sun streamed through the bathroom window.

Emerging from the bathroom, I smiled at my husband and offered, “What do you say we all go to the beach for a sunset picnic?”  I might have preferred a strappy dress and sandals to cut-offs and bug spray, but life was more complicated now.  “We could pick up some food on the way, bundle up in blankets with the boys.  A glass of wine,” I trailed off leaving some of the imagery to him.

He hesitated.  It was true, it was harder to mine the spectacular in me these days.  But it was there.  I was still active and adventurous.  I was happy, and it showed.  Archiving my gifts, familiar yet strangely foreign these days, my husband shrugged: “Sure. Why not?”

I quipped,   “I’ll try not to get jealous if you ogle the sunset.”

We were married in the one thousandth, nine hundredth and eighty ninth year of the Christian calendar.  Even though we married before a Justice of the Peace without any regard for a white dress, I deemed our marriage a celestial miracle.  Our orbiting masses were pulled to fusion by divine magnetic force.  Our marriage would become an oversized billboard for the future’s multiculturalism.  His Pakistani, Muslim family however, privately doomed the union to cataclysmic combustion. Mine held their breaths while swearing support of my most grown-up decision.

It never occurred to his parents that he would marry a firenghi even though they had lived in this country since he was twelve.  He was such a good boy – combed, obedient, successful — and there had been no warning.  No girlfriends.  No drinking nor disrespect.  So they were shocked when their eldest son told them of his intentions.

“Please.  Don’t do it, Behta,” his Abbu cajoled affectionately.  “It will not work.  They do not have our ways.”  When logic failed, he sat numb at the fringes of female hysteria.

“Ayyy.  Ayyyyy.  What of my boy’s happiness?” his Amma wept inconsolably.

So spastic were her intakes of air and snot, that there was almost a primal quality to her distress.   “What will they say about us in the community?” she wailed.

But she knew.  How the aunties would commiserate and wag their heads.  Aiiii la laaaaa.  They tried soooo many times to introduce him to some girls – ve-ry bhew-ti-ful girls.   Fair and charming.  And from such good fam-i-lies.

Lingering, we lived at the edges of his family’s upheaval.  Having watched just a few of their Bollywood movies, I recognized our drama’s script: the tragic yearning of resisted lovers; a mother’s heartbreak, morphing into life-threatening ailments; the painful unraveling of a knitted family.  Yet, we had tampered with the familiar plot.  My Salams were those of an Amrikan and my Blackness felt twisted and swollen in a story line to which it didn’t belong.

“Why don’t you just stand up to them?” I challenged.  After all, it had been seven years.  “If you tell them what you are going to do, all this will stop.  They’ll accept us as a couple.  We’ll be happy.  I know it.”  I considered their outlandish cackle, their immigrant fears for their son and our dreams, mawkish masks for true devotion.

”Just give me more time.  It will destroy them if I go through with this right now.”

“But what about me?” I pleaded.

Now my parents love as parents should, I’d thought to myself.  In a synchronized dance that my mother and I knew by heart, she only questioned me, hoping my lead and her shadowy suggestions might prompt me to consider something more.  “What about the children?  And Christmas?”  Wary, she’d still smiled.

But my parents had modeled a strong, independent woman from their shared history and they were born of families and a people steeped in struggle. “It took your great, great grandfather,” they’d said, “mulatto son of a slave owner, to buck the law and bequeath land to his Negroid descendents.”  It had demanded my grandfather, a strapping, Baptist minister in segregated Mississippi, look down a rifle barrel on a bridge’s crest rather than back down to allow a white man to pass first.  And, it had taken both my parents to leave the suburbs and enroll themselves at Harvard, just to make a difference.  Family had sculpted me and they were proud of a job well done.

But perhaps it is difficult to calibrate devotion by the nature of our parents’ protests.  For who is to say whether acceptance or resistance defines the greater love?  Now a parent, I know how resolute is a mother’s love for the hollow, bony pocket behind a scraped knee.  And I know how crippling to a child’s flight, is a parent’s crush of love.

My husband and I would persevere, determined to marry.  Moral conviction and intellectual certitude propelled me to fight, although I understand now that I was but one of many masses hurtling through the stratosphere, and that our two celestial bodies colliding may have been more random than anything else.  My fervor intoxicated my husband with power he had never known. Yet twenty years into our marriage, I realize our battle was not about me.  Perhaps our mothers, in the pits of their stomachs, knew our most grown-up decision would commit us to a marriage of much harder work than most.  A marathon where I can only hope breathing deeply and pacing myself allows us to finish the course.

Lisa Argrette Ahmad

I wonder what stories will emerge from our gathering.

Lisa Argrette Ahmad

Its been years now since the time when the Pakistani one as a young girl was beckoned to all their daughters’ weddings, her legs tucked gracefully beneath her turquoise silk shalwar kameez, to lead teenage songbirds in rhythmic thumps on her dolke.  Its been even more years, since by my calculations I am older than her by at least fifteen birthdays, since as a young girl in short shorts and tube tops, we side-stepped then slid, shimmied and signaled lyrics with our hands to a Motown sound whining from an scratchy LP.

Yet its been only yesterday since she rose before daybreak for thirty days Allah-ka-shukar, to offer her prayers, steeling herself for a long day of fasting in America without the wail of an azan or faithful (or faith-filled) companions.  Every day, each of us dropped off kids at school and then bustled through errands, hosted a book group or girlfriends for a light lunch or tea, shuttled back and forth to soccer practice before sitting down with the kids to dinner and homework.  But in between, I ate and drank liberally, donned exercise lycra straight through ‘til 3pm pickup, then calmed my nerves with a glass of wine after dinner.  If I were honest, even I’d have to say that occasionally I startled at how comfortable the strangeness between us had become for me:  how Urdu words and Arabic names that once became caught in somersaults of my tongue, now rolled off my lips gracefully, or how the faces of Pakistani girlfriends that once all looked alike, registered  distinct now just like their personalities.

But whether by coincidence of marriage, each of us wed to one brother of a first generation Pakistani family in America, or by coincidence of nature, both being disciplined guardians of whatever but given to playful bouts of child-like laughter, we were drawn to one another on some deep primal level like that that exists as a matter of survival in the wild.  I was bound as if by blood to my sister-in-law.

Lisa Argrette Ahmad

*                         *                            *

We all clasped hands around the dining room table and bowed our heads to pray. Silently acknowledging deference to our elders, I nodded to Grandaddy.  His voice was measured and sure, as was his faith in his old age.

“Heavenly Father . . .We ask that you bless the food before us and the hands that prepared it . .  We pray that we remember those that are less fortunate than us and . . . In Jesus’ name, we pray.”

Abbu followed in the song-like chant of Islamic verse, his prayer resonating with clarity and truth.

“Bismillah Ir-rahman Ir-rahim. . .”  Translating his prayer from the Koran’s Arabic, he continued, “In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most compassionate. . . “

The children wiggled and shuffled.  Everyone was hungry.  When Abbu finished, some of us said Amen and others Amin, but it didn’t matter which was whispered. We all were thankful.  We were all family and I smiled.

Lisa Argrette Ahmad

I’ve been invited to my boyfriend’s house for dinner in a couple of weeks.  They are Muslim and seem pretty conservative.  What should I wear?