[Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Ayesha Mattu, a writer, international development consultant and the editor of Love InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. Her writing has appeared in CNN.com, The Huffington Post, International Museum of Women, and Religion Dispatches. Ayesha is working on a memoir about losing – and finding – faith and love.]
O sisters let’s go down,
Let’s go down, come on down.
O sisters let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.
- Alison Krause, Down to the River to Pray
It’s hard for me to admit that light and darkness, love and rage, need and pain are entangled in my relationship with my mother. Every Mother’s Day, we go for brunch and pretend that love is pure and simple, that we’ve never been wounded or made each other miserable, that our hearts aren’t fists covered in each other’s blood.
I gave my mother an advance copy of Love InshAllah about a month before the release date. Although she knew the love story I was going to share, and had been a strong supporter of the book over the five years it took from conception to publication, after she read it in print, she disowned me.
