As firstborns, Zaiba (my co-podcaster at Mommying While Muslim) and I are usually right. Check the research, and it’ll tell you that the gift of big headedness is for firstborns. We are firstborn and daughters. And now that we are in our forties, we are most assuredly right, but less vocal about it outside of our podcast. It’s 100 percent true that wisdom comes with age, and we are not too proud to report that our wisdom came at the expense of falling on our faces or butts many times.

Humiliation is one of the best teachers, and we’ve been around the block many times, unashamed to admit that our wisdom was earned by our mistakes, which are often the best teachers.

Due to those experiences, we launched Mommying While Muslim. We saw Muslim American moms of our generation lost. We had no playbook to guide us and had to play it by ear like our moms did, petrified of repeating the mistakes that were made at our expense. At times it seemed like we figured it out, but that was after trial and tears aplenty. And, everyone knows (except many new moms) that motherhood comes in phases, and it’s a new learning curve with each one.

We had hoped that the cultural norms traumatizing us would die out with our parents and we’d have the purest form of Islam on our side of the planet, far from the cultural baggage that continued to plague Muslims “back home.” My mother always said that Muslim countries had Muslims, but they didn’t have Islam; America wasn’t Muslim, but Islam was here in its generosity and freedoms. Islam was “more pure” in America.

But then I found myself raising my kids in a primarily Muslim immigrant community and became heavily involved volunteering with refugees where the cultural norms were the same ones in which I was raised.

Such oft toxic cultural baggage has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with imploding it. Although there is much that is good in their parenting style, I have to say that I saw the same and worst mistakes of my parents’ generation being made by these immigrants and refugees, although I personally hold immigrants to a higher standard because not a few of them are educated and have the financial means to know and do better. Their kids were sometimes my students in Sunday school, and try as I might to redirect parents or the entire masjid, my words fell on deaf ears.

People literally asked for my advice because I was such an enigma to be a trilingual professional hijabi Muslimah, born and bred in the United States. Then they’d do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I advised. Let’s just briefly acknowledge how their shock and awe of observant Muslim Americans who are born here is irritating and highly offensive. Then let’s get mad about people who ask us what to do and then don’t listen.

Sure, we have to travel our own paths, making the mistakes we make in parenting from which hopefully we (as the parents) and our children both learn and emerge for the better. And sure, parts of our cultures can be beautiful and shape who we are. But at the same time, why must the toxic cultural baggage of previous generations be perpetually repeated? Why can’t we learn from those who have come through it and have figured out (to an extent) what to take with and what to leave behind?

While I stewed in my indignation that these parents were screwing up yet an other generation of Muslim Americans, Zaiba was dreaming up a solution. It was Mommying While Muslim podcast. It has become our way of steering and redirecting those who ARE willing to ask, listen and execute towards purer Islamic mothering than we had. It’s for moms who are okay saying, “I don’t even know what I don’t know about this job,” or “Wow, I did not know that.”

Further, it became a means for us to get the answers we needed to better parent our own growing kids. At the podcast, we have to ask, learn and execute more so than our audience does because the responsibility of disseminating the best, truest, most relevant information and modeling it is now on our shoulders. It’s a burden we are only too happy to carry.

This year the podcast started hosting mom retreats to fortify moms for the work they have to go back and do at home. Zaiba had never left her kids before I came along as cohost and made her run away from home and recharge. Fill Up Your Cup Retreats is aimed at improving our mothering skills and also pampering moms who have to be mothered, too. It’s Zaiba’s pet project even though she was the most resistant to do something for herself at first. Now she’s the cheerleader of hardworking self-martyred mothers and has scheduled retreats in cities where most of our listeners live. Watch out for them in 2023!

Most importantly, we’ve been able to connect moms who DM for assistance finding a therapist for a child, a shelter to escape DV or a food pantry to get an emergency food box. And most heartbreaking of all, we frequently tell a child who contacts us that Allah (S) loves them and that WE love them even though they’ve been kicked out by their own parents for being gay, drunk or defiant.

We do this all off the air for free as non-social workers because as Muhammad Ali said, “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.” Our podcast that was supposed to be a soapbox became a desk for us to learn and serve, bigger gifts to us than any we could give others. These DMs and emails are often the inspiration for our scheduled monthly series because we find out what we don’t know, and then call the experts and resources to come on and tell everyone about their work.

Now almost four years, over 100K downloads and 200 episodes later, we are still here, Alhamdulillah. Our guests blow our minds with information and experiences we haven’t had. Our job is to open up to our momsisters so that they reciprocate and reveal the pain and secrets sometimes their own families don’t know. That’s how we podcast, that’s how we mommy and, Insha’Allah, that’s how we sound to our new audiences: wise but humble, strong but soft, loud but listening. Always listening.

We may be firstborns, but we are teachable and thus, we resonate with the teachable at Mommying While Muslim. Please do check out the podcast. We’re pretty sure there’s an episode in there that will resonate with you or teach you something, maybe shape how you parent in a different direction or validate how you are parenting.

1. Like it on your podcast app to help people find us and repost our post #mommyingwhilemuslim.

2. Share it with the moms in your life because #sharethekhayr.

3. Donate a cup of coffee ($5) every month so we can keep podcasting.