A Letter to My Daughter: Caregiving, Faith & Letting Go

One afternoon, I was rushing. You had an appointment and I was still on the laptop, ordering your supplies, and when I finally looked up at the clock, I realized we were already late.

I rushed to get you changed. Rushed to transfer you into your wheelchair. Rushed to change myself. Rushed to pray Zuhr. Rushed to get you into the car. "Oh no, Muji," I said, pulling out of the driveway, "we're going to be late."

I looked at you through the rearview mirror, half-expecting you to feel my panic too.

You laughed.

Not a worried laugh. Not an apologetic one. A laugh that said, quite clearly: don't blame me.

I've thought about that moment more than you'd guess. Because in it, you weren't the one behind schedule. You weren't the one who forgot the time. You were just along for the ride I'd built around you, patient with my chaos in a way I have never once been patient with my own.

There was a version of me, before you, who moved through the world differently. She had her own kind of rushing, deadlines, plans, a life that unfolded roughly the way she expected it to. I don't think about her often anymore, but I see her sometimes, in old photos, in the way I used to write my name. She didn't know what was coming. She couldn't have. None of us ever do, that not-knowing is itself a mercy, I think now, though it didn't feel like one at the time.

I don't know exactly when the shift happened, there wasn't one morning where everything changed. It was slower than that, and stranger. It was a hundred small realizations, stacked on top of each other, that the life I'd been planning for wasn't going to be the life Allah had written for me. And somewhere in that stacking, I stopped being her and started being this, the woman rushing to get you dressed, apologizing to you for a lateness that was never yours to carry.

I've grieved things I never say out loud. Not you. Never you. But the version of motherhood I imagined before I knew you. The ease I assumed I'd have. Small things too, a Tuesday afternoon with nothing urgent in it. I miss those sometimes, the way you might miss a person. I don't think Allah asks us to pretend the grief isn't real. I think He simply asks us not to stop there.

Because here is what I've come to believe, slowly, and not without resistance: none of this was a wrong turn. I used to think my life had been interrupted. Now I know it was qadar, written before either of us existed, by the One who knows what neither of us could have carried alone. There is a kind of surrender in loving you that I don't think I could have learned any other way. You have taught me tawakkul without ever saying the word, that control was always an illusion I was renting, never something I owned, and that the only steady hand on anything has always been His.

You are not a test I am enduring, Muji. You are an amanah, a trust, and somewhere along the way you became my worship as much as my worry. Every lift, every late night, every appointment we've rushed to together, I hope it is written somewhere as sabr, and that sabr is written somewhere as love.

So here is what I want you to know, today, right now, not as a memory but as something true in this exact moment:

You have never once been the reason we were late. You have never been the burden in any room you've entered. If anything, you have been the stillness in rooms I was too busy to notice were moving too fast.

I don't know how much of this you understand. I don't know if "understanding," the way I mean it, is even the right thing to hope for from you. But I believe you feel it. And I believe Allah sees what passes between us even when nothing is said aloud.

So laugh at me, Muji. Laugh at me every time I panic over a clock that was never really mine to watch because none of it was ever mine to hold in the first place.

I'd rather be late with you than on time without you.

Carry a little light today.
Until we share light again.
Nur, Muji's mum