Style & Serenity

The Year I Was Supposed to Be Fine

October 6th, 2026
Photo by Tycho Atsma on Unsplash

My daughter was home for her father’s birthday, and we just dropped her back at school. After she left, I cleaned her room. Then I closed the door.

I keep it closed. It’s too painful to see her room without her in it.

She’s a junior in college now, and by the third year I was supposed to have figured this out. That was the unspoken deal. You cry through the first semester, and by junior year you’ve found your purpose. A business, a degree, a cause. Something of your own.

People assume I’ll go back to broadcast journalism, the career I left to raise her. I won’t. Every part of me says that chapter is behind me, and I want something completely different. I don’t know yet what it is or how to find it. But every day I push myself to feel secure where I am, and most days I remember how blessed I am.

I’m still waiting. The door is still closed.

I know she’s doing great. She’s fine. I miss her anyway, with an ache I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t been here. I miss her face, her real face across the kitchen in the morning, not on a screen.

Some nights I open Life360 just to see the little dot that shows where she is. On an ordinary day, that’s the closest I get to her. It tells me where she is. It can’t tell me how she is.

I admire women who are full-time mothers, and women who manage full-time careers and motherhood at once. I couldn’t do both. So I chose the one that mattered most, and that was my daughter. She still is. She always will be.

Now she’s grown, and the job I chose is done. I’m truly grateful to watch her out in the world, finding her footing. And still, without her, I feel lost.

Some women reach this point and simply move forward. They’re in a good place, building the next part of their lives, and I’m glad for them. That isn’t me. Not yet.

On the hardest days, it feels like a whiteout. The light is so bright I can’t see the horizon or tell which way is forward. That’s the closest I can come to explaining lost.

Missing your child is hard enough. Then a second voice shows up to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Too much, for too long. Why can’t you let go? Why aren’t you doing more? I’d never talk to a friend that way. Most days, I talk to myself that way.

So I’m practicing something else. We don’t all cope the same way, and we aren’t meant to. One woman’s solution is another woman’s dead end.

Part of the difference is where I come from. In my Afghan family, closeness was the furniture of daily life. We lived near each other, ate together, and knew each other’s days without asking. Girls didn’t leave home until they married. It was old-fashioned, but it was how I grew up. Raising a daughter who would pack up and go away to college meant doing something the women before me never did. So when she did exactly what I raised her to do, I had no map for this goodbye.

I’ll say the harder thing too. Some days the sadness runs deep, and my health doesn’t always give me the energy I want. The missing makes the sadness heavier, and the sadness makes the missing louder. Still, I fight my way through.

I don’t fight alone. I have women in my life who make me feel I’m enough exactly as I am. They hold my hand when things are hard and applaud when things are good. Growing older has taught me how much that matters: friends who walk with you through each chapter and don’t need you to have it all figured out. That sisterhood is a big part of how I’m finding my way back to myself.

And I come from strong women. My father was a diplomat at the United Nations, and my parents came here planning to go home when his posting ended. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and there was no home to go back to. My mother raised us in a country that was never the plan and made sure every one of us went to college. Both my grandmothers, my aunts, and my cousins lost the lives they knew and started over in foreign lands. If they could carry that, I can carry this.

My daughter is watching, too. Children do as you do, not as you say. If she sees me admit how hard this is and keep going anyway, that’s what she’ll remember.

If you feel it too, the loss and the pain and the pride all at once, you’re not the only one. That’s why I’m writing this. There are many of us standing in the same storm, and you’re not standing in it alone.
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A Place She Never Got To

September 29th, 2026
Everyone who reproduces that photograph reproduces the camp. The dark wall behind her, the dust, the torn shawl. That’s what made Steve McCurry’s 1985 National Geographic cover impossible to put down, and it’s what people reach for when they paint her.

I kept her face and threw the rest out.

I painted this in April 2013. Nothing about the place I gave her has become true since.

Sharbat Gula, after Steve McCurry, 1984. Oil on canvas, Laila Sattar, 2013.

Behind her there’s open turquoise with light coming through it. Color falling across the top of her head, pink and yellow and blue, petals or confetti, I didn’t decide which. The shawl isn’t torn. It’s embroidered, magenta and white beadwork, navy and yellow dots, small green leaves worked into the folds. Somebody made that shawl with care and she’s wearing it. Underneath her, pale pink and white, a field in bloom.

I wanted her somewhere peaceful. A place she never got to.

The one thing I didn’t change is the eyes. The cover of the June 1985 issue said they were full of fear: “Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears.” Seventeen years later, when someone finally asked her, she said it was anger. I believe her. I also think anger is only where it starts. What I see in that face is what anger becomes in a girl who has to survive with it. Strength. Something fierce and very still, that doesn’t need your permission to stare back at you. I gave her a better background and a shawl nobody had ruined yet, but I wasn’t going to soften that.

She was about twelve, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan after her village was bombed. When a foreign man raised a camera in her school tent, she covered her face, and it was her teacher who told her to uncover it. By her account, nobody asked if she wanted her picture taken. Nobody wrote down her name.

It became the most recognized photograph in National Geographic’s history. McCurry’s studio prices an open-edition print at $18,000, and larger prints have sold for as much as $178,900 at auction. She didn’t know any of it existed. She was married at thirteen, raising children in a camp, living a life nobody thought to ask about.

When they found her in 2002, National Geographic gave her financial assistance, the first compensation she’d ever received for the image. I want to be fair about that. I also know how she took the news. She and her husband were nervous and sad, and she later said, “The photo created more problems than benefits.”

Then the rest of it. Two of her children died. So did her husband. In 2016 she was arrested in Pakistan for getting identity cards so she could stay there with her family, and she was deported. Five years later the Taliban took Afghanistan back, and she was evacuated to Italy, where she lives now. The girl the world used as the face of Afghan suffering went on to live nearly every chapter of it.

Afghans are known for hospitality. In Dari we call it mehmannawazi, and it means you honor any guest who comes to you, stranger or not, whatever their religion or wealth, and you expect nothing back. Nearly two hundred years ago a British envoy wrote that it was the most remarkable thing about us.

I grew up inside it. Nobody came to my parents’ house without being fed. My mother was a great cook, but that was only part of it. She made every guest feel special, like the house had been waiting for them. She was petite and beautiful and attuned, a strong Afghan woman in a petite frame, and her strength showed up as softness toward whoever walked through the door.

Sharbat Gula was raised the same way. A stranger walked into her classroom, and she gave him the one thing he came for. She didn’t offer it. Nothing came back to her for seventeen years.

Forty years after that magazine hit newsstands, Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans girls from high school and women from university. And the girls are still going to school anyway. Every morning at dawn, teenage girls in Kabul slip through an unmarked door and down a dark stairway to a hidden basement classroom. One woman’s secret online school now teaches 12,000 girls across the country. A seventeen-year-old wrote that the Taliban never considered how long Afghan women have been practicing resistance. For generations, she said.

The place I painted her into doesn’t exist, not for her and not for the girls going down those basement stairs every morning. I made it anyway. I didn’t ask her permission either. I couldn’t. That’s the part I keep sitting with.

Where to help

Aid Afghanistan for Education was founded by Hassina Sherjan, an Afghan woman, and has run accelerated learning programs for over 22 years, putting more than 7,000 Afghan girls and women through school. Sahar Education partners with local schools inside Afghanistan on literacy, coding, and English programs for girls banned from the classroom.
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Once or Twice a Year

September 23rd, 2026
My uncle has been gone for years. We drove out to California from Las Vegas to see his wife, his two kids, grown and married now, and their kids. Losing him never meant losing them.

One evening we went up into the canyon above Malibu and stopped at an overlook. There’s a bench up there and a tree the wind has pushed sideways. Purple sage was blooming along the edge of the pavement. The ocean was flat and hazy all the way out, and the sun was going down behind the ridge.

I paint water. I do it alone, usually from a photo, and I can spend a long time on one color. Standing up there was different. I was between my father’s sister and my father’s brother, looking at the same thing they were looking at. The ocean wasn’t better than the water at home. I just wasn’t by myself.

That’s most of what this trip was.

My uncle lives in Las Vegas, my aunt came from Virginia, I came from New York. The plan was to be in the same house.

My cousins and I grew up scattered. We were refugees, so the family landed in different countries, not different towns. Our parents got everyone into one house once or twice a year for a few days, sometimes a week, and that was how we knew each other. It doesn’t sound like enough. It was.

We’re still close. My cousins’ wives are lovely and welcoming. The kids didn’t hold back either. They were curious about everything, affectionate, wanting to be in the middle of whatever the adults were doing, and by the third day I had something of my own going with each one of them.

I want that for Sophia. I want her to know her cousins’ kids and her nieces and nephews well enough to recognize them anywhere. It doesn’t happen by itself. Most of us spend our time off somewhere new, a country we haven’t seen yet, and I do that too. But making the family the trip, on purpose, is what keeps everybody in each other’s lives. Nothing else holds. You book the flight, you cook for everyone, you put up with the noise, the way our parents did.

I want her to have the annoying part too. It’s easy to love family you see once a year for an afternoon. I want her to have the ones who get on her nerves and she goes back to anyway.

The first half of this trip, the week in Las Vegas, is Million Dollar Views.
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Million Dollar Views

September 15th, 2026
My uncle’s kitchen in Las Vegas holds four people and about six conversations. My aunt is telling me something about my father. My uncle interrupts to correct the year it happened. She keeps going without acknowledging him. Someone sets a plate of cut fruit in front of me that I didn’t ask for and don’t need, and I eat all of it.

This is the closest I get to my parents now.

Not because I don’t see these people. I always have. But nobody visits the way they used to. People call instead, or they mean to. A house full of everyone at once, for no reason except that it’s Tuesday, is something my parents’ generation did and mine mostly doesn’t.

Here is the arithmetic that brought me here. My father is gone. So is one of his brothers, and so is his sister Halima. On my mother’s side there is no one left at all, my mother included. What remains of my father’s generation is one sister and three brothers.

So I booked the trip. Not a stop on the way to somewhere else, not a weekend that happened to work out. I asked for the days and I came. Next week we drive to California to see my aunt and my cousins, their wives, their children, all of it.

My cousin lives here too, with his parents. He’s here every day, part of the noise. I didn’t know how much I’d been missing that until I was sitting in it.

They are feeding me constantly. They ask what I need before I’ve worked out that I need it. There’s no version of me here that has to be competent or interesting.

And they tell the stories I already know.

I heard every one of them from my mother and father, most more than once, a few so often I could tell them myself. But these are those stories from inside a different body. My aunt was in the room when it happened. Her version carries a detail my father always left out. Or it loses one he always included. Or the blame lands on someone else entirely, and nobody at this table finds that worth arguing about. They just keep going. I’m listening to a story I’ve heard forty times because this is the forty-first, and there won’t be an unlimited supply.

I understand now that I was never hearing the story. I was hearing my father’s telling of it, which is a different object, and there were only ever a few people alive who had their own.

My parents never sat me down and explained that this was the point. They just lived as though it were. My father was a diplomat, which meant he and my mother and their children were safe when the war came. The rest of the family wasn’t. They went from prominent and comfortable to refugees, and they landed where they could land, Germany, and several different states here. We watched all of it happen. My parents treated the scattering as a logistics problem rather than an ending. Our house was the hub. People came from wherever they’d ended up and stayed for weeks. Every bedroom taken, then mattresses on the living room floor, then the hallway, then the kitchen. You stepped over people to get to the bathroom. Nobody delivered a lesson about family and I absorbed the whole thing anyway, the way you absorb a language before you know it has grammar.

I’m in the third chapter of my life now. What that mostly means is that I’ve stopped assuming I’ll get around to things.

Four people left who remember my father as a boy. That number has only ever moved one direction.

I’m not going to be the generation this stops with. That’s the whole of my ambition here. What happens after me isn’t mine to decide, and I’ve made my peace with that, but whether there’s anything left to carry is decided now, by whether I keep showing up while everyone is still in the room.

Sitting in that house I feel overwhelmed and completely safe at the same time, which I didn’t know were compatible.

Sophia is twenty. She’s seen some of this, the full houses, the fuss, the cooking for more than showed up. I don’t know if it took. Nobody finds that out for years.

Tell me about the house you grew up in. Was it the hub, or was it quiet? I want to know.

We made the drive to California the following week. That part is Once or Twice a Year.
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What You Allow

September 8th, 2026
You already know if you’re in one of these. Not the kind of knowing you’d say out loud to a friend, but the quiet kind, felt in your stomach a half second before you talk yourself out of it. The relationship that doesn’t make you happy. The one where you’re smaller at the end of most days than you were at the start.

I’m not a therapist and I don’t have a method. I have twenty years of watching women I love, myself included, stay somewhere bad and call it something else. A rough patch. He’s stressed. She doesn’t mean it like that. I’ve come to believe most of us were taught long ago that love and diminishment can come from the same person, in the same sentence. A parent who criticized you as devotion. A partner who cuts you down and calls it honesty. Learn that pairing early enough, and unkindness stops registering as unkindness. It registers as familiar, and your body mistakes familiar for safe.

That’s why smart, capable women stay in relationships that would horrify them if a friend described the same one back to them. I’ve watched women who run companies and speak to full rooms without shaking go home and shrink in front of one person. Confidence doesn’t touch this. It runs on a different track.

Some do leave. File the divorce, pack the car, move to another city so there’s nothing left to walk past. A few years later they’re sitting across from someone new who turns out, once you know him, to be the same person with a different last name. Leaving him doesn’t leave the pattern. It isn’t attached to any one man. It’s attached to her, waiting for the next familiar shape to climb into.

It rarely starts with the woman living it now. This moves down a line, mother to daughter to granddaughter, each one certain she’ll be the one to end it, each one arriving there anyway, because nobody handed the next woman what actually stops it: the knowledge that this is a pattern and not a personal failing, the confidence to name it while it’s happening instead of years later, and one other person willing to say so plainly instead of looking away.

I don’t think the way out starts with an ultimatum, and I’ve never seen a five-step plan hold up against a real relationship. The shift I’ve actually watched work is smaller than that. It happens at the table, in the second after the comment lands, when something in her flinches, and then, almost instantly, she starts building the excuse: he’s stressed, I’m too sensitive. That flinch is the truest thing that happens all day. Everything after it is the story she writes to keep living where she’s living.

The women who’ve changed didn’t get harder or colder. They caught themselves mid-excuse, once, and said the true sentence instead: that wasn’t okay, and I’m not going to pretend it was. Even silently. Even if it took months to say out loud to the person who’d earned it. It looked like standing up straighter than they were used to, not like relief. Doing it once made it easier to do again, and easier to spot the next man for what he actually was.

What happens after isn’t the same for everyone. Some relationships bend around a woman who’s stopped apologizing for existing. Others don’t, because they were never built on anything except her absorbing it. I don’t know which one is coming for you, and I don’t think anyone does in advance. But the women who get somewhere better are the ones who stopped being available to people who needed them smaller, and had one person in their corner who could name the pattern and still see her clearly underneath it.
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The Year I Was Supposed to Be Fine

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A Place She Never Got To

Where to help

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Once or Twice a Year

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Million Dollar Views

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What You Allow

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