Her nose is teal, her skin turns from blue-green to purple at the edges, and her hair is the color of a struck match, so much of it that it falls across half her face and keeps it there. What’s left uncovered are her eyes, lowered and half-closed, as if she’s still deciding whether I can be trusted.
Procreate on iPad
I painted her a few years ago and tagged her #arttherapy without thinking much about it, because that’s simply what she was, something I needed to make before I knew why.
When someone asked me recently who she was supposed to be, I reached for words and kept coming back with ones that almost fit: future, alien, angel, ethereal, confused. Each of them touched some part of her, and none of them could hold all of her at once.
We’re taught that naming a feeling is how we come to understand it, and most of the time that’s true. But some feelings arrive in colors that were never meant to sit together, the way a teal nose was never meant to sit on a face, and the moment you give them a name, they shrink to fit it.
She’s one of those. On some days she looks hopeful to me, and on others she looks lost, and somewhere along the way I stopped needing to decide which.
Lately, I understand her better than I used to.
I still don’t know her name, and I’ve stopped looking for one. She doesn’t seem to want to be explained. She seems to want what all of us want, to be looked at long enough to be seen.
Is there something in your life you’ve stopped trying to name? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.
When she lived with me, I knew her life. The shape of her days, the small things, what was on her mind.
I still want that. I want to be the person she tells. Maybe because she’s my only child. Maybe because somewhere along the way, she became my whole life.
I know this longing from the other side, too. I wish I’d spent more time with my mother. Really enjoyed her. Breathed her in. As a child, you think your parents will be here forever. You know people die, but that feels so far away. You don’t realize how fast it happens. The same way you don’t realize how fast your child grows up.
That’s the beauty of life, and the saddest part of it.
If you’re a mother who knows this longing, you’re not the only one.
Little Birds
Something in me has gone quiet,
further down than sleep.
I stand at the window of my own life
and can't find the latch
to let myself back in.
The house is the same size.
It only feels bigger.
Her door stays open
because closing it would mean something.
Little birds learn to fly.
That was always the plan.
I showed her the sky myself,
pointed at it for years,
said go.
And she went,
far, the way they do.
I still want the small things,
the calls about nothing,
her days told back to me.
I didn't know what my elders were to me
until I'd lived long enough
to count who was left.
She'll learn it the same way.
I only have to still be here.
Nobody tells the mother bird
what to do with the nest after.
So I do what mothers do.
I keep the branch warm.
I listen for wings.
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.
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.
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.
