Award acceptance speeches often open with the recipient’s gratitude for one person: their mother. It is fitting. Mothers are where everything we know begins. They are the life-givers, the most tangible evidence we have of a creator. And for many of us, mothers shape our lives from beginning to end.
My mother’s stories were etched into every hall I grew up in.
From New York to Lusaka to Dhaka to Hanoi to Seoul to Port Moresby, and in the many homes and hotel rooms between, there were countless halls. Where my mother’s boundless insight fell short, I hounded the doors of the only other sages I knew: my aunts, my grandmothers, my sisters, and at times even my female teachers.
The more I sought, the more their insight felt like a confirmation of my responsibility to live for them.
Only now, older, do I see how little these women were allowed to live.
Lately, I am fascinated by bounds: boundaries, binding, and the shapes we form when we bind.
I have filled tens of books and notebooks between 2010 and 2026, most of them spiral-bound. The spiral weaves from hole to hole and tightens, tracing a circle that repeats the same shape but, funnily enough, never ends up quite where it began.
Around 2013, in a Dubai shopping mall, my father spotted a bright pink book with etchings of a mermaid, flowers, and butterflies adorning the cover.It was called Girls’ Miscellany: Fascinating Information Every Girl Should Know.He asked me if I wanted it.
“Oh, no, Baba,”
I shook my head, because that was how my mother usually responded to generous offers. It’s a habit I still have today.
To be a woman and directly ask for what you want remains unsettling to me. Really, I wanted that book. I liked books, mermaids, flowers, butterflies, and hot pink. I was intrigued by the large, unfamiliar word in the title.
At my denial, my father shook his head at the cashier.
“She doesn’t want it.”
What?
He wasn’t playing the game right.
“Wait. I changed my mind!”
I carried that book around with me for so long that its spine came loose. Pages grew thin and stained. I had memorized everything “miscellaneous” about its contents, including the long and dismal list of Henry Tudor’s wives--victims of his frustration at his own failure to bear a son.
And the fact that for centuries, women in ancient Chinese tradition were coerced into binding their feet and violently constricting the natural growth of their bones to gain a daintier appearance. It was called foot binding. “Pretty”, as a replacement for autonomy. “Woman”, as a replacement for “human”.
Boundaries are something I learned about in therapy. I was first brought to therapy when I was too young to understand what it was. In New York City, my mother would enter a large hall with mahogany wall-to-ceiling doors that slowly swung shut.
The doors swallowed her for about an hour while I played computer games with a friendly man outside.
I thought I was accompanying my mom while she spoke to lawyers about the mean things my Baba was doing.
Really, she was consulting lawyers regarding his pitiful crimes, both legal and moral, while her daughter spoke to a child therapist.
Eleven years later, therapists told me that boundaries were what healthy people used to avoid carrying the pain their mothers had endured at the hands of fathers, sons, misogynistic bosses, and so on.
Part of me distrusted this idea.
Before anything else, I am my mother’s daughter. What kind of living comes at the cost of betrayal?
A boundary seemed akin to shutting the doors to the years of love, sacrifice, good humor, and good grief that bound me to my mother.
Bangladeshi women know well that womanhood often strings up and binds women in hereditary ways.
I feel the pressures and pains my aunt, sisters, and mother have had to live through because, unfortunately, patriarchy is crafted of things far tougher than plastic.
This inherited baggage lives off the idea that self- sacrifice is a virtue.
The pains I inherited from living through women who don’t live caused me to idolize martyrdom.
As someone so connected to bounds, boundaries are still new to me. Boundaries don’t feel like they were made for someone like me, someone who is a woman and is Brown.But the older I get, the more I’m having to accept being self-defining in my identity. More and more, angering others feels like the price I have to pay for living.
Selfishness is a “crime”, and yet the self is all I have.
Is the selfish Brown Woman, then, nothing at all?
Deya Nurani is a freelance contributor based in the US.