About Me

A Recap Of My Life

2002 Abu Omar and I get married Islamically in Manama, Bahrain. He starts the process for the Saudi marriage permission. His application gets rejected but he tries again. The second time he uses a wasta. His friend knows a pilot in Jeddah that transports Prince Muhammad ibn Naif ibn Adulaziz Al-Saud and gave him our file to pass on. Eventually, Prince Muhammad ibn Naif approves our marriage permission. May Allah reward them for their assistance ameen.

2003 I have my 1st miscarriage in Bahrain.

2004 my only child is born at the American Mission Hospital. A son named after the companion of the Prophet (peace be upon him), Omar ibn Al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him). Allah is merciful. When my son is 3 months old, I decide to leave Bahrain to live with my mother and sister in St. Louis, Missouri.

2005 I start blogging about Saudi Arabia and Saudi/non-Saudi marriages.

2006 I received a temporary Saudi passport for my son and a family visa for myself. A month or two afterwards, we arrived in Riyadh. The long process of getting our papers in order continues. So many unbelievable obstacles were put in place by government officials. Thank Allah I was able to keep my iman and optimism high throughout the ordeal.

2007 I have a 2nd miscarriage.

2011 I got my iqamah alhamdullah. Even though I could now travel outside of Saudi Arabia, my son could not and I refused to leave him behind. I am homesick but I love my son so much, Allahumma barik lahu.

2012 I have a tubal pregnancy. I felt like I was going to die!

2016 even though I fought very hard against Abu Omar’s insistence on moving to Dammam for a new job, I lost the battle. I cried my eyes out. We had been in Riyadh for 10 years and it felt like home. My friends were like my family and I didn’t want to leave them. I especially felt sorry for my son as he was an only child and was not only losing the companionship of his friends but his cousins too.

Some bad habits of Abu Omar are increasing my emotional distress and getting harder to ignore. However, I still try to overlook things and be even more patient by trying to focus on the good in him. But I am often asking myself, why did I marry a Saudi, astaghfirAllah.

The move to Dammam put the biggest strain on our marriage and it never recovered. At some point in the five years we lived there, I lost what I thought was my best friend. Things went from bad to worse but I won’t divulge the bad in order to safeguard sins. The last couple of years in particular, he killed my love. 

I had thought he was different than most Saudis. The horror stories I had read about when Saudi/non-Saudi marriages collasped had always worried me. It is not that I felt safe from it ever happening to me. But I sometimes ended up coaxing myself to stay in the marriage because of my son. One of the reasons being that he couldn’t exit/re-enter the country. Nope, I was never going to abandon him.

2018 I got my Saudi driver’s license masha’Allah. It was the most exhilarating feeling in the world, very liberating. I got a car soon afterwards masha’Allah. I thoroughly enjoyed my newfound independence.

My son was happy too. We had some fun!

2022 my son got his Saudi national ID and Saudi  passport, Allahumma barik lahu. We both got put on the family card masha’Allah. Now we could leave and I worked up the courage to ask Abu Omar. He agreed to let us go to the United States to try to see if we could get him into a high school alhamdullah.

We arrived in St. Louis, Missouri in July of 2022 and have been here ever since. 

In September of 2023, after much deliberation and praying istikhara three times, I asked Abu Omar for a divorce. He didn’t strive to keep the marriage. I guess I wasn’t worth it anymore. If he really loved me, he wouldn’t have let me go so easily. It hurt because I had sacrificed a lot but insha’Allah I will have no regrets. I pray that Allah makes me content with his qadr and replaces my lost with something better.

I miss Saudi Arabia. There are days I do get sad about no longer living in a Muslim country. Allah forbid I was ever ungrateful for having a chance to live there. I just make du’a that Allah gives me and my son a better life in this world and the next.

So here I am, back at writing and helping people on FHWS for the sake of Allah with 21 years of marriage to a Saudi and 15 years of living in Saudi Arabia under my belt. It is nourishing my soul alhamdullah.