The version of me that my mom spent my whole life trying to bring into existence came alive eight months ago. She took her first steps on Facebook, using my name and my face to hide behind. She used the version of my name that I adopted when I left home and stepped outside the margins of acceptable femininity as drawn and reinforced by mom and her idea of respectable religiosity. Her profile picture, ironically enough, was a four-year-old photograph of me grimacing at my sister’s phone, taken during a family dinner for which I put on the hijab so my parents wouldn’t know I hadn’t been wearing it for about seven months.
I spent years simply blocking my mother and relatives on Facebook to avoid the family gossip, bickering, and rumor-mongering. In the middle of a tough couple of weeks in my second-to-last semester at college, my sister called to let me know that my mother was demanding I take down my Facebook profile picture, a picture of me looking at the camera with a cigarette in my hand. I told my sister no; my Facebook page was mine. A few hours later, my sister called again to let me know that my mom had bribed her into creating a fake Facebook account for me. Mom didn’t want to risk people seeing pictures of me smoking, shaving my head, or hanging out with people who were obviously not Muslim.
I checked the fake Facebook page, amazed at the person my mother had concocted — a person who described herself with a mix of poor grammar and unlikely goals: “I’m 21 and the only thing I need in my life is Islam and Allah. I hope everyone can find peace and happiness like me by being the best religious version of themselves. I hope one day to be a good wife to my husband and to be a good mother to my many children 🙂 InshAllah i succeed in life!”
At the time I was too stressed out by grad school applications and the end-of-semester workload to do much more than show it to my friends and laugh. But as the weeks passed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was another me out there, wearing my face and carrying my name. I checked the page periodically to see the list of friends grow as my mom used the account to add relatives and friends of family I hadn’t seen or talked to in years. Through fake me’s page, I found my half-brothers — who I haven’t talked to in six years — the aunt I had seen twice in my life, and my ninety-something grandmother.
I thought mom’s attempts to keep up the charade that I was the daughter she raised me to be would stop at creating the fake Facebook account, but I soon found out she was also paying my sisters to impersonate me in conversations over Facebook with relatives and family friends. My mom also pretended to be me in conversations with aunts and cousins I barely knew. During a conversation about these hijinks, my therapist first laughed at the description of me my mother had put up for the world to see, and then looked at me thoughtfully. “This must hurt,” he said.
It did hurt.
I didn’t know how to confront my mom about the fake account. It was clear that it gave her some sort of satisfaction I was unable to provide, but it also seemed to be a signal that she had given up on trying to mold me into the daughter she wanted me to be. Despite my frustration, I was also upset that she had stopped trying.
My feelings about our relationship often changed depending on my mood and how secure I felt in the choices I was making. After a day spent with my friends and chosen family, it was easy for me to laugh off my mother’s actions because I had proof, cuddling next to me on the couch, that I was loved for who I was. But when I started getting rejections from different grad programs to which I had applied, I felt angry with my mother and simultaneously terrified that the person she’d created was the person I was really supposed to be – the version of me that could actually succeed in life.
My mother was the one who nagged me into putting on the hijab when I was eleven, ignoring the obvious signs that I had taken it off and was only wearing it in her presence by the time I was nineteen. She pushed me to start fasting Ramadan when I was nine, and pretended to believe that I was still doing so when I was twenty-one. Even now she nags me about finding a husband, ignoring the fact that I came out to her as gay months ago.
What my mom doesn’t like, she often tries to ignore. The fake Facebook account seemed like just another way for her to try and ignore the very real person that I have become. When I tried to express my anger at what she had done, she laughed it off and told me that my aunts were so happy I had come back to Islam and started wearing the hijab again. I tried to point out that that wasn’t me, and that she could only keep up the charade for so long, but she waved off my protests. She then told me of the numerous marriage proposals fake me had gotten from “religious” men on Facebook, snidely informing me that at least I had options. After graduating university a few months ago, I moved in with my parents while I look for a job. Now I’m actually being introduced to some of the family friends and relatives that “Mom Me” had been having conversations with on Facebook.
Somehow my mom is able to keep up the illusion of religious, hijabi, online me, alongside real, short-haired, cigarette-smoking me, at least in her own mind. Mom Me is religious, therefore good and virtuous. Real Me is not religious, therefore bad and corrupt. A small part of me worries this unusual brand of wish-fulfillment could eventually beat me into submission, so that one day I will wake up as the person my mother has tried to create, a person who is the polar opposite of who I am.
The fake me created by my mother has come to mirror the differences between her and me — two sides of a coin that can’t be reconciled. I was supposed to want marriage and children. I was supposed to find peace in Islam. I wasn’t supposed to run off to a liberal arts college, come out as queer, get fifteen tattoos in the space of two years, and leave religion and tradition as far behind me as I could. I have always hidden parts of myself from my mother’s overly curious eyes — my music, my books, and my writing. As I grew older, I started hiding my friends and relationships, too. The most obvious manifestation of this double life happened when I took off the hijab but still wore it around my family, because I didn’t know how to tell them that I didn’t want to wear it anymore.
There is a part of me wonders if my mom’s desire to remake me in her image is an attempt at recapturing her lost youth. At my age, she was already married and pregnant with me. My father was twice her age, and already married with children when they met; my mother was his second wife, a young engineering graduate he taught in college who, I imagine, was meant to make him feel young again as he struggled through a mid-life crisis. My mother’s twenties were marred with a difficult marriage and an even more difficult divorce. She moved back in with her parents after her divorce; moved back to a small town where she was ridiculed. She tried to support my sister and me by working at various dead-end office jobs, where she had to battle the propositions of older men who considered her fair game because she was divorced.
But in her late twenties, my mother married her high school sweetheart and one-time fiancé, and he helped her find a job and move to a new country, eventually adopting my sister and me as his own. When I think about the trajectory of my mother’s life, I’m amazed that the person who survived all of this scandal and heartache chose to raise me to feel shame in being a woman. One of my mother’s favorite refrains is that a woman’s voice is Awrah — something to feel ashamed of, something to be hidden. Yet my mother herself has never been a person to stay quiet in the face of something she didn’t agree with.
Perhaps she now believes that if she teaches me to be quiet, I won’t suffer as she did.
In trying to relate to my mother, to find something within her with which I can still align myself, I try to draw strength from the part of her that insisted on completing her education when her parents were pressuring her to get married instead — the part that caused her to leave an unhappy marriage and a powerful husband for the sake of her safety and the safety of her children — the part that dared to forsake comfort in favor of independence. While that side of my mother doesn’t seem to exist in the person she has become, I have tried to emulate that side of her anyway; make that part of her proud. I write my stories under my own name because, just like my mother before me, I demand honesty and respect. Because, one day, I hope to draw that side of my mother out again, so that we can finally be honest with each other.
Tags: family, moms, personal history, rabha ashry, religion
What my mom doesn’t like, she often tries to ignore.
Perhaps she now believes that if she teaches me to be quiet, I won’t suffer as she did.
Oof! Wow. This is really powerful. I am absolutely not crying in public right now.
“There is a part of me wonders if my mom’s desire to remake me in her image is an attempt at recapturing her lost youth.”
I think she’s trying to recapture the magic of that hair-raising “I’m 21 and the only thing I need in my life is Islam” narrative. I see this on the fundamentalist Christian side. The women have accepted the message that their value can lie only in embracing certain feminine roles, but down deep they sense the contempt from both their own subculture and the outside world for the submissive woman who devotes herself wholly to wife-and-motherhood. This gives their defense of their roles a certain desperation. They have nothing else. If it turns out that God doesn’t actually care whether they work outside of the home or not, that their husbands actually don’t respect them, that their children can find real happiness in other ways, they’re stuck having given everything away for nothing. Your mom has grabbed an opportunity to recreate the moment before she learned all this through a “you” who still believes in the story.
Very well said & resonates with my experience relating to my devout Catholic mother/grandmother/aunts.
I think you may be very right. I went to high school and college in the Bible Belt and so, so many of the people I knew from that time period appear to be living very “Instagram Perfect” lives (if that makes sense). But I think that many of them are afraid to examine, down to the very roots, what makes them and could make them truly happy.
“hair-raising” is the perfect descriptor for that attitude. It’s in the uncanny valley of points of view – like, it could maybe be real if you squint, but something isn’t right.
Perhaps she now believes that if she teaches me to be quiet, I won’t suffer as she did.
Oh, yes. My mom passed away last fall, and in the midst of my reflecting on her life and how she raised me, it really did begin to occur to me that she went the “do as I say, not as I do” route not out of hypocrisy, but because things had not been easy for her.
Thank you for sharing your story with us.
What an amazing story! Thank you for sharing it.
Holy shit, I would not be as kind, forgiving, and understanding as you are. (for starters, I would have reported that FB account and made FB delete it!)
That was terrifying! And also fascinating. I can imagine my mother doing something similar to this, if she could figure out how to use facebook.. And I also know what you mean about the bizarre inconsistency of your mother being unafraid to raise her voice and speak out against anything, and yet teaching you that you should make yourself small and voiceless to fit a particular mode of femininity. It’s particularly insane-making.
This is so beautiful and thoughtful, such a great piece of writing and hope you have drawn out of something so painful.
I chuckled a little because, when I left Islam and started living like the atheist I am, I created a fake, sanitized FB for myself to throw family off the scent. Didn’t work for too long, but hey, I tried.
new series: fake facebook accounts we have created to pacify others
What about “I no longer post on Facebook because it’s been invaded by aunts”?
(Bertie Wooster would forever be trying to dodge Aunt Agatha on Facebook.)
What about the “I stopped playing nice and told a bunch of relatives I never see and barely know to go fuck themselves, then blocked them?”
Did this for work once. Was friend-requested by my ex-boyfriend’s mother.
“Mutually agreeing with one’s dad that he should be blocked from seeing anything posted on one’s Facebook”
Helping one’s FB-naïf widowed boss block her terrible adult stepchildren and filter most of the rest of the family because the terrible adult stepchildren have taken their anger about the will and turned it into constant passive-aggressive hateful FB comments that make her cry.
This was a very, very good read. Thanks for writing!
As beautiful and powerful as always! I can only ever hope to be as kind and forgiving as you are..
Oh, this piece moved me to tears. Thank you for sharing.
Whenever I read a piece like this that resonates so hard with me, I feel the need to comment on it to let the author know I appreciate what I read but also feel like I can’t put words to all the ways in which I appreciate this piece. IN SUM, this is so so great – will commence googling author to find any/all articles I can read & follow on ig/twitter.
I’ve been thinking about this all day. Mother Love and Mother Denial are two incredibly powerful forces.
‘Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.’
I don’t recognize that quote – what’s it from?
Sent from my iPhone
It’s the only line I remember from Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’
What a story. Thank you for sharing it, but I’m sorry you have to deal with it.
This resonates with the part of me that remembers cutting my hair and wearing pants in front of my mom for the first time.
Beautifully written, thank you.
This is lovely and heart wrenching.
Good grief, I thought my mother was bad, but she has never gone as far as massive identity theft. At least, not as far as I know. I cut off contact with her four years ago, best decision of my life, and also with almost all of my family, since she was using them to get to me. About a year and a half later, my aunt rang my ex-partner to scream at him about how they were going to open a missing persons case with the police if I didn’t get back in touch. The police have already told her repeatedly to stop stalking me, so they won’t have any of that. Is she trying to get you into an arranged marriage or something? I’m really glad you’re documenting all of this. Stay safe.
People who treat their children like this are quite unbelievable, aren’t they. Everyone always recommends Karyl McBride’s “Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers”, so I’m finally reading it, and a lot of things are clicking into place. My mother was also obsessed with turning me into an image of her, doing things like buying clothes that were too small for her, wearing them for a while, and then sending them to me as a “present”. They were way too big for me, thirty years too old for me, reeked of her perfume, and gave me the creeps. She flatly refused to believe that I’m bisexual or that I left Judaism.
There’s no indication that her mother is trying to get her into an arranged marriage in the piece… What led you to ask?
(Also, eesh. I hope you get some peace from your family soon.)
“She then told me of the numerous marriage proposals fake me had gotten from “religious” men on Facebook, snidely informing me that at least I had options.”
So her mother is posing as her and having private message conversations (well, presumably private) on Facebook with men who propose marriage (out of the blue, or after a conversation?). This is after committing identity theft and gaslighting her daughter about it.
“When I tried to express my anger at what she had done, she laughed it off and told me that my aunts were so happy I had come back to Islam and started wearing the hijab again. I tried to point out that that wasn’t me, and that she could only keep up the charade for so long, but she waved off my protests.”
Her mother is talking about things that absolutely have not happened, that are inventions of her own, as if they are true, and telling them to other people. It occurs to me that she could claim that there’s been an agreement made to a marriage, look, I can show you the Facebook conversation where it happened. It all sounds pretty worrisome to me.
Hopefully Rabha is going to be OK, and she is clearly an awesome person and an awesome writer with a good network of friends around her.
And thank you! I haven’t seen any of them in years, although the odd bit of communication manages to slip through on occasion. I still go through patches of getting nightmares about it all several nights a week, but it’s blissfully peaceful being away from the whole unholy mess. Mine was also a gaslighter on a grand scale. It really fucks with your head. You don’t even realise how much until you’ve been away from it a while.
Rabha: Your mom sounds like an extremely extreme version of my mom, who I’m pretty sure has Narcissistic Personality Disorder – though she claims it’s PTSD from a bad childhood, and would insist she’s completely selfless. It might be PTSD – they’re fairly similar, and could be related.
Narcissism got taken out of psychiatry’s DSM [Diagnostic something Manual] this time around, but that was only one of the controversial decisions in the current revision of the DSM, and most mental health pros apparently use the previous DSM.
But anyhow, although religion and keeping to tradition to keep up appearances is a key part of your mom’s problem, I think it is almost certainly way deeper than that.
Narcissists are among the personality disorders that do not see – or refuse to acknowledge – other people’s boundaries, or the idea that other people can have different opinions than they do that can be accepted simply as “we disagree”. Inconvenient truths are ignored and rewritten. A child is good as long as it is conforming to the narcissist’s will and being an extension of the narcissist.
It could be that religion was PART of whatever forces shaped your mom’s disorder, but that’s a question for a psychiatrist or two, and I’m not sure how much it would matter except in helping you to understand your mom.
It is hard to be the child of a mom who doesn’t respect your boundaries. I am 47 and still struggle with it.
I wish you all the best, and just be true to yourself, and realize that only by being true to yourself can you be happy and fulfilled. Your mother and family are your past, and though you can love them and keep them as part of your present and future, being their reflection rather than your self can never make you happy.
Please do not treat NPD and abusive behavior as if they are the same thing. Personality disorder diagnosis in particular is frequently used to malign and pathologize people. If your mother is controlling, self-centered, and manipulative, it is very reasonable to say so, but to claim that mental illness is the cause of those behaviors is extremely harmful, as it feeds into the ways mentally ill people are stigmatized and far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence.
Controlling others is abuse, not illness.
I know very little about Islam, but I’m pretty sure identity theft is at the very least frowned upon? Or does she somehow convince herself that the end justifies the means? She has always told you a woman’s voice is something to be hidden. Now she’s speaking not only for herself, but for you – impersonating you, in a widely used public forum, where most people will assume the person with YOUR name and YOUR face is in fact YOU. You don’t have to put up with that. You can’t force your mother to make peace with reality, but you can stop her from actively sabotaging it in this specific way.
Facebook lets you report impostor accounts. I tried to post the link, but I think it got blocked. You can easily google it, though.
Oh wow… I want to give you a hug right now. But I should also go and take a photo of me wearing a hijab… to make things easier for my mom…
Please do not treat NPD and abusive behavior as if they are the same thing. Personality disorder diagnosis in particular is frequently used to malign and pathologize people. If your mother is controlling, self-centered, and manipulative, it is very reasonable to say so, but to claim that mental illness is the cause of those behaviors is extremely harmful, as it feeds into the ways mentally ill people are stigmatized and far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence.
Controlling others is abuse, not illness.
Wow, this is familiar. My family is not that religious but they are conservative in a “what will the neighbors say” way and Facebook is our current battleground. (Basically, I get phone calls for posting anything “too gay” – up to and including standing next to people who are somewhat more visibly queer than I am.)