My mom held me down while my dad arranged my wedding to a dangerous older man, so I ran away and exposed them all. Now, years later, she’s sick and begging me to come back because I’m family. In my family, girls were married off the moment they got their first period.
It didn’t matter if you were 12, 13, or 14. The blood meant you were ready for a husband at least three times your age. I grew up with this idea normalized around me, so in my head, it didn’t seem that bad until I turned 11, because that’s when I watched my cousin Miam get promised to a 43-year-old man just 3 days after her first period.
His previous two wives had died before turning 20. That was the first night I decided to stop eating enough food. Not because I was fat, and not because I hated food, but because I noticed the skinnier girls in my family would be the last ones to get their period, and I knew it was my only option.
I later learned that your body actually needs to have enough fat stores before starting puberty. The other girls called me skeleton, but I didn’t care. Other girls my age were already promised to men who had children older than them.
That didn’t mean they stopped prepping me to be a wife, though. Every Friday from 1:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., I was made to serve meals to male family members for hours without speaking, and of course, if I made eye contact or noise while serving, then I would receive 10 lashes of the belt across my back and legs.
I was forced to hold burning pots without oven mitts to toughen up soft hands for kitchen work, the heat searing into my palms until I learned not to cry out. Every night, my mom put skin whitening cream all over my face so I could be beautiful, rubbing it in with rough hands while reciting prayers about purity and worthiness. Other than the secret starvation, I was the perfect daughter.
I played the part with zero complaints and always talked about how excited I was to have kids, how I couldn’t wait to serve my future husband, how blessed I would be to carry on our family’s traditions. But when I was 14 and still periodless, I found something that changed everything. For context, we were in the USA the whole time.
My mom had just convinced us that all of this was normal and that any girl who didn’t do this was bound to die alone, as well as being ugly and useless, until one teacher forced me to have a meeting with her because I had accidentally worn a t-shirt to school and she saw how skeletal I was, my ribs visible through the thin fabric. When she walked out to go to the bathroom, she had forgotten to lock her drawer. Inside were books about marriage laws, pamphlets with titles like “Your Rights as a Young Teenager” and “When Culture Becomes Crime.” As I read with trembling hands, my jaw dropped.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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