Dear 35-year-old Gemi,
You’re so pregnant with your second, and you’re in survival mode. Taking up short gigs in DC to Philadelphia to New York, sometimes across the country, and you just got back from Singapore holding a huge position and now that position has evaporated. Your husband is finding his feet, worried in a way he won’t say out loud, and you hold that deep worry for him without flinching. You don’t cry. You don’t push back. You just hold it, and he finds his footing, and he flourishes.
I want to tell you: that was strength. Nobody handed you a manual for that.
You were a pioneer, and almost nobody around you could see it yet. You worked mornings, when you weren’t traveling, from home, years before anyone called that normal. People thought you were lazy. Canoodling with the pillow, someone said, like you were just lounging around doing nothing. They had no idea you were working with your own energy instead of against it, building a life around your family instead of a job you commuted to. You didn’t defend your situation. You just kept going.
Here’s what I remember most clearly, though: the bus stop. You wanted your son to get more morning light, more curiosity about the world, so you’d walk to the edge of the complex and just sit with him, counting cars, calling out colors, naming vehicles. Some days you’d ride the bus together for the fun of it, forty-five minutes, then catch the next one home. That boy is an automation engineer now. Organized, observant, kind. You didn’t know it then, but you were laying track for exactly who he’d become.
You also built something of your own in there. A platform, a real dream, born in the cracks between motherhood and travel. It didn’t survive. The team around you didn’t launch it the way you wanted, and it felt like sabotage at the time. What I understand now that you couldn’t yet: not everyone will share your vision, and building something real means learning finance and structure, not just having the idea. You didn’t ask for that kind of help soon enough. That’s not a failure. That’s a lesson you paid for so I wouldn’t have to learn it twice.
Then came the seafood company. Head of marketing and operations, millions of containers of crab meat up and down two coasts, product development while you mothered two small children. You dropped a million-dollar check at the bank with kids in the back of the van and your hijab a mess, and you just kept going. That kind of drive is rare. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
But here’s the harder truth, the one I’m still catching up on in my fifties: you scheduled everyone else’s success and forgot to schedule your own. Meditation. Time with the Quran. Sleep. Real exercise. You knew how to negotiate brilliantly on someone else’s behalf and never quite learned to do it for yourself. You leaned on food to cope instead of resting. And the parts of you that needed developing back then are the parts I’m working to develop now, later than I’d like, but not too late.
Your kids are thriving. These are Allahs blessings. With Allahs help they became heroes of your life. But don’t forget you were a hero too, and you didn’t let yourself know it yet.
So, girl. Hug yourself. You were brave before it had a name. You were building a woman worth becoming, and you became her. I’m just still learning how to rest inside the life you built.
With so much love,
Gemi
Founder, Khalifah Leadership Studio
Let’s stay connected! Find me on LinkedIn or catch my daily updates on Instagram.