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I saw a blissful mother with her little daughter sitting in a coffee house. The relationship of a little daughter and her mother seemed beautiful and were so appealing to me that I decided to have a conversation with the young mother. I approached them and greeted and asked for permission to sit with them.

They happily allowed me and a delightful conversation started. Her daughter started telling me about her favorite cartoons and the little girl was admirably selective in her choice of cartoons as she liked Dora the Explorer and Lion King and it was entirely surprising for me when the 7-year-old told that she doesn’t have permission to watch fairy tales. I wondered why her mother did not allow a 7-year-old to watch fairy tales which children of her age avidly enjoy.

My curiosity was intrigued and having too much interest in real –life stories of people I wanted to know more about their life. The mother noticed my piqued curiosity after knowing that she did not permit her seven-year-old daughter to watch fairy tales and she answered my question “As she grows up, she discovered her life was complicated. As a child, she never thought but life was not a straightforward fairy tale she strongly believed in” and she wanted her little girl to know this.

She told me smiling how she coped with emotional and psychological challenges of divorce and stress of raising a child alone. Before filing a case for divorce from husband (khula) she struggled emotionally for many years as her married life was not a happy one. When she was 22, she was forced to marry a stranger who turned out to be a womanizer and his constant womanizing made her a depression patient. Like every wife, she could not tolerate her husband’s bad habits but for her daughter secured future she kept silent and used pills to escape from her problems.

Whenever she tried to talk, her mother would interrupt and suggested that she should save her marriage as her daughter needed a father but her husband was not recognizing his responsibility and that his daughter needed a father to be involved in her life. But her pain tolerance ended when she took an overdose of pills and had near death experience and he refused to change. Lying on hospital bed she made up her mind parting ways from her husband and ended an exploited relation was the only solution to her problems.

No one from her family supported her decision but she had made up her mind to “reverse the curse” she told herself that she was not cursed but a victim of her own thought process. Some problems should be solved alone. So after she got discharged from hospital she went to her parent’s house with her daughter. She told her parents that no doubt her daughter needs a father but her father’s debauchery and inattentive behavior would only worsen her problems and his constant absence would raise unanswered questions in her innocent mind.

So, she took the decision and filed a divorce, fortunately, her husband agreed that the irreconcilable differences and granted her a divorce. She suffered psychologically and she went through post-divorce stress but every day she told herself a depressed woman could jump off the cliff but a mother could not and after two agonizing years God healed her wounded soul and gave her strength to live again as one day her little daughter came to her and told her that she loved and child’s love was above her pain.

She was an educated woman so she used her education and applied for a job and got it, she now lives with her parents and daughter. She was pressured to remarry but she was not impacted by the society around her as her remarriage would be damaging to her daughter. So she preferred to become a single parent and raise her daughter alone and does not regret her decision.

She told me that she was peaceful as she learned forgiveness and accepted an apology she never got. She had to schedule meetings with her ex-husband because of her daughter but after so many years of divorce, she got indifferent to him. She said with a smile looking into my eyes “time says to us, I’m the healer your ancestors spoke of, THE CURANDERA healing wounds.”

After a long conversation with them, they had to leave but her story deeply impacted my mind and I understood why she did not permit her daughter to watch fairy tales because fairy tales show a fragile princess waiting for a prince to solve her problems. But she wanted her daughter to be the hero of her story and learn to reverse the curses. When women like her rise above certain incidents and decide to heal them their insistence to joy is a threat to those who devalued them. (To the so-called Majazi khuda)