I will not unlearn love

​

I was raised in remembrance.

My childhood was a tapestry of many faces, many tongues, many ways of worship.
Uncles and aunties from different religions, tribes, cultures, and lands moved through my life not as “others,” but as extensions of something familiar… something shared.

I was born Muslim and nurtured within its path.
Yet love did not arrive to me in one language or faith.
It came in many forms.

It came through hands that prayed differently.
Through voices that called on God in other ways.
Through hearts that recognized my mother, held her, stood beside her, and loved her without condition.

And in loving her, they loved us.

So I did not learn division.
I learned presence.

No one asked us to become what we were not.
No one imposed belief as a condition for belonging.
There was a quiet reverence between us, unspoken, yet deeply understood.
A knowing that did not need to declare itself.

Some walked with us into Islamic studies.
And we, with equal ease, walked into churches.
As flower girls.
As witnesses to joy.
As children who did not feel misplaced in spaces called “different.”

We traveled across distances for weddings, for grief, for celebration.
Not bound by sameness, but by something far more enduring.

Humanity.

I have been held by Christian women.
Guided by Edo and Igbo aunties.
Laughed with Yoruba uncles.
Embraced by white American women.
Seen by Black American women.
Nurtured by Kenyan mothers.
Connected to brothers and sisters across borders.

They were never strangers.

They still aren’t strangers.

If anything, the word “others” has never felt true to me.
I have always known them as mothers.

And yet, as I have grown, I have encountered spaces that feel colder.
Spaces shaped by lines, by labels, by quiet separations that were never part of my foundation.

It has, at times, felt like displacement.
Not because I am lost,
but because I remember a different way of being.

A softer world.
A truer one.

I was raised in love.
In the simplicity of allowing people to exist as they are,
without interference, without judgment, without the need to convert or convince.

That remains within me.

Asking me to choose where I pour my love
is asking me to forget.

To ignore the people who have genuinely loved me.
The ones who have cried for me.
The ones who have prayed for me.
The ones who have wished me well when I could not even find the words for myself.

It is asking me to turn away from kindness.
From presence.
From the quiet ways people have shown up when it mattered most.

People who stood beside me when even my own family could not.
People who prayed for me when I could not pray for myself.
People who held me in ways that had nothing to do with labels, and everything to do with love.

I cannot do that.

Because I am not me without them.

I am shaped by that love.
I am strengthened by it.
I carry it.

I was raised a Muslim.
And I am a Muslim.

But I was also raised in love.
And that love has never been limited by who people are, where they come from, or how they pray.

So I will not unlearn what was given to me so freely.
I will not rewrite what I know to be true.

I will not turn away from love.

I will not unlearn love.

Love Always,

Umi