Abd Ennour Alouach, 17, Essaouira. Iron Women, Strong Women, Pretty Women, Ambitious… All are descriptions of a mother struggling to prove herself, fighting time for her family, for their happiness and success and everything good about them. But no one knows the suffering and sacrifice she endured to become what she is now. Many women embody these descriptions, but this one happens to be my mother. She is not famous in the world, in any field or in her community. She didn’t write a book summarizing her life to appear on television or tell her story to gain selfsatisfaction from others. She owns a family, maybe a bit big to recognize her efforts. In 1971, Khadija Daoudi was born in a rural village called Talmest of a father working as a merchant and mother of a housewife. She was the eldest daughter and after one year she had a brother. After reaching the age of going to school, she didn’t go like the other girls the same age as her because she had to help her mother with the housework and raising her brothers, which in turn still need nurturing. The years go by and she has not gone to school but is taking on great responsibility for herself. This was the situation for years. Every day her brothers waited until they came back from school, to then take a book and make the most of it; looking and thinking about its content and story. My mom, too, was there, seeing the words but not understanding a thing.
When she was 16 years old, like when all the other girls in the town reach the same age, her parents saw her as a grown up women who must marry, just waiting for a suitable husband. But my mother took another way. She started selling the seeds of Argan, raising chickens to then sell their eggs, and after a while, she started to form herself. She became part of the community along with other people and learned some new life lessons. She completed what she was, at the same time staying involved in her family. She worked with her parents but didn’t ask for money from them. Not looking too much at the business of it all, she began to think about her own life; buy clothes, jewelry, and even traditional beauty products. More important than this though was thinking
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