How a mother's "God-consciousness" nurtured her daughter's writing voice

Noha Beshir joins Cave of the Heart and answers 5 questions on self-trust

Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.

Noha Beshir

is a second-generation Muslim Canadian, who writes about faith, mental health, motherhood, and the immigrant experience in her newsletter, Letters from a Muslim Woman. She lives in Ottawa, Canada with her husband and two boys, and their bunny, Bilbo. 

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

I’m sitting on one of the chairs in our cozy little living room, with a cushion on my lap and the laptop on the cushion. My boys are also in the living room, each playing mobile games because it’s Saturday night after dinner and they’ve both earned their screen time for the week. My husband is downstairs, and I can hear the jazz music he has playing wafting up the stairs. Today was a busy day and we’re winding down now. Earlier, there were groceries and Arabic school and the neighbourhood winter carnival (it’s -20 degrees celsius here in Ottawa, but we drank hot chocolate, went snowshoeing, and rode on the back of a horse drawn sleigh, so we were game). 

Childhood

Q: Were you a chatterbox as a child, or were you quiet or something else entirely? When you spoke up or expressed a preference, what sort of response did you get?

Oh my God! I was the chattiest chatterbox that was ever known to chatterbox. I put the regular Chatty Cathys to shame. I had such intense feelings and so much to say all the time. My family was very loving and welcoming of my incessant need to talk. I’d sit at the kitchen table while my mom was prepping dinner and tell her one story after another of my school day and she’d ask questions and prod me along. Nobody cut me off at home no matter how long I went on. But the other kids around me, at school or in the community, constantly told me things like, “You talk too much!” or “Do you ever shut up?”

For a long time, I didn’t even realize how much of a wound that left. I just adapted by learning to say less over the years. I never became quiet, but I certainly wasn’t as profusely verbal as I’d started out. 

Maybe 10 years ago, at work, two of my girlfriends and I took an emotional intelligence class — there was money left over in the training budget and we were like, “What the heck! Why not?” The teacher told me that my EQ was off the charts. I had just answered a question — one of those “What should you do in this situation” case studies, and she said something to the effect of “Your EQ is really high. I’ve never seen this in any of my years of teaching.” She just offered that info up in front of the rest of the students, unprompted. I think it unlocked something in me, made me feel validated, because later that week, I remember standing up in class and expressing how I had made myself smaller because I’d been told to stop talking so much as a child. I cried in front of the whole class. Not just a tear or two but big, ugly crying with the shaking shoulders and all. My girlfriends had no idea what to do — ha! But a weight was lifted off my shoulders that day. 

Influences

Q: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.

I took a long time to answer this one because I really wanted to pick a cool, esoteric indie someone or other to point to and impress everyone with the obscurity of it all. But even after I left it for a week, there is only one undeniable answer: my mother.

My mother is a force to be reckoned with. I know that’s a cliche but I can’t think of a better way to describe her. She is an incredibly strong, incredibly principled, incredibly disciplined woman. She grew up in Egypt, completed med school there, and then moved to Canada with my dad in the early 70s.

I always say that there were so few people wearing hijab when she moved to Ottawa that she was taken for a nun. But the truth is that when she first wore the hijab in Egypt, she was one of the first to put it on after generations of Western influence on the country. You watch Egyptian movies and TV shows from that time and they look like American 50’s shows — the hair, the babydoll dresses, all of it. She endured ridicule and insults from everyone around her. Relatives and neighbours would taunt her and ask her if she thought she was “more Muslim” than them. Her dad, with whom she was very close, tried to talk her out of it multiple times to spare her the insults and mistreatment.

My mom is a natural leader. She sees the people in front of her as they are. Really sees them. She has no time for small talk — always goes straight for the deep stuff. In terms of her influence on me, I think I learned the value of community, hard work, and pride in my identity. She was strict but she was also incredibly loving. She’d get down on the floor with us and play games with my sisters and me. She’d let us all pile around her on her bed and tell us stories at bedtime when she was so tired that she’d fall asleep midway and the story would start making no sense (those were our favourite parts). 

She also modeled a God-consciousness to which I can only aspire. She cries when she prays—her heart is so engaged. Basically, she lives her values. She was a proponent of slow living and disengaging from the material and self-awareness before they were buzz words. She learned to garden, which was not a thing in the big cities in Egypt where she grew up, and wasn’t trendy yet in Ottawa either. She grew tomatoes and cucumbers in our side yard—it was a battle between her and the squirrels! When we wanted new Barbies she’d buy them for us at garage sales, and make them fancy beds from wooden clementine boxes and the cloth from her old dresses. I can see her sitting at her sewing machine, making the pillow case for a luxurious Barbie sham, which she then filled with stuffing from an old pillow. It was so much prettier than anything you could buy at Woolworths or Sears. 

A lot of people can’t wait to move out and build their own lives when they’re younger, but when I moved out, I was on the phone with my mom almost every day. Getting advice. Learning how to “adult” beyond just paying the bills and meal-planning. It was the bigger stuff that I needed advice on: how to deal with the fact that I never had all the answers, that there would always be uncertainty. She is endlessly supportive and instructive. She’ll get in the weeds with you to solve your problems. I am incredibly blessed to have her. Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God).

Creative Spark

Q: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

My new ideas are usually sparked in one of two ways:

First, I’m having a conversation with someone and I think to myself, there’s something here to explore—I should write about this. This is how my hijab piece came about, and also how my Muslim in 3D piece came about. The details emerge later but in that moment, I write down the triggering thought or concept. It might be a sentence. It might be a whole paragraph, but it gets jotted down in my Notes app on my phone in a really long note called, unoriginally, “Writing.” Often, the idea feels so urgent and sudden that I’m afraid I won’t be able to type it fast enough, so I use the dictation feature. Sometimes that original line never makes it into the piece. Often it does, though.

Or alternatively, I think of a line, maybe triggered by an observation, maybe it just appears out of seemingly nowhere. I usually can’t tell if I’m just working with a line, or whether there’s an actual idea attached. Is it good enough to be the building block for its own piece, or is it just going to be some lovely wording to insert into another essay? 

The lines go into the same note as my other ideas. They often hit me when I’m reading someone else’s work, or listening to it as I walk. The other day I was listening to one of

Jeannine Ouellette

’s essays as I walked on my lunch break, and I had to pause the essay and dictate a whole paragraph that ended up in my hijab essay. But it’s not always that linear. There are other lines that have been sitting in that file, unused, for months.

Writing Process

Q: What does your writing life look like today, and can you compare/contrast it to 10 years ago?

Ten years ago, I had an infant that didn’t sleep more than 4-5 hours a night. So my writing life at the time was essentially non-existent. I had managed to write a bit as a mother of one, but as soon as I became a mother of two, and the second little guy didn’t sleep, I was purely in survival mode. Being a highly self-critical person, I berated myself for not finding ways to write, and for not finding ways to get him to sleep. Was I eating the wrong things? Did he feel too insecure to sleep? 

I tried to read in order to get my creative juices flowing again, but more often than not, I couldn’t concentrate long enough to read full novels, which had been my go-to for years. 

I went back to work full-time when my son turned one, and of course he still wasn’t sleeping. It took until the age of 4 before he slept through the night, which meant it took that long before I slept through the night again too!

Finally, I stopped berating myself. I told myself that it wasn’t goodbye forever, just until I could actually function again. I gave myself permission not to force creativity, and to only write when I felt that creative spark. I set an arbitrary date to start pushing myself to write again: when my son turned 10 (which would happen in September 2023). 

Happily, my creative inclinations returned a full year before my self-imposed deadline, but I still didn’t have a clear plan for my work. In June, I decided to start my Substack newsletter to keep myself accountable and to hopefully find a community.

Nowadays I don’t have a specific routine, more a deadline that I work towards and several drafts on the go at any given time. Sometimes I’m scrambling to put something together at the 11th hour because inspiration just has not hit that week. But the kids know Mama needs her time to write now. They’re 13 and 10, so it’s pretty easy to explain to them. The older one reads every post! Life is busy and hectic, so I don’t have a daily writing routine, but I’m definitely thinking about writing every day. And I think a big part of the writing is the thinking you do about it, even if you’re not sitting down in front of the page.

I’ve been so pleasantly surprised to find that people are interested in what I have to say! I’ve gotten published before, but I’ve also gotten rejection after rejection over the years. I don’t think my writing necessarily fits the MFA style that a lot of literary journals are looking for. 

Resources

Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

Peak TV shows. Watching TV is a really good wind down for me but I always considered it a guilty pleasure until recently. Now, there are so many shows that are art in and of themselves. They’re a good form of relaxation, but they’re also just excellent examples of good writing: character building, plot, pacing, tension, atmosphere. One example that comes to mind is Severance. I find that show absolutely genius. 

And stand up comedy — smart stand up is actually so brilliant at connecting threads from one part of the monologue to another and that’s something I think essayists and memoir style writers can really benefit from. Trevor Noah is a master at this, I find. And he talks about themes related to identity and being a minority too, so it’s a great atmosphere to steep myself in. 

Up Next!

Michael Estrin

,

Beth Kempton

and more will join us in Cave of the Heart! Plus don’t miss more behind-the-scenes editing videos like this one for Noha’s interview to help you bolster your writing. Subscribe to get these updates in your inbox.

Join Noha in the comments!

Noha shares her experiences of finding validation in her voice after being told she spoke too much as a child. Have you ever had a similar moment of validation that changed how you viewed yourself? Share your story and how it impacted your self perception.

Reflecting on the influence of Noha's mother on her life, who has been a significant influence in your own life, and how have they shaped the person you are today? 

Noha finds inspiration for her essays in conversations, observations, and even in the lines of other writers' works. Where do you find inspiration for your creative projects or ideas? Do you have a similar process, or does inspiration strike you differently? Share your experiences of where your best ideas come from.