What Nayeebah Means

For my father, who gave me my name.

There are names where history tells the person who to be.

And then there are names where the person gets to tell history what the name meant.

T h a n k G o d I am one of those people.

Nayeebah did not arrive to me with a blueprint.

There was no long line of famous Nayeebahs for me to study. No great women in history whose story entered the room before I did. No universally understood image of who a Nayeebah is supposed to be.

So every day that I live, I am answering the question.

What does it mean to be Nayeebah?

Apparently, this.

This life.
These choices.
The way I love people.
The things I build.
The things I leave.
The things I survive.
The things I make better simply because I was there.

Every time I accomplish even a portion of what I am building, I add something to the definition.

There is something extraordinarily powerful about that.

To carry a name rare enough that, for much of the world, you may be its introduction.

I am not living up to Nayeebah.

Nayeebah is becoming known through me.

And maybe that should feel like pressure.

It doesn’t.

It feels like freedom.

I have discovered that some of the places in my life where I once thought I was missing a blueprint have given me the cleanest slate.

I grew into womanhood without a mother beside me showing me what being a woman should look like every day. There are things about absence that I will never romanticize. But adulthood has allowed me to recognize something else it gave me.

Choice.

I get to decide what kind of women I am.

I get to choose the women who influence me. I get to choose what I expose myself to. I get to decide what femininity, strength, softness, ambition, beauty, rest, faith, friendship and love look like in my life.

Marriage has been much the same.

I didn’t grow up watching a husband and wife interact every day. There was no marriage playing in the background of my childhood for me to unconsciously recreate.

So now that I am a wife, I get to ask:

What kind of wife do I want to be?

What kind of marriage do we want to have?

And then we make it.

We get some things right.
We get some things wrong.
We learn.
We try again.

Turns out all that inspiring 2000s Disney Channel stuff had a point.

Life really is what you make it.

And nobody’s perfect. You work it again and again until you get it right.

At this point in my life, I can see the blessing in not always having a playbook.

A blank page used to look like something was missing.

Now it looks like authorship.

My mother once said that I would save a life.

Perhaps I saved hers.

I know I have saved mine.

And L o r d k n o w s, other people have saved mine too.

Maybe saving a life isn’t always one extraordinary moment. Maybe sometimes it is what we give one another over the years- the sentence, the example, the kindness, the interruption, the love that changes what someone believes is possible.

Maybe that is part of what it means to carry a life at all.

You become a signal.

Your life quietly tells the world:

This is one way a woman can be.
This is one way a wife can be.
This is one way a human being can be.

And in my case:

This is what it means to be Nayeebah.

I don’t have to prove the definition.

I am living it.

And as long as I’m alive, I get to keep writing it.

With love,