I Just Want Normal

A longing for health, peace, and the steady, boring, uneventful drumbeat of an ordinary life

I don’t want a blessed life. I don’t want a remarkable one. I don’t want a story anyone would envy.

I want normal.

I want my daughter’s spine to be just a spine. A private thing. I want numbers on monitors to stay boring. I want the word “sepsis” to return to the medical journals where it belongs and not follow my husband into Penn Station. I want the future to unfold in the quiet way people forget to write about.

I am Muslim, which means I was raised inside a faith that talks openly about suffering, about trials, and tests, and patience, and reward. It is a tradition that insists pain is not meaningless, that hardship is not evidence of abandonment.

I believe that. At least, I believe it in theory.

In practice, however, when something bad happens, my brain turns to God in the most unsophisticated way possible. Not with surrender, but with suspicion. As if safety were transactional. As if prayer were a currency I’ve been mismanaging.

If I pray better, maybe nothing worse will happen. If I don’t, maybe it will. This is not theology. It’s fear wearing theology’s clothes.

What makes it harder is that fear doesn’t arrive in isolation. It stacks.

My eldest son has lived with chronic health issues since birth…the kind that quietly teaches a family to stay alert even during good years.

So when my daughter’s MRI led to a spinal tap, and when my husband collapsed with a fever of 103 in the middle of a train station, none of it landed on clean ground. It landed on a body already trained not to relax.

Prayer, which is supposed to be a refuge, becomes another pressure point. Another place where I am failing. Another thing I’m supposed to do correctly or else.

And when prayer becomes harder, fear says, See? This is why.

So now there are two battles. One in this world, with bodies breaking, needles in spines, IV poles, doctors using careful voices. And one inside me…a spiritual courtroom where I am always on trial.

Islam teaches that God is closer than our jugular vein. That mercy outweighs wrath. That hardship is not punishment.

I know these things.

But sometimes spirituality goes quiet during crisis not because God left but because the body is too flooded to perceive Him. A drowning person can’t hear prayer. She can only hear water.

Knowledge doesn’t quiet a nervous system. And belief doesn’t always reach a mother whose children are hurting.

I am a writer, so I do what writers do. I try to turn terror into sentences. I try to build a small shelter out of words and call it meaning.

But if I’m honest, what I want isn’t meaning. It’s peace. The kind that doesn’t announce itself or require interpretation. The kind that lets a family…my family… move through time without constantly bracing for impact.

I want a future that unfolds without commentary. Where health is assumed. Where pain is the exception.

I’m not asking for miracles. Just a little space to breathe.

Just… normal.