Grandma’s Girl

On my grandmother’s love and the comfort that never leaves

I think we all need that one person in our lives who makes us feel deeply loved and deliberately chosen. Someone whose love feels steady, unquestionable, and protective. The kind of love that does not need to be earned or negotiated. For me, that person has always been my grandmother, my Bobo.

I love her more than life itself.

To my Bobo, you are often a pain. You are stubborn, intense, and unapologetically yourself. But it is a pain I welcome, one I have learned to hold with tenderness rather than frustration. The thought of a world without you feels unbearable. The day you leave me will be the day my heart splinters into a million pieces, and I know that with complete certainty.

This is a woman who has lived a hard life. One shaped by loss, sacrifice, and endurance. To some people, she might come across as odd, intense, or a little unhinged. But to me, she was exactly what I needed. She never made me feel like I was too much, or not enough, or somehow incomplete. In a world that often felt confusing, she was grounding. She was certainty.

Aside from her, I never really felt like I was anyone’s first choice. I was rarely the person someone loved the most, the one they reached for instinctively, or prioritised without hesitation. I learned early on how to exist without expecting to be chosen. How to accept closeness that was conditional, temporary, or shared. But with her, there was never any doubt.

I have written before about being mixed, about the quiet identity questions that sit beneath the surface and follow you through childhood and into adulthood. I genuinely don’t know how I would have formed any sense of self without her. She was my anchor to culture, to faith, to lineage. She gave me language for parts of myself that might otherwise have gone unnamed.

She is the person who introduced me to Islam, who taught me what she could, in the ways she knew how. My faith was not handed to me in perfect explanations or polished theology, but in lived practice, in quiet insistence, and in example. Even now, one of my greatest comforts is knowing that her prayers follow me wherever I go. That she prays for my safety, my future, my heart. There is something deeply reassuring about being held in someone’s duas. It feels like a kind of protection that does not expire, something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

When I was younger, she would sleep over at our house, or I would stay at hers. On the nights she left, I would cry myself to sleep, clutching onto the lingering smell she left behind in my room. Even then, my body seemed to understand something my mind could not yet articulate. That her presence made me feel safe in a way nothing else quite did.

I was never envious of people who were close to both of their grandmothers. I never felt like I was missing out or lacking anything. She filled every possible space. Any gap that might have existed was made irrelevant by the sheer magnitude of her love. She gave so much of herself to me that there was no room left for absence.

When people ask whether I was a mummy’s girl or a daddy’s girl, my answer has always been simple. I was a grandma’s girl.

My love for her is not only about how she makes me feel, though that alone would be enough. It is also about the woman she has been in the face of hardship. The resilience she carries. The way she has endured things that could have hardened her, yet somehow remained deeply invested in the wellbeing of her children and grandchildren. Everything she does comes from a place of wanting the best for us, even when it is expressed in ways that are confusing, intense, or imperfect.

I like to think I am fluent in her language. In her silences, her warnings, her contradictions. Loving her has taught me that care does not always look gentle, and that devotion is not always soft. Sometimes it is fierce, unrelenting, and deeply human.

And I know, without question, that being loved by her shaped the way I understand love itself. What it means to be chosen. What it feels like to be someone’s person.

Some loves change you forever.
Her love is one of them.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always,
Ari <3