Five Minutes explores five minutes of a life in one hundred words. Five minutes is edited by Susanna Baird, with editorial support from managing editor Maria s. picone, newsletter editor kate meen, and founding reader bobbi lerman, plus our rotating team of guest readers, who you can meet in the latest newsletteR. Five Minutes was founded in October 2020, with the Salem (Mass.)-based writing group Carrot Cake Writers supplying the journal’s first pieces. We’d love to read your five. Submit here

Mother

You, a woman steeped in tradition, find me utterly incomprehensible. You permitted yourself to be relegated to the sidelines. I snatched independence from the land in which I was born, a land that to this day, despite four decades of living here, remains foreign to you. I did not reject our culture so much as subtly disregard it. I slipped in my desires so skillfully that they became the thread of my being. I did not realize that in becoming myself, we would not find each other. You look at me now, and you do not know who I am.

Huma Farid is an ob/gyn by day (and by night) and an avid reader at all other free moments of her life. Find Huma on Twitter @HumaFaridMD.

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