After Faith's story, where we saw how staying in her marriage came before her own health and her own life, and after Wael's story, where his project and his professional success came before the signals of his own body, today we meet someone new. A woman who chose an entirely different priority.

Leila was not chasing professional success like Wael. And she was not trapped in a harmful relationship like Faith. She was a woman who loved her family, and gave her children everything a mother could give.

But priorities do not always hurt us because they are bad.

Sometimes they hurt us because they grow inside our lives selfishly, until they leave no room for anything else.

Leila loved children since she was a girl. She approached them easily, sat down to play with them, and held babies in her arms whenever she had the chance. She told her friends she wanted a house full of children, and pictured herself as a mother before she even knew who her husband would be.

And yet, her life did not revolve around children alone. She was social. She loved meeting her friends, exercising, and taking care of her body. She read a great deal, always looking for something new to learn. She had her own interests, her own time, a life that was hers.

Then she married, and walked into her new home carrying the dream of motherhood with her. She thought it would only take some time. But the first month passed, then the second, then a whole year without anything happening.

The waiting turned into visits to doctors, tests, medication, and appointments whose dates she remembered better than any occasion. She would come back from the clinic silent, her husband sitting beside her trying to reassure her, while she asked herself the question she was afraid to say out loud:

What if I never become a mother?

And after years, the news came. The news she had almost lost hope of ever hearing.

She was pregnant.

She repeated the test, and held the paper with a trembling hand. When she told her husband, he laughed and cried in the same moment. From that day, they began counting the weeks, watching that small hope grow.

Her first child was a boy. When the nurse placed him in her arms, she did not see only a baby. She saw all the years of waiting, finally turned into a small body breathing on her chest. She and her husband were overjoyed, and the house filled with visits, gifts, and voices.

Some time later she had a girl, then another boy came, and the family she had always dreamed of was complete.

Two boys and a girl.

They were not simply children to her. They were a dream that arrived after a long fear, and perhaps that is why she felt she had to give them everything.

Leila built her life around raising them. She followed their food, their sleep, their schooling, and sat with them in the evening to go over their lessons. She searched for the best schools and the best teachers, and made sure they lacked nothing that could help them build a good future.

She did not want academic success for them alone. She wanted to raise them with respect, with a sense of responsibility, and with loyalty to one another. She was happy doing this, and at first she did not feel she was losing anything.

A meeting with a friend could be made up later. A sports class could be postponed. A book could wait. Even her own doctor's appointment did not feel urgent to her. But her children's early years would never come back.

And she was right about that.

But she did not notice that her own life was passing too.

Leila did not give herself up in a single day. It happened through small postponements, each one seeming reasonable. She stopped exercising until the children were older, apologised to her friends for missing their gatherings, and left her books on the shelf. She kept telling herself all of this was temporary.

But the temporary, repeated every day, can become an entire lifetime.

The years passed. Her eldest son grew up, and won a chance to finish his studies in the United States. Leila was proud of him, and spoke of his future to relatives with pride. And with time he came to love his life there, and decided to continue his studies and settle down.

The house had barely grown used to his absence when her daughter left for Germany. She faced homesickness and the pressure of her studies, and called her mother whenever she grew tired. Leila reassured her, and hid her own loneliness. The years passed, her daughter married there, and became a doctor.

Her youngest son stayed with his parents. His voice still filled the hallway, his clothes still lay over the chair, and his daily requests kept something of the old life of the house alive.

But his brother's and sister's success made the same dream grow inside him too. He told his parents he wanted to study medicine in Russia.

Leila could not ask him to stay. How could she stop him from walking the same path she had encouraged his brother and sister to take?

He left in his turn, and for the first time, none of her children remained in the house.

Leila was left alone with her husband. They waited for calls from America, Germany, and Russia, and together recalled the years when the rooms had been full of voices.

Her husband was the last person who knew what every corner of that house meant. Each of them carried half a memory, and the other one completed it.

After two years, his health began to decline. Leila returned to the role she had mastered her whole life. She watched over his medication times, helped him stand, and accompanied him to hospital.

The illness dragged on, and his voice faded little by little, until the house grew quieter even while he was still in it.

Then her husband died.

The house filled for days with relatives and neighbours. Voices returned to the rooms, footsteps filled the halls, and then the mourning ended, and everyone went back to their own home, their own work, their own family.

Leila closed the door.

She found herself alone between the walls of a house that had once been full of noise.

She walked into her children's rooms, one after another. The beds made, the covers pulled tight, the pillows in place. Then she went back to her own room, and found her husband's bed made too.

Four beds, and none of them out of place.

In the past, she used to complain about thrown blankets and clothes piled on chairs. Now, she wished she could walk into a room and find a bed messy again. Not because she loved disorder, but because she understood, too late, that disorder had been proof that someone lived there.

She tried to ask herself what she could do now, but found no answer.

Her body was weak. A body forgotten for years. She had ignored its pain, postponed its check-ups, and drained its energy in the service of everyone else, until it too needed someone to look after it.

She thought of her friends, and scrolled past their names on her phone. She hesitated to call.

What would she say after years of silence?

Friendships had not ended because of a falling out, but because of postponement. Calls that never happened, gatherings she apologised for missing, news she no longer knew, until the friendships grew cold.

As for her personal life, it had stopped long ago.

The books stayed closed, exercise became a memory, and old interests went quiet. The things that made Leila feel like herself, she had set aside again and again, until she forgot where she had left them.

She knew how to be a mother, and she knew how to be a wife. But she no longer knew who she was outside of either.

She helped her children build their lives, but she kept no life of her own to return to.

The problem was not that Leila loved her children, nor that she made her family a priority. Family is a great priority. But a mother is part of that family. She is not someone standing outside it, only there to serve everyone else.

The problem was not that Leila's children were among her priorities.

The problem is that they became her only priority.

It is beautiful for a mother to live for her children. But she must also keep a part of her life to live for herself.

The Journey's Question

Take a sheet of paper, and write down the roles you live today.

Mother. Father. Husband. Wife. Employee. Son. Daughter. Friend.

Then ask yourself, quietly:

Who am I outside these roles?

And what part of my life do I postpone every day, telling myself that others come first?

Write down one thing you have neglected in yourself. Your health, an old friendship, a book you stopped reading, a sport you used to love, or simply quiet time in which you play no role at all.

Then write one small step that brings this part back into your life this week.

Remember: this is not my journey alone… it is ours.