Once a year, I see a woman who used to know so much about me.
We smile at each other. We say hi. Sometimes there is a brief exchange about the children, because that is the reason we are in the same place to begin with. Then we go our separate ways, and if you happened to be standing nearby, you would never have guessed that there was once a time when we were close.
Not social media close. Not the kind of friendship built on occasionally replying to Instagram Stories and promising to meet up one day.
We were real-life close.
We met in 2019, when our eldest children started preschool. We were still living with my in-laws then, and I noticed that one of my daughter’s classmates would always take the same bus from the same bus stop.
Eventually, his mother and I started talking. Then we kept talking.
After sending the children to school, we would spend time together. During the school holidays, we would meet and bring the children out. We talked about our families, our children, our hopes for them and the kind of mothers we were trying to become.
Our lives were not identical. Our family circumstances were different. Our husbands had different working arrangements. My husband worked shifts and wasn’t home much, and I remember her once telling me that she couldn’t imagine what it would be like if her husband worked shifts too.
There were differences between us from the beginning, but somehow, none of them mattered. She was the first mom friend I truly resonated with.
There is something strangely intimate about finding another mother whose parenting makes sense to you. You don’t have to explain every decision. You don’t have to defend the way you do things. You can talk about your children without feeling like you are participating in a competition neither of you agreed to enter.
I had other friends, of course. But she occupied a very particular place in my life.
One day, one of our children’s classmates celebrated a birthday at school. As preschool birthdays usually go, the child came home with a goodie bag filled with little gifts.
Some of the items were personalised products from the mother’s business.
My friend looked at me and said something along the lines of, “Wah, our children’s classmates’ mothers all have businesses. Then both of us? Just SAHMs?” I believed her.
Years later, I would discover that she had been building something too.
She used to give my children flashcards and educational materials with a brand name printed on them. I once searched for the brand on Instagram and found an account selling children’s learning resources. I watched one of the videos. Only a pair of hands was visible, but I could hear a child’s voice. I saw curly hair.
I remember thinking that the child sounded exactly like her son. For a moment, I wondered if the business belonged to her. Then I told myself it was probably a coincidence. I never asked.
Eventually, my family moved into our first matrimonial home. We tried to stay in contact. We talked about visiting each other’s houses and meeting up again.
Then COVID happened. Life changed.
Around that time, I ventured into MLM. I was posting about the business constantly on my personal Instagram account because, like many people who were new to trying to make money online, I was still figuring things out.
One day, she posted an Instagram Story saying that people should separate their business accounts from their personal accounts. I replied jokingly that I was still learning. She didn’t reply.
Not long after, it was her birthday. I sent her a birthday message on WhatsApp. She didn’t reply to that either. Eventually, she stopped viewing my Instagram Stories.
There was no argument.
There was no confrontation.
She never told me that I had hurt her. She never said she was upset with me. She never told me that she needed space or that she no longer wanted the friendship.
She simply became quiet. And then, somehow, the silence became permanent.
At first, I wanted to know why. I replayed things in my head, trying to find the moment when something had changed.
Was it the MLM?
Was I posting too much?
Had I said something?
Had I done something?
Was there something about me she had grown to dislike?
Or had I simply misunderstood how much the friendship meant to her?
I had no answer.
The strange thing about grieving a friendship that ended quietly is that you don’t even know what you are supposed to be angry about.
If someone betrays you, you can be angry about the betrayal.
If there is a fight, you can replay the argument until you are tired of hearing both sides of it in your head.
If you hurt someone, you can apologise.
If someone tells you that they no longer want you in their life, at least you know that the relationship has ended.
But what do you do when someone simply stops responding? How do you grieve something when nobody officially told you that it died?
For years, I didn’t know.
Once a year, our children’s combined centres would have a school event, and I would see her again.
We would smile. We would say hi. And that was all. Every time, I wondered the same thing.
How could she stand in front of me, smile, and behave as though we were never close? How could two people know so much about each other’s lives and eventually become people who exchanged nothing more than a polite greeting? I knew things about her that strangers didn’t know.
We had shared personal family stories, experiences we were going through, our worries about our children and the hopes we carried for them. She knew parts of my life too. At one point, we had trusted each other with the ordinary and deeply personal parts of motherhood and family life.
And somehow, I was supposed to stand in front of her and behave as though none of it had happened.
I did. What else was I supposed to do?
After some time, it stopped hurting as much. I told myself that I no longer wanted to know the reason. And I meant it.
I still followed her on Instagram. Whenever she occasionally posted something, I would like it.
It was never a strategy. I wasn’t trying to force my way back into her life. I think, in my own quiet way, I was leaving the door open. I was saying that I wasn’t angry. That I still remembered her fondly. That if she ever wanted to talk to me again, she could.
She never reciprocated. Eventually, I learned to live with that too. What I didn’t realise was that the friendship had changed something in me.
After her, I stopped allowing myself to become close to other mom friends.
I didn’t announce it. I never consciously decided that I would never have another close friendship with a mother. I simply stopped putting myself in situations where one could happen.
At my son’s school, the mothers would stand together in a corner talking. I would stand somewhere else.
I wasn’t unfriendly. I smiled at them. I would speak when spoken to. I was polite enough to make it clear that I had nothing against anyone, while distant enough to make something else equally clear. I wasn’t looking to become friends.
For years, I thought that was simply who I had become. I didn’t realise that perhaps I had learned something from losing her. If I never became that close to another mother again, I would never have to experience another friendship disappearing without knowing why.
Then, on 13 July 2026, I found her again.
Not really her.
I found a Threads account belonging to the children’s educational brand I had discovered years ago. The brand whose products she had given my children. The brand with the video of the curly-haired child whose voice I had recognised.
I started reading.
The more I read, the more familiar everything became. She shared personal family stories and experiences that I recognised. Details I had heard years ago, when we were still close enough to tell each other about the things happening in our lives.
I knew those stories because she had once told them to me. And suddenly, after seven years of wondering, I knew. It was her.
I had been right all along.
There was something almost funny about discovering her this way. The woman who once posted that business and personal accounts should be kept separate was now writing about motherhood, faith, family experiences and raising her children on her business account.
At first, I laughed at the irony. Then I thought about it a little longer.
Perhaps she hadn’t changed her mind as much as I first assumed. Her personal Instagram account was attached to her real identity. The people following her knew her face. They knew her family. They were people she could meet at school events, family gatherings and in ordinary life. Her business account was different. It was faceless.
People knew the brand, but they didn’t necessarily know the woman behind it. Perhaps that distance made it easier to write.
There is a particular kind of safety in sharing personal stories with people who cannot recognise you in the supermarket the next day. You can write about motherhood, faith, family experiences and the things you are carrying without wondering which person in your real life has read your words. Maybe that was why she felt brave enough to share there. Maybe she could be known through her stories without having to be recognised as the woman behind them.
Except I recognised her.
Not from her name.
Not from her face.
I recognised her because once, a long time ago, I had known her well enough to recognise the stories of her life.
To everyone else reading those posts, she was an anonymous mother behind a children’s educational brand. To me, she was my friend.
Or at least, she used to be.
And after the amusement of finally confirming what I had suspected all those years ago wore off, something else remained.
I missed her.
I missed us.
Not because our lives turned out the same. They didn’t.
Our circumstances were different even when we were friends. We had different financial realities, different family circumstances and different challenges. Our children eventually took different educational paths too.
Both of us once hoped that our children would enter full-time madrasah. Alhamdulillah, things worked out that way for her family. My children entered government schools instead. I have long accepted that.
I believe completely that Allah knew where my children needed to be and what our family could carry. There are practical realities that I understand now that I didn’t understand when my children were small. I don’t look at her life and wish it belonged to me.
I just miss my friend.
And perhaps finding her again hurt because, for years, she had become an abstraction. Someone I used to know. Someone who existed somewhere, raising her children and living a life I was no longer part of.
Then suddenly, there she was.
I could read her thoughts again. I could recognise the stories she was telling. I could see the mother she had become. There was something painfully familiar about her. And she was still completely out of reach.
I don’t want an explanation anymore. I meant that when I finally told myself to stop asking why. Knowing the reason now wouldn’t return the years that passed. It wouldn’t give us back the school mornings, the outings with our children or the friendship I once imagined would continue long after we stopped meeting at the same bus stop.
I don’t even know if we would still be friends if we met today.
Maybe too much time has passed. Maybe we have become women who would no longer understand each other. Maybe we would sit together and discover that there is nothing left between us except memories. Or maybe we would talk for hours.
I will probably never know.
What I do know is that for years, I kept leaving small lights on.
A like on an occasional post. Tiny ways of saying, I am still here. I am not angry. The door is still open.
She never walked through it.
I think that is the part I had never allowed myself to say out loud. I no longer need to know why she left, but perhaps a small part of me had hoped that one day she would turn around. Not because I expected us to become what we once were. Not because I needed an apology.
I just wanted to know that she remembered us too.
Because I remember.
I remember the bus stop. I remember the mornings after sending our children to school. I remember the outings and the conversations and the things we trusted each other enough to share. I remember laughing about our children’s birthdays and joking that one day, because her husband’s birthday falls on the same date as my daughter’s, we should celebrate them together.
I remember the woman who became my first real mom friend.
And I remember standing in front of that same woman years later, smiling and saying hi as though we had never been anything more than two mothers whose children happened to attend the same school.
Perhaps that is the hardest part about grieving a friendship that ended quietly.
There is no villain. There is no final argument. There is no grave to visit and no anniversary marking the day it ended.
There is just a person who is still alive, still living her life somewhere in the same world as you, carrying memories you cannot ask whether she still keeps. I have learned to live without knowing why our friendship ended. I have learned to accept that some questions will never be answered.
But today, after finding her again and realising that I still recognised the smallest details of her life, I finally understood something I had spent years avoiding.
I still miss her.
And maybe the part of me that hurts isn’t waiting for an explanation anymore.
Maybe she just wants to know that somewhere, in the life of the woman who once knew her so well, she is remembered too.
Ummi Noi