Samaiya Mushtaq

speaker

81 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2025 last heard Jun 2025

Samaiya Mushtaq’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Daily · ‘Modern Love’: If You Want This Kind of Love, Don’t Expect it to be Easy · 1 Jun 2025 podcast

I think loving humanity, loving service. These circumstances are so dire that this is just what's needed from us in this moment is to think outside of ourselves and our own nuclear families and to serve community and to serve humanity. And I think Mahmoud, his ability to be of service in that way, it permeates. And so it kind of enabled that too in me.

Yeah, that was a hard day. That was a really hard day. There's a moment I remember really distinctly. I was taking pictures of him with the kids, and he took Maimuna out on the water table in the side yard, and I was taking pictures of them through the window. And I'm terrible at taking photos. He's the one who remembers. Yeah. His presence, you know, he's like, I got to capture this moment.

So he's the one that takes the pictures and I always forget. And he was like, are you taking pictures of me because you think I won't come back? And I said, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly why I'm doing that. We took him to the airport and I remember, you know, he had his bag stacked up and I was like, smile. I just wanted the last picture I took of him to be smiling.

I didn't know what to expect, and it was really spotty. There was very little synchronous communication. So there was WhatsApp, texts, and there was voice notes. And he would send daily updates of the things he saw.

His reaction to the things he saw...

Well, he will say that it helps that I'm a psychiatrist because I would ask him, you know, sometimes he will just kind of note the observations, but I would be the one asking him the reaction to those or getting into digging deeper into what it was like for him. And so that would help him process. And yeah, he was writing almost like a kind of a daily journal basically in these WhatsApps to me.

Well, our son was only like four, five months at the time. Wow, so young. They were very little, yeah. And that was really part of my fear was that if he didn't come back, they wouldn't even remember him. And what a sad legacy that would be. It would be a legacy of absence and just my retelling. And my daughter, I mean, she's super attached to him and she's precociously verbal sometimes.

We had kind of prepared her. Bob was going on a long trip. And we had the number of bedtimes. So every bedtime I would shave off. Okay, now today is 13 bedtimes. Today is 12 bedtimes, 11 more bedtimes. And that was sort of how we did it. But she really missed him.

There was just so much uncertainty. The mind will try to rationalize. The mind will try to say, oh, well, they have their coordinates. They'll be safe. They're American. They'll be safe. They're not Palestinian. They're not the targets. The mind will try to rationalize. But none of that is truth. The truth is you don't know. You cannot predict. You have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

No. I knew he would go back. How did you know? Well, there were two missions that he had put his name on. And he was like, well, the reason is because if the first mission doesn't work out, it falls through. And then the second one gets full, then I'm just not going to be able to go at all. And so he put his name on both thinking that like the second one was plan B. But I'm like, I know you.

You're committed. I was like, I'm not going to be the person that tells you you can't go. I'm not going to stop you. I was like, I think that you're the kind of person who honors your commitments. And he sort of saw that as me supporting him again.

Before he left, there was sort of rumblings of a ground invasion in Rafah. And then a week into his mission, they invaded Rafah. And then once they invaded Rafah, there was no exit. There's no way out of Gaza without Rafah.

You know, his observations were really poignant.

The day Mahmoud told me we're not leaving on the date that we are supposed to leave, that there's no plan right now for how we are going to leave or when, that was when I was like, oh, God. Like, all the anxieties I'd had the first mission, it was like, okay, now, now we're actually at the point where he really might not come back.

I will never regret him going.

I remember asking him, you know, what's the first thing you want to do? And he said, I just want to thank you for being so supportive of this, so supportive of me.

I think it was that feeling of being seen and acknowledged for my part, my role. You know, that it wasn't taken for granted.

Yeah, I think so too. The courage for Mahmoud to go is obvious. I think the courage for me to be on board is more understated. And I think he could see that. And that courage comes from love.

I think I would tell myself to temper fear with hope.

Fear is one way of looking at the future, of evaluating all that could go wrong. But if you let hope in too, you know, hope can prevail and the future can be much brighter than fear would have you think.

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