My name is Sara Tasneem, and as a 15-year-old, I was forced to marry a man almost twice my age (he was 28 years old and 13 years older than me).
My father introduced me to my husband-to-be that morning in Los Angeles, and I was told I would marry him that night. After a spiritual wedding ceremony that evening, performed by the leader of the group my father belonged to, I was handed over to my new husband and left in his care. He became my guardian, husband and the father to my children. I lost my childhood, my freedom and myself that night. I would never be the same person again.
Six months after our spiritual ceremony, I was legally married at the age of 16 and pregnant in Reno, Nevada. I spent most of my marriage in California, but none of it felt like a real marriage to me. It began to feel more and more like a prison after our legal marriage. After I had my firstborn, a beautiful baby girl, I started fighting for my own freedom. I fought to go back to school, and I slowly began establishing my own freedom. Seven years after marrying legally, I was able to separate from my ex-husband. I was 23 years old then, and he was 36. He left the marriage and went back to his life with no repercussions, while I was left with the aftermath.
With little education and few means, I had a long road ahead of me. Finding the strength to leave my marriage was difficult, but the hardest part was yet to come. Leaving the marriage was the first obstacle I had to overcome to find my own freedom. Getting a divorce took me three years. I did not have the financial means to hire an attorney, but he did. I did not have the money to fight him in court, and I ended up giving him everything we had, which was not much. He gladly gave me all the debt, which he had racked up over the course of our marriage. He happily left the country and flitted back off to where he came from.
At first, he tried to keep my kids. I had to fight to get them back. That meant an expensive ticket abroad to convince his family to let me have my babies back, who desperately missed me. He became a distant father to my children, who only saw him in the summers if he decided he could afford to send for them. My ex-husband had a hard time keeping a job during our marriage and afterwards, and I was never sure if I was going to receive the minimal child support that I desperately needed. There were times I had to choose between paying for gas to go to work or buying dinner for my kids.
Even after leaving my marriage, I was years behind my peers in education, work experience, mental health and life experience. I had to learn how to navigate life as a single mother, starting from zero. During my marriage, my ex-husband had controlled the finances, and I had never even had my own bank account. Luckily, I had learned to drive at 22, and I had an Associate degree in Culinary Arts by the time I left my marriage. Without these abilities, I am not sure that I would have been able to leave and survive with my kids on my own. I am one of the lucky ones.
Most of the community members I had grown up with shunned me because I had divorced. I was left a shell of human being because of years of physical abuse starting from my early childhood, and from the emotional and sexual abuse I suffered throughout my marriage. I was so used to surviving my circumstances that I no longer knew how to live a life without being scared, anxious, depressed and angry. It took years to overcome the mental obstacles that were holding me back. I suffered from severe and debilitating depression, PTSD and anxiety for years after I left my forced marriage.
My children grew up with a mother who was still in survival mode most of the time. I felt ill-equipped to navigate the adult world most of the time. Despite these circumstances, my children and I found a way to move on and rebuild our lives in California. There are still moments of despair, anxiety and depression that I struggle with, but now I have a support system that helps me to overcome these struggles. I was a lucky one. Many survivors do not have the same support system I had.
My children have grown up to become independent, free-thinking adults and are in charge of their own futures. They have been my motivation to always move forward and to never give up. I wanted to give them a better life than I had, and I am grateful for each day I am able to do that. I’ve spent my life fighting to protect girls from the human rights abuse that I was subjected to. Because of my advocacy and the work of my allies, we are making progress, but I will not rest until every state sets their marriage age at 18 with no exceptions.
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