Ruwaida Abela Northen: The Power Of An Apology
Hearing the words ‘I’m sorry’ from her mother changed everything for Bazaar Arabia columnist Ruwaida Abela Northen
I never thought she’d say it. Not after all these years. Not after the silence, the disbelief, the distance we both tiptoed around like broken glass. But she did.
For decades, I carried an open secret.
Open – because I told my mother when I was twelve about the abuse I had endured.
And secret – because she didn’t believe me. She never spoke of it again. Never asked, never defended, never fought for me.
What followed were years of shame, anger, and a quiet, growing resentment. Not just for what had happened, but for the silence that came after. I wrote about it publicly for the first time in October last year, the month I turned 40, in my second column for Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. That was my first step towards healing, shedding the shame and the taboo and embracing the truth even if no one else would. We had danced around the past for years – polite conversations, measured visits, nothing too deep, nothing too raw. I had stopped expecting anything more.
This month she came on a work trip to Dubai. A city I now call home, far from the place where my childhood was shadowed by things no child should have to carry. And then one afternoon, in a quiet moment I didn’t see coming, she looked at me and said: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wrong you. I love you.”
The words fell between us like a stone into still water. A ripple that reached back to the girl I was at six, to the twelve-year-old who wasn’t believed, to the woman I am now, still stitching myself together.
She hugged me, really hugged me, not a customary greeting hug. She held me tightly, and we both sobbed for everything that was robbed from us. For all the lost time.
I sat alone afterwards, unsure whether to cry or exhale. Because while pain doesn’t evaporate with an apology, something shifted. Not just in her words, but in the way she said them — softly, without defence. Like she had finally allowed herself to feel it too. Something shifted in me too. I felt lighter, seen (in a good way), and I felt free.
All my life, I’ve carried a quiet ache. The ache of not being believed. Of learning that love can sometimes look away when it’s needed most. I built walls. I learned to parent differently — to listen, to protect, to believe. I vowed that my children would never doubt that I am in their corner.
But this moment with my mother wasn’t just about what was said. It was about what was given. A door, long shut, creaked open. And with it, the possibility of something growing in the empty space that existed for so long between us. Not to rewrite the past, but to write something new.
Forgiveness isn’t linear. Healing rarely announces itself with a grand gesture. Sometimes, it tiptoes in disguised as three simple words: I am sorry.
Since that moment, things have softened. There’s a gentleness in our conversations now, a willingness to sit with the uncomfortable instead of pushing it aside. She asked questions about my childhood that she never dared to before. She listened. I still hesitated, still hold my breath at times, but there’s less weight in the silence.
We are not who we were. Maybe we never will be. But in this fragile, unfolding chapter, we are learning to be something else: two mothers, once torn by silence, now slowly stitching a bond not from denial, but from truth. Because healing, I’ve learned, doesn’t mean forgetting. It means facing the ache together. And sometimes, that’s enough to begin again.
Lead image supplied
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia October 2025 Issue