Mohammed is a friend of mine, the dad of two girls who were at the same middle school I taught in some years ago in Jefferson County, CO. When I go to the King Soopers grocery store near my house where Mo has worked for 20 years I always check in with him. He works in the vegetable department.
One daughter crashed and burned in high school after middle school. She had hope, I remember, as a young teen, even though she didn’t fit the expected model out here where the Columbine shootings occurred. Mo told me that his hopeful middle schooler wouldn’t come out of her house as a high schooler because of the way she looked. He tried to talk some sense into her, as he said, but it didn’t work.
Maybe it’s because she was of a different ethnic background, or didn’t have the best skin, just didn’t have the cheerleader thing going on. I don’t know what happened. Mo told me it was a lot about the clothes she wore – not good enough. He said a lot had to do with the clothes thing. But then, Mo works in a grocery store, just an average Muslim American trying to make it like anyone else, so he can’t outfit his kids in what a lot of the other kids wear.