Miss car keys and quiet luxury problems

“This will probably sound like a first-world problem, but...” She paused, her beautiful, big brown, kohl-lined eyes suddenly serious as she looked down at her plate of mishkakis. (Pronounced Miss-Kah-Keys, not Miss Car Keys; these are delicious Omani barbecue-grilled skewers of tender meat marinated in bold, fragrant spices.)
It was the second of October, and we were sitting outside. As I waited for my friend to finish her sentence, I suddenly remembered when I first met her and her now-former husband years ago. Back then, they looked to me like an Omani version of King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain. I was not sure if someone that sophisticated would have anything in common with me.
As it turned out, we did, and she is one of those women who became, as someone once put it, an 'accidental activist,' not out of rage but out of heartbreak, especially over Gaza. Like her aunt, my husband, and my child, she also has an infectious, booming laugh that seems to rise from somewhere deep inside whenever she finds something funny.
This evening, it was finally the end of another hot summer, and the air outside was free of its sometimes foul-smelling refinery haze (which is not OK for us or the environment).
I was still sweating as I tried to be both a good host and a good friend, fiddling with the volume of the vintage speakers I inherited from my father. I wanted to pause the jazz in the background out of respect for the evening call to prayer, Isha, which was now coming from different directions, including the mosque a few doors down.
An hour earlier, my friend, the online activist with the first-world problem, had let her thick hair down and left it uncovered for the women-only night. She smelled like musk (not Elon, I mean white musk, the Arabian perfume with its powdery, fresh, cotton-like scent) and had been among the first of ten ladies to arrive at our farm that evening.
(Luckily, we do not live in a fancy compound. By farms in Muscat, we mean old houses with gardens of palm trees and singing birds. No goats or camels. We once tried to have a pet rooster, but he shattered the nighttime silence, triggering our adopted outdoor cat, a territorial animal who feels more equal than others.)
I had turned our garden into a simple, partly solar-lit gathering for this group of Omani and expat women (I prefer to call the latter immigrants, though some do intend to leave the country one day and retire elsewhere).
They came to celebrate my late mother’s and my birthdays and the start of the mild Omani winter (usually like a cool European summer, good if you love golf, tennis, or sunbathing, and for people like us who prefer beach walks and desert camping).
Like any barbecue around the world, it was also just an excuse for us to talk freely about the sudden perimenopausal inability to remember why you walked downstairs in the first place. About high-functioning anxiety and why we forget the names of certain colleagues. “Are we becoming more antisocial, depressed, or simply someone who occasionally enjoys lying on the sofa without communicating with anyone, wearing old pajamas and mismatched socks?” “Healthy marriages are never free from arguments!” Hear, hear.
Schools, preteens, where to stitch dresses for us as wedding guests, whether, in hindsight, Tom and Jerry had racial undertones and if the movie Borat was just propaganda and not funny at all.
And then we ate, and occasionally used a word we tell our kids never to say in public. We skipped the karaoke (too loud for our overall quiet neighbourhood, especially after the mosque a few doors down stopped using loudspeakers for Friday lectures).
With half of these friends, I usually meet up online to discuss enraging global power politics, humanitarian catastrophes (mostly Gaza, too little Sudan, and not just Ukraine), and headlines we refuse to take at face value (we are not TikTok conspiracy theorists; we simply do not, or sometimes no longer, buy into certain narratives).
Apart from a few exceptions, Muscat does not have many night venues suitable for this particular group of ladies in their forties because, like the people at my gym, sometimes we just want a women-only space. Not because we hate our husbands or men, but because men tend not to fully understand all our favourite topics.
My husband respected our privacy and was in the living room wearing an apron despite not cooking that evening. As I went in to go to the hammam (bathroom), he was watching the Kimmel show with Sanders as a guest. “I love Bernie,” I overheard him say.
When these women and I meet face-to-face, we are perhaps too wary to talk about the heavy stuff. We do not look away, but we want to forget for a little while, celebrate, and talk about our personal and perimenopausal stuff too.
Without getting into details, that was exactly what my friend’s ‘first-world’ problem was about. We should never feel too embarrassed to mention a personal issue simply because it might seem trivial compared with the greater suffering elsewhere. These are not always quiet luxury problems. They can be real and silent struggles.