English, Muslim, Pakistani ... how I tell my kids about their identities

As she raises three boys, our writer is starting to face tough questions from them about where they fit in. Her answer? As a whole, not just halves…

My six-year-old son is learning about fractions. He sits next to me at the dining table, and draws a bat, then colours half of it green. “The word half is used when something is split into two equal parts,” he explains. I nod, go back to my laptop.

Then he looks up at me and says, “I’ve got two halves. I’m half-Muslim, half-English. Right?” He looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to confirm whether his calculation is correct and my heart sort of breaks a little, to hear him refer to himself as pieces of a whole.

I worry that if I push too much, they’ll grow up resenting both their religion and me

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from Islam | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3atlXQX