The Ramadan Mental Load: What Nobody Talks About
By Simone Mazloumian, Founder of Eklektik Mama — Abu Dhabi's community for mothers
It starts with a feeling you can't quite name.
The city shifts overnight. Streets that were buzzing go quiet during the day. Restaurants pull their curtains. The air carries something different — slower, more intentional, like everyone collectively agreed to turn the volume down. Your kids start asking questions you're not entirely sure how to answer. Your schedule rearranges itself without consulting you. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you're standing in your kitchen at 5am thinking: right, how am I going to hold this together?
Welcome to Ramadan in the UAE as a mum. The holiest month of the Islamic year. And — let's be honest with each other — one of the most quietly relentless months on your calendar.
What Actually Is Ramadan? (A Quick One For Those Who Didn't Grow Up With It)
If you didn't grow up Muslim, or you're still relatively new to the UAE, Ramadan can feel genuinely moving and genuinely confusing in the same breath. So before we get into the stuff nobody talks about, here's the bit everyone should know.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and one of the five pillars of Islam — the foundational acts of devotion that define Muslim practice. It began this year on 18th February and runs for 29 to 30 days, ending with Eid al-Fitr, the Festival of Breaking the Fast.
Muslims fast from before sunrise to sunset — no food, no water, no smoking. But describing Ramadan as simply "not eating" is a bit like describing childbirth as uncomfortable. Technically accurate, completely misses the point. The fast is a deeply personal act of worship — a way of drawing closer to God, practising self-discipline, cultivating gratitude and empathy, and commemorating the revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The Arabic root of the word Ramadan — Ramdh — literally means "intensely hot" or "burning." The month is named for the way devotion is meant to burn away distraction and bring you back to what actually matters.
It's a month of increased prayer, charity, and community. Families rise before dawn for suhoor — a pre-dawn meal — and break the fast at sunset with iftar, traditionally starting with dates and water before a larger communal meal. Mosques fill every night for Tarawih prayers. The last ten nights are considered the holiest of all, with Laylat al-Qadr — the Night of Decree — believed to be among the most blessed nights of the entire Islamic year.
In the UAE, all of this shapes daily life in ways you feel whether you're fasting or not. Working and school hours shorten, and though the rules around public eating have relaxed over recent years, eating and drinking openly in public spaces during daylight hours is still discouraged as a matter of cultural respect. Fasting hours this year begin at just under 13 hours, building to around 13 hours and 27 minutes towards the end of the month.
For Muslims living here, Ramadan is among the most significant and anticipated experiences of their year. For the many expat mums in Abu Dhabi and Dubai navigating it from the outside, it's something that asks for genuine curiosity, respect, and a fair amount of logistical flexibility.
Either way, it asks something of the mums who are holding everything together.
The Bit That Doesn't Make It Onto the Ramadan Greeting Cards
Here's what the beautiful lanterns and the golden iftar spreads don't show you.
The suhoor that appears on the table before dawn? Didn't make itself. The iftar feast — the dates laid out just so, the soup simmering, the table set for however many people are coming — someone planned that. Shopped for it. Prepared it while also managing the witching hour and answering 400 questions and locating the school reading book. In households across the UAE and GCC, that someone is usually the mum.
She's doing this on disrupted sleep. With children whose routines have shifted in ways that make everyone a bit feral. Navigating school pickups that now happen at 12:30pm when she used to have until 3. Fielding questions from kids who genuinely cannot understand why they can't eat their snack in public. All while trying to make sure everyone else's experience of the month is meaningful and special.
Researchers call this the "mental load" — the invisible cognitive and emotional labour of running a household that falls disproportionately on women. Not just the doing, but the remembering, the planning, the anticipating, the fourteen open tabs running simultaneously in her brain. The mental load doesn't take a month off for Ramadan. It opens more tabs.
And in the UAE, it opens tabs that other places don't even have.
If You're a Muslim Mum Fasting
Let's just say it plainly: what you are doing is hard.
Fasting for up to 13 hours while also being the primary emotional and logistical anchor for everyone in your household is not a small thing. The intention of Ramadan is to create stillness — to pray more, to be more present, to let the noise fall away. The reality for a lot of Muslim mothers is that the noise doesn't actually fall away. The kids still need feeding, which means you're standing over food you can't eat. The household still needs managing. The iftar gatherings — wonderful as they are — still need organising. If you work, you're showing up professionally during shortened hours on an empty stomach and then coming home to cook a feast.
Many mothers across the UAE describe a constant background hum of feeling like they're not doing enough in any direction — not enough mother, not enough professional, not enough version of themselves. Ramadan lands on top of that existing pressure, not instead of it.
And then there's the thing not enough people say out loud: a significant number of Muslim mothers feel social or internal pressure to fast even when they are pregnant, breastfeeding, or genuinely unwell — despite Islamic guidance explicitly exempting them from doing so. If you are one of those women, please hear this: your wellbeing is not in conflict with your faith. The exemptions exist because they were always meant to. Rest is not a failure of devotion.
If You're a Non-Muslim Mum Navigating Ramadan in the UAE
Nobody really prepares you for your first Ramadan as an expat mum in Abu Dhabi or Dubai. Or your second, if we're being honest.
You're living in a city that has, for a month, shifted into a completely different gear — and that gear affects everything from your children's school hours to where you can grab lunch to why the roads are inexplicably empty at 2pm and then absolute chaos at 6:15. You're figuring this out in real time while still managing the full weight of your ordinary life.
There's a particular loneliness that can come with this season for expat mums. You want to be respectful. You want your children to understand what's happening around them. You might find yourself genuinely moved by the beauty of the month and completely unsure how to say so without it sounding like you're projecting. You might also be exhausted and not certain you're allowed to admit it.
You are.
The UAE is home to over 200 nationalities, and most of the mothers raising children here are doing it far from their own families, without the village that previous generations quietly took for granted. Ramadan, for all its communal warmth, can sharpen that sense of being on the outside of something you don't have the cultural shorthand for. What actually helps isn't pretending it's easy. It's finding other mums in Abu Dhabi who know exactly what you mean without you having to explain the whole thing from scratch.
What Every Mum in the UAE Has in Common This Month
The season is meaningful. It is also, genuinely, a lot.
The planning, the adapting, the feeding, the explaining, the management of everyone else's experience of Ramadan — this sits on maternal shoulders regardless of faith. School schedules shift and you absorb it. Work hours shorten and you reconfigure around it. Social life inverts — days go quiet, evenings come alive — and you reorganise the entire household's logistics accordingly. Largely without anyone asking how you're doing with all of that.
Which brings us to the thing that actually needs saying: burning out during a holy month doesn't make you a bad mother. It doesn't make you a bad Muslim. It doesn't mean you're not grateful for the life you have. It means you are a human being who has been running at full capacity without adequate rest, and the season turned up the dial.
How to Actually Get Through Ramadan Without Losing the Plot
This isn't a list of ways to do Ramadan better. It's permission to do it in a way that doesn't leave you face down on the sofa by week two.
Lower the bar on magical — deliberately. One genuinely lovely iftar moment is enough. The whole month does not need to look like a hotel marketing campaign. A meal eaten together at sunset, even a simple one, is entirely the point.
Find one window of time that is non-negotiably yours. Before the house wakes up. After the children are finally in bed. Fifteen minutes sitting in your car before you go inside. It doesn't need to be long or impressive. It needs to be yours and it needs to happen consistently.
Seek out honest company. Not to spiral together, but because being genuinely seen by another woman who actually gets it — without having to explain or justify or perform being fine — is one of the most quietly restorative things that exists. We're not talking therapy, although also therapy if you need it. Just real company with people who have also stopped pretending.
Drop one thing this week. The iftar you agreed to host when you absolutely should not have. The school thing that became yours entirely by accident. One thing. Put it down.
Let your children see you taking care of yourself. They are watching how you move through this month far more carefully than you think. A mother who runs herself into the ground making everything perfect for everyone else is teaching her children something. So is a mother who participates fully and also protects her own energy. You get to choose which lesson they take away.
Come Find Your People This Ramadan
At Eklektik Mama, we're building a community of over 3,000 mothers across the UAE who refuse to accept that motherhood means disappearing into everyone else's needs.
Every Wednesday we run BYOBaby events in Abu Dhabi — baby-friendly breakfasts, fitness classes, cinema mornings and co-working sessions where you can show up exactly as you are, baby in tow, without performing anything for anyone. And beyond Wednesdays, we create experiences that are purely, unapologetically for you — boat trips, members-only mama breakfasts, community iftars, and the kind of evenings you actually look forward to rather than spend three weeks organising for everyone else.
We're gathering for our Community Iftar at the Rosewood Abu Dhabi on Friday 6th March — Glo Restaurant, sunset to 9pm. Interactive food stations, live cooking, a Qanun player, and a room full of women who actually get it. An evening that's for you. Not organised by you.
This event is exclusive to our Eklektik Mama community. Join us here to get access to events like this one.
You can say the hard parts out loud here. You'll find women who are also brilliant, exhausted, ambitious, and completely done pretending everything is fine.
Because we need each other. And our children need to see us thriving, not just surviving.
This is Eklektik Mama. Where the bar for perfect motherhood is on the floor, and we like it that way.
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