love: This is a prompt from my friend Shekina.

The other day a woman with an elegant soul and a slightly burnt nose said to me:

'My children are my world, I give everything to them.'

We are sitting in a large hall, leant to us by the local council, so that we can teach people, often post-asylum seeking, English. The lady in question is Kurdish, and her English is perfect, since she used to be a lawyer in Kurdistan. Her hair is coiled gold, her eyes as black as a sky full of stars.

'I think to be a good parent,' she continues, slowly, chewing the words around, 'to raise your children well and prepare them for the world, you have to be tired.'

She has that look about her which says she has always been a hard worker, in everything she does. A calm, made up from years of determination. Her country, politically, no longer exists. When she flies to the city she calls home, she flies into Irak, a dominator rich in oil and in corruption.

The conversation ends with my holding back tears—and her seeing. She leaves at half past two to go and pick up her children from school. Despite not being taught in their native tongue, they are among the top students of their school.

When I get home the next day, my flatmate cries out, swinging from one foot to the other:

'EH! Amiga!' with a joyous grin I have come to know well.

He is a Brazilian health economist, and I live with him and his wife, who is a marketing consultant currently studying an MBA. We, laxly, share duties around the house.

That weekend, his wife, who is the kind of woman who will do up my zips for me if I am running out the door and have forgotten to check, is upstairs, swaying between business calls and exhaustion.

She is his second wife, and third serious partner. Both are honest people, with Christian backgrounds and too much empathy to want to believe in the Resurrection. We also don't want our loved ones to burn all while we are saved just because we sang in a church once a week.

Perhaps due to an age gap and gender difference, the man and I tend to have brief debates rather than conversations. We have covered most topics we can, and keep each other well informed on current affairs. Interests range from economic studies, how they affect governmental policies, and fighting climate change. Never, I have noticed, do we gossip.

But that weekend, our conversations run long over the weekend, mainly because his wife is calling a business partner one evening and sleeping the next.

His tongue loosened with wine, he begins to tell me about his divorce. Homeless, he then lived in a hostel, lost his political capital and then his job, the woman he'd left his wife left him and then came back. It didn't take him very long to realise her bipolarity made her emotionally laborious to be around. But he loved her, until she was unkind to his children.

'She was demanding more energy than my children, and she barring me from my children and I realised, no, never. This I cannot do, and nothing, nothing can get between me and my children.'

There's a ferocity and an anger when he speaks, reliving the bitter taste of understanding what it means to lose everything. His smile doesn't come back for a while as he looks down at his hands, eyes wide.

'I'm really crazy with that.'

And I think, there is a love and an ache in his chest which screams out at him that there is nothing in the world which should interfere his intense need to protect his daughters.