I had hoped that my son would visit me, but my ex-husband changed his mind. The only way I could see Aboudi was to fly back to Saudi Arabia every other weekend. I did, of course. But I had no place to stay. At the time, many hotels refused to allow a Saudi woman to stay alone in a room without permission from a man. So for those precious weekends, I returned to my ex-mother-in-law’s house, the house where my marriage had fractured and broken and where more times than I care to remember, my own body had been struck and bruised.

My ex-husband has remarried and has two daughters. Aboudi now lives with his grandmother, my ex-mother-in-law; it has become her job to raise him. I used to know everything about my son: his favorite food, color, game and movie; what he liked to wear, his latest tricks, his best friend’s name. But he has become more and more of a stranger to me. I have to ask his grandmother who his new friends are, what he likes to eat, when he last went swimming.

I hired a lawyer to contest the premise that I could not have my son visit me in Dubai. The verdict was no. The court cited a 10th-century Islamic text, from the time of camels and caravans traveling across hot desert sands, and noted the “risk of the child dying en route on such a dangerous distance.” The trip from Dammam, where he lives in Saudi Arabia, to Dubai is one hour by plane.

And then in 2014, my second son was born.

A man who loved me had proposed, and we were married — not in Saudi Arabia or in Dubai, but by a civil marriage from a law court in Canada. Under Saudi rules, a woman (or a Saudi man) cannot marry a non-Saudi without official permission, and my planned marriage did not pass whatever test was applied. Because my marriage is not recognized, neither is my second child. The government will not grant him a visa.

When he was 6, Aboudi had asked me for a brother. He wanted to name him “Hamza,” which means courageous lion. This baby is Daniel Hamza, a great irony since in religious texts it was Daniel who survived the lions’ den. My curious, noisy, mischievous younger son has never seen my homeland. He knows his big brother only through photos and from waving at each other on screens.

I love my sons, I love my husband, and I love my country. But in kingdoms of men, there are few — if any — choices for women. Or the choices are such that there is no greater pain than having to choose.

I have been jailed. I have been strip-searched. I have pressed my face against heavy metal bars, against the Plexiglass divide in a visitor’s waiting room. I slept on the prison’s filthy mattresses. Inside, other mothers had their babies. All day long, I listened to their gurgles and cries. As horrible as it was for me, at least those mothers were on the same side of the prison walls with their children. I am now on the outside, but I do not yet know how to free myself from the bars that still separate my children.