One warm June morning, Rula Abu-Rajab knelt at the doorway to her parents’ stone house in Amman, Jordan, and kissed her children goodbye. A taxicab, its meter running, waited to drive her to the airport.

Rula lingered, not wanting to go just yet. She needed reassurance that leaving her three young children with her family in Jordan while she finished school in America was the right thing to do — not just for her, but for the children.

She could hear the disapproving voices of her Muslim women friends. Why do you need to go to school? You have a husband with money.

Rula’s mother — the children’s beloved “Tata” — tried to reassure her.

My daughter, go! Don’t worry… Rula looked at her daughter, Mariam, in her pink Disney princess pajamas.

Do you want to come with me? Rula blurted out. If you want to come with me, I’ll take you with me.

Rula thought she knew the answer, but she needed to hear her daughter say the words.

No, Mama, she replied. We’ll miss you, but we’ll stay with Tata.

Rula kissed her daughter and walked quickly to the taxicab so the children wouldn’t see her cry.

NOW, RULA sits at her kitchen table in North Attleboro and listens for the computer to ring. Her children — Mariam, 6, Omar, 5, and Yusif, 18 months — have been living in Jordan with their grandparents since last summer, but the house in Amman has Internet access. With a few clicks, they can log onto a service that allows them to see and talk to each other. The children log on twice, sometimes three times, a day.

“Omar, he wakes me up every day,” Rula says, brightly, “and he always calls me when I get back from school. Rula wears a watch with two dials, set to two time zones; Jordan is seven hours ahead.

At 25, in blue jeans and a hot-pink Ralph Lauren T-shirt, and her hair twisted loosely behind her head, she looks a typical American college student.

“Most Middle Eastern women come to this country and sit home and cook, clean and gossip,” says her husband, Mahmoud (MA-mood), as he makes a pot of coffee. “We decided to send the kids so she would not be a typical Middle Eastern woman in this country.”

Mahmoud is 41, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. On this afternoon, his day off, he wears an open-collar shirt and khakis.

A modern Muslim, he believes that wives can be more than homemakers. His mother started a seamstress business out of their home in Jordan. And besides, he reasons, a mother with a college education is better equipped to help the children with homework.

But the logistics are rarely simple. In some parts of the world, women pick cotton with babies strapped to their backs. In Western cultures, working mothers without family help drop off their children at daycare centers or leave them at home to be cared for by nannies.

Rula would never leave her children with someone whom she barely knows.

“What are the chances you get someone you trust?”

It would be different, she says, if they were living in Jordan. Even if she didn’t know the person directly, she would surely know someone else who did.

“I would put my kids in daycare if I was in Jordan,” Rula says.

“You would?” her husband responds, sounding surprised.

MAHMOUD HAS done his share of driving their children to and from school on his days off, but routine childcare has always fallen largely to his wife. In his free time, he watches football on TV or reads. He devours Arabic stories about ancient civilizations as well as books by Western authors such as Ernest Hemingway.

He wages his daily battles from inside a glass office just off the showroom floor of a car dealership. As finance manager at Tarbox Pontiac Jeep, in North Kingstown, he regularly puts in 11-hour days, and works Saturdays. His strong work ethic and personable manner helped earn him the national title of 2005 Finance Manager of the Year. He spent the $5,000 prize on plane tickets to send Rula and the children to Jordan last spring.

In his office, pictures of the children fill Mahmoud’s computer screen. “Omar got his yellow belt in Taiquondo.”

On this afternoon, Mahmoud has just finished his midday prayer — kneeling on a company sweatshirt — and is seated in his swivel chair. A couple appears at his door. The man says something in Arabic and Mahmoud’s face brightens. They have mutual friends.

“Hello!” Mahmoud says, standing to offer his hand. “Assalamu alaikum, brother” — the traditional Arabic greeting: peace be with you.

Mahmoud turns to the woman.

“Assalamu alaikum, sister,” he says, and shakes her hand, too.

The gesture speaks volumes. Traditional Muslim men often refuse to shake hands with a woman; to touch a woman other than one’s wife or blood relative violates the strict Islamic code of behavior. But Mahmoud operates as any other American in the non-secular business world, where shaking a woman’s hand is a display of gender equality and respect. (“You know about women in whatever culture,” Mahmoud says, “they’re the boss. Whatever they say goes!”)

The man in the couple is Turkish; he was referred by a mutual friend. Usually, Mahmoud leaves the sales work to the showroom guys, but this couple came to him personally.

“So, you’re looking for a Grand Cherokee?” Mahmoud says, stepping out of his office to the showroom floor. “You looking for something with leather?”

Mahmoud presses on. “What’s good for you?” he says, turning to the woman. His eyes twinkle. “I’m talking to the boss!”

Mahmoud is a natural salesman, though this line of work never interested him. Nor did he ever have much interest in cars, despite the fact that his father was an auto mechanic. Mahmoud left Jordan to study electrical engineering at The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, supporting himself with menial work — cashier, store clerk, cook — before he landed a finance job at an auto dealership and quickly worked his way up.

“I’ll help you with the numbers,” Mahmoud says to his customer. As the couple peer into the windows of an SUV, Mahmoud directs a salesman to bring a key so they can take it for a ride.

“I want you to drive the car; see if you like it, and I’ll work the numbers for you,” he says to the man in the couple. “The numbers are my job.”

INTELLIGENT, CONFIDENT and financially secure — these were the qualities which impressed Rula when, during her freshman year of college in Jordan, she was introduced to Mahmoud Shawish. He was 32, living in America, and had returned to Jordan in search of a wife. She was 17.

Back then, marriage was far from her mind. Rula was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, a country which, until 1960, offered no formal education for girls. In 1990, fewer than half of all Saudi women were literate. Her parents, both educated Palestinian immigrants, taught grade school.

“I wanted to be an educated person,” says Rula. “I didn’t want to stay home and do nothing.”

In public, Rula always covered her hair and wore long, loose-fitting dresses like the other Muslim girls. But beneath her traditional cover, a modern woman’s ambition bloomed.

Rula excelled academically and dreamed of becoming a doctor. But as non-citizen residents, her family, like roughly a quarter of the Saudi population, was not allowed to attend the free public universities. The country’s private universities also were off-limits to non-citizens. It never occurred to Rula to be angry. She took a pragmatic approach to find a solution. After high school, Rula moved with her mother to Jordan so she could attend college. She was the oldest of six daughters and two brothers; more independent and focused than her sisters; the one her mother turned to for advice.

She had already turned down several potential suitors when, during her first semester of college, a woman in Jordan who knew Rula’s family offered to introduce Rula to her brother, who was visiting from America.

The first time Rula met Mahmoud, he came to her family’s house with his mother and sister. The two barely spoke. When Rula left the room, Mahmoud told her mother that he was concerned because Rula was only 17 and perhaps not ready to leave her family.

I know my daughter, Rula’s mother told him. She is smart and independent. If God wants it to happen, it will happen.

On the second visit, Mahmoud came to the house with only his sister. He asked for permission to speak with Rula alone, without her head scarf, as is customary for a groom-to-be. Rula and Mahmoud were left alone in the living room to talk over tea.

How do you spend your free time, he asked her. What do you like to read?

He talked about his favorite books, his work, and living in America.

Their next meeting, over lunch at a fancy restaurant, Mahmoud spoke frankly. It is not going to be easy to leave your family and start a new life, he told her. You don’t know the language; you don’t know the culture. You will be home alone while I am at work. I can’t watch you being miserable, crying every night. It will take time to adjust. If you get through the first two or three years, he told her, you’ll be fine.

“That’s what I liked about him,” she recalls. “He was honest about every single thing.”

Rula had been unable to get into medical school in Jordan. She was studying computers, which she hated. She’d heard there were more opportunities to get an education in America.

By law, women in Saudi Arabia are permitted to go abroad to study only if they are accompanied by a spouse or a male relative of their immediate family.

Rula asked her future husband: Will you let me continue my education if I come to America?

Ten days after they met, they were engaged. Mahmoud flew back to America, returning six months later for the wedding. Almost 800 people came to the wedding party at a giant hall in Amman. Five days later, Rula flew with Mahmoud to Boston. Her new home was an Attleboro apartment. She spoke only a few words of English. She was 18.

In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive. Rula was pregnant with their first child when she slid behind the wheel of a car for the first time. She had lived in America just two months.

Their daughter, Miriam, was still an infant when Rula began attending English-as-a-Second Language classes at the Community College of Rhode Island. Rula was pregnant with their second child when she enrolled at CCRI in biology and psychology — prerequisites for the degree in x-ray technology.

Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Rula gave birth to Omar. She watched the world unravel on TV from her hospital bed.

“We never heard of bin Laden or al-Qaida,” recalls her husband, Mahmoud. Americans look at people from Arab countries and think, “all of them are the same.”

He shrugs his shoulders, incredulous.

Muslims come to America as refugees, tourists, students. An estimated six to seven million Muslims now live in the United States, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. That includes an estimated 70,000 Muslims in Massachusetts, and another 6,000 in Rhode Island.

Mahmoud has lived in the U.S. for 20 years. He is also an American citizen, a point he makes more than once in discussing the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

“As an Arab-American, a Muslim-American,” he says, “we were guilty by association. We were guilty by accent. We were guilty by culture. We were guilty by faith.”

Rula defers all political commentary to her husband. “I’m a regular mother with three kids,” she says, dismissively. “A student.”

RULA OVERSLEEPS. Even the ring of the computer in the downstairs study — she keeps the volume high so she can hear it when the children call over the Internet from Jordan each morning — could not drive her from bed this morning. She has missed their call.

Rula sprints downstairs to make coffee. With no children at home, their days run on their schedules. No shuttling the children to the school bus, ballet classes, swimming lessons.

These are the small indulgences of a life without young children: sleeping late on their days off; spontaneous nighttime strolls; weekend drives in the couple’s Mazda Miata to Boston or New York.

And yet, Rula is exhausted. She attends classes three days a week; the other two days, she does her training on the radiology ward of Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence. In her kitchen, she stands at the granite counter and grinds Starbucks coffee beans, scooping the grounds into a Krups coffee maker.

Rula pulls on a long-sleeved T-shirt (bare arms violate the dress code for Muslim women) and over that, her hospital scrubs. She retrieves her two-piece head cover, or hijab, and plants herself in front of the bathroom mirror. She used to wear an all-white hijab, but patients at the hospital, usually the older ones, kept asking: Are you a nun?

Over her head, she pulls a stretchy tube of cotton in navy blue, tugging it halfway down her forehead. Over that, she pulls on a white cotton hood.

Her face appears as an oval of olive skin, soft features, and wide green eyes that sparkle when she smiles. Except for her groomed eyebrows, she appears hairless.

Rula adjusts the clip of her hospital name tag and pours coffee into her travel mug.

Outside, the automatic sprinklers mark their progress with a rhythmic tink—tink—tink against the plastic mailbox. Rula climbs into her white Jeep Grand Cherokee and heads into traffic.

“GOOD MORNING, Rula!”

A short woman with reddish-brown hair greets Rula as she hurries down the linoleum hallway of the main radiology department at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital.

A man tethered to an IV drip lies on a stretcher in the hallway. A group of young women students in scrubs chat with the office staff about the morning’s traffic jam: an overturned tractor-trailer.

A man’s voice over the intercom intones the morning’s blessing.

“…Christ our Lord, Amen. God bless you and have a good day.”

Rula is an anomaly at this private, Catholic hospital; the only other woman wearing a head cover this morning is a nun in full habit. Yet Rula feels comfortable and accepted here. Sometimes she’ll even duck into an empty x-ray room to pray.

The women students in radiology, all in their 20s, spend their morning coffee break trading stories like sorority sisters. On this morning, one of the women tells a story about a man who came into the hospital with a stomachache. The x-ray showed that he had swallowed 30 screws.

“Do you remember the lady who swallowed the lipstick?”

“…The pen!”

“…The knitting needle!”

“You know how you hear the stories about the guys” who get x-rayed, one of the woman says. “You can see things?”

They giggle.

“Well, we did, and you know you could see the guy. . . .” Rula burst into giggles, covering her face in embarrassment.

The women don’t hold back with their Muslim friend. And Rula has been open about her own life.

The women often ask about her children.

Did you talk to your kids today?

Their first reaction when she explained how she’d sent her children to live in Jordan so she could get her degree was to feel sorry for her.

You can’t see your kids, she recalls them saying. Oh, that’s hard!

Yes, she says, it is hard. But she needs to do this for herself, her future.

“I don’t want to just be sitting in the house taking care of kids for the rest of my life.”

It’s also for her children’s future. In Jordan, the children attend a private school where they learn to speak three languages, study the Koran and swim in an Olympic-sized pool.

They learn about their culture, their religion. Would Mariam have decided to fast during Ramadan, Rula wonders, had she not been living in Jordan?

“There, half of her class is fasting,” she says. “All of the neighbors are fasting. The whole country is fasting.”

Two years away is a long time, but Rula will visit during Christmas break, and the children will spend summers in North Attleboro. If it all works as planned, by the time the children return to their parents’ house in two years, Rula will be a certified x-ray technologist. Not a doctor, as she’d dreamed of, but an educated professional.

“YOU KNOW what they tell me at work?” Rula says to her husband one evening. They say “You are giving a good impression about the Muslim women!”

Mahmoud, who arrived home well past dinnertime, has washed his hands and face in preparation for his evening prayer. He and Rula sit in their uncluttered living room reviewing the day.

Shortly after 9 p.m., he rises. On his way out of the room, he says something in Arabic.

“He wants his tea,” Rula explains to a visitor.

The French doors to the dining room close with a thud-click. Mahmoud prays in Arabic, his voice floating down the hall and into the kitchen, where his wife prepares tea.

These are their evening rhythms now. The house is quieter, the rooms emptier. Luggage from their trip to Jordan is stored in a spare upstairs bedroom, along with their one-year-old son’s dismantled crib. In Jordan, Yusif now sleeps in a regular bed.

The children’s bedrooms look as if they never left: the oak-framed beds covered with matching floral comforters; the piles of stuffed animals; the Tonka trucks scattered on the carpet; the pair of carelessly tossed Mary Janes.

Since she left, Mariam has grown a full shoe size.

SHORTLY AFTER 3 p.m. one recent afternoon, Rula and Mahmoud kneel, prayer-like, in front of the computer screen in the downstairs study.

Click. Click.

A rectangular window opens.

Mahmoud leans in close to his wife. “Mariam? Yusif?”

The image is grainy, the movements jerky, like an old home movie. Mahmoud speaks in Arabic. A woman, head covered in a white scarf, appears on the screen. It’s the children’s grandmother, Tata.

A child’s voice screeches with ear-splitting feedback.

The boy wears a — is it green? — striped shirt. His face is in shadow. Rula smiles.

“There’s Yusif!”

Omar yells to his father. “Baba! Baba!”

And there, straddling a chair, legs swinging, is Mariam. She calls out, “Alo! Alo!” Since she’s been away, Mariam has lost two teeth.

More screeching. Only now, the cause becomes clear. The grainy image on the screen shows little Yusif putting the microphone into his mouth.

Rula tries to engage her son in a game.

“Yusif!” Rula says. “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands!”

Clap, clap.

“….If you’re happy and you know it stomp your feet!”

They speak an English-Arabic mix that Mahmoud calls Arabish.

“Big hug,” he says. “Big hug.”

“Alo! Alo!”

“Omar?”

“Hi, Baba.”

“…I missed you a lot.”

“I love you two-thousand billions. How much you love me?”

“…Oh, that much?”

“Good boy, good boy, Habibi. I love you a lot.”

Rula moves away from the microphone to allow Mahmoud a turn.

“Isn’t he adorable?” she says, smiling. “I just want to hold him and kiss him.”

There are moments — not many, but a few — when the urge to be with their children is so strong that Rula and Mahmoud think: why not just go back to Jordan, retrieve the children, enroll them in daycare?

Then, the computer hums. The monitor lights up. And in this American suburb, thousands of miles from Amman, the parents of three smiling children blow kisses at the computer screen.