If you can’t take responsibility for your children, might as well not have them.
They are not your belongings or parts of you or your spouse. They are fragile. And if you damage them, which you will, don’t blame them for spending the rest of their lives undoing what you did to them.
The damage you suffer as a child never goes away.
Age 5: I was forced to go to a mosque where the preacher would beat me mercilessly for not being able to pronounce Arabic syllables correctly. I was memorizing Quran without knowing how to read it in the first place!
At the same time, I was denied modern schooling by my father. According to him, Islamic education came first. Every two weeks I was asked to go to school by my mother for exams (I was in grade 3 then) and every exam I heard the teachers gossiping about ‘how my father beats my mother and had me removed from the school.’
Not to forget the amount of ridicule I faced for wearing Kurta Shalwar instead of my uniform and carrying my aunt’s purse instead of a school bag.
Age 7: For eight years, I was put through the torment of a custody trial where I watched my parents fight each other in the court. My uncles fed lies into my head and my mother pleaded in front of the judge that I had the best chance at life with her because “her family was secure and wealthy enough to safeguard my best interests and provide me with a quality education.”
[I am 26 now and she is the same woman who hates, belittles me, and despises my very own existence. They are the same uncles who boasted how much they loved me and then abused me eventually throwing me out of the house to fend for myself and laugh at me when I crawled back inside having no place to go.]
Age 12: My single mother was my only guardian who refused to send me to a different school (because of the fear that my father would abduct me). I was forced to study in a local one instead of taking the Cambridge examinations (I’ve been teaching that curriculum for ten years now). The same thing repeated five years later when I was in college and was offered a scholarship by LUMS which is a very prestigious business school of Lahore. Everyone in my family backed out when it came to paying the admission fee and I was forced to let another one of the many opportunities slip away.
Age 16: My mother and her brothers strictly forbade me to bring friends to the house. The mere thought of me having friends was blasphemous. According to them, it was a NO BOY ZONE. ‘And good Muslims can’t have girls as friends’ was preached to me. Instead, every chance I had to make friends, or meet people, or play was systemically replaced with books, books with pretty pictures, Encylopedia Americana for my 9th birthday, and then eventually more novels leaving Harold Robbins and Sydney Sheldon, the only prohibited authors in my home. My curiosity thus increased ten folds.
This continuous craving for more books labelled me ‘psycho’ and ‘lunatic’ one evening when my mother found out a tremendously long list of words that I had written down on a piece of paper which I had tucked in my backpack. Every evening when the rest of the world went outside to play, I would take the list out, scan through the dictionary to find their meanings and try to memorize them so that I can use them in sentences. That evening when she caught me ‘playing’ she told me that ‘people who read the dictionary go mental!’
Age 19: My eldest uncle called me a ‘hypocrite’, ‘a self-centred dick’ who ‘ate at their expense for an entire life and then ran away without paying a single penny in return’. He then spread the news to the entire family of how ill-mannered and disrespectful I was for replying a ‘Fuck You!’ to his constant name calling because he wanted me to pay for his webcam and headphones from my mousy income of 8000 Rupees (roughly 80$) which was then spent entirely on my rent and grocery.
Age 21: I had a nervous breakdown. My mother, her brothers, and sisters refused to acknowledge their share in the equation and placed me on the pedestal of being the black sheep of the family.
To reinforce her control my mother refused to pay my tuition, shouted away all my students. Whatever they paid was my only income to get stationary, photocopy handouts at the university, and pay for the bus to get to class. She then put up a curfew on food which means that I don’t eat cause I don’t pay. The curfew is still in place to date!
She destroyed years of my life, imbued hours of psychological and physical abuse and starved me for days. She’s 61 now, her ways in life have not changed. It took me years to unravel the tangled threads my family weaved around me, trapping me for a lifetime. Every now and then, I go back to the instant where the judge had asked me before he decided to sign the verdict of my custody.
‘Where do you wanna go?’
I had looked at my pleading mother’s face and remembered all the hurtful words my dad had said about her (which were never true and only implanted in my head by my uncles) and had chosen her.
I regret that decision the most.
EDIT:
I could have gone anonymous for this answer as my friends and family would read (they are active here) but chose not to. I feel a bit sad after writing this. My mother has been horrible towards me but she is a completely different person outside the house. She’s taught five generations of children and they all respect her and admire her. She’s a damn good teacher. Just not a good mother, I guess.
She is still working. I admire that about her. She raised us when she could’ve easily remarried and put us up for adoption or had let us rot in her mother’s house. She tried her best to help us in whatever way she could and whatever time her rage didn’t get the best of herself.
There are a lot of things that I’ve learnt from her. English Literature that I’ve always been praised for (and managed to write a book) – only cause she coached me in the art of language; watercolour painting, pottery; cooking and sewing all that I’d seen her doing as a child. I still owe her a part of my success in life. But the abuse and suffering were just a little too much of a price to pay. I still wonder what she might have gone through (a lot in my eyes though) that caused her to be so cruel and bitter towards her own children.
And yeah, I realize the effect of culture and stigma, trying to justify my mother’s action. I’m not justifying anything. Whatever pain she’s put me through cannot be erased. And a part of me really hates her for that, but if I have to be the bigger person and think rationally then that means to accept what she did and move on.
I can’t say I love my mom or like her either. But if we could connect, I could have known her better and maybe helped her.
“You were merely wishing for the end of pain. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.”
A monster calls | Patrick Ness
Keane resurfaces after years to give us the music we’ve yearned to hear. Go watch this beautiful movie and if you’ve read the book, the better it is. It is one of the movies that you as a parent must watch it with your child and help them understand everything about life that their tiny or bigger head can focus on!
There’s nothing more difficult than raising children. You love them but they drive you insane. There are times when you will not understand them and there are times that they will challenge your authority. They will run your patience dry, trample all over your skin in heels, twist your spine and detest you for not being like other parents when you’re trying your hardest to be the best version of yourself. And they won’t understand the pain of loving someone unconditionally until they get to raise and love children of their own.
I say this because I feel privileged to have got to raise my students as kids of my own, from the time they were toddlers to the smart, intelligent and kind young people they’ve become in their lives.
Sometime in 2015: Took the kids to see Avengers!
TEDxNUST Sep’16: I mentioned my students who were my greatest support in battling depression and suicidal tendencies.
Giving your children the best of yourself is the greatest gift. The other one is, of course, loving them for who they are even if it means that they go for life choices that are different from what you had in mind!
© Sulaiman
Unwritten 