HF: Getting married is half your deen, right?

Me: Yeah.

HF: So getting two wives must complete it entirely then, hunh?

*rimshot*

Ok, I don’t really want to drive people away.  I guess I just want to lose the mental barriers that have gone up since my blog has become a public place, and is therefore not always the best way of sharing private thoughts.

Hmm, I could be deluding myself here, assuming that anywhere on the internet is a private place.  But humor me for the sake of argument.

Also, the L key on my computer might have banana milkshake in it.  Thank you Khalid.  It took me five attempts to spell your name because of the sticky L.

What am I trying to say here…I used to freely complain on my blog with the desired outcome of catharsis.  Now I’m afraid of offending people if I do.  I used to talk through my own weaknesses on my blog, now I’m afraid of mixing my human frailties with my public responsibilities.  I’m a dag-nabbit director, dag-nabbit.  I’m supposed to be on the ball, in the know, up the eyeballs in managerial competence or something.  I shouldn’t be complaining about the banana milkshake in the L key and how lately Musfira has been so nocturnal that my daily waking time is noon and I seldom, if ever, leave the house during daylight hours.  I shouldn’t complain about how my Ramadan felt like an utter waste because I got a kidney infection on day five and missed fasting for the next 25 days.  I shouldn’t talk about the overwhelming sadness I felt when Eid was announced because another Ramadan had ended and I was no better off than I was before and not at all looking forward to reintroducing waswassa to the darkness of my own thoughts.  When the sun set for the last Iftar I actually cried.

I’ve been reluctant to post for a while now, not fearing public disapproval, but rather of opening myself up to too many people who actually know me as a person.  I’m not sure what it’s called when you have an easier time sharing your deepest, darkest thoughts with a stranger on an airplane than your own family or long-time friends, but I have that.  I’ll open my inner recesses of my mind to strangers (and sell tickets to the event on a decorated marquis!) but keep it tightly locked to the people around me.   But now a certain element of mixing has occurred, and I don’t know whether I should tell the strangers on my blog that I feel useless, overwhelmed and frustrated, or whether I should tell the friends and family on my blog that I’m a little busy but perfectly fine, thank you.

And thanks to the magic of RSS feeds (thanks for the reminders, guys) my ingenious plan of not updating for a long ole time is not likely to work.  Which is such a pity, because I spent all of five minutes devising it, and now I want those five minutes back.

Meh.

I have no choice but to be myself, because I don’t know how to be anyone else.  I just don’t know how much of myself I can be here anymore.  Let’s see.

If I leave this blog un-updated long enough, will people stop coming, and if people stop coming, will I get my anonymity back?  Just wondering.

There are so many things about this talk that I like that I’m not even sure where to begin.  SubhanAllah.

I thought I would post a quick dua request here.  It is an odd night, and the 27th too.  So more people making dua is good, right?  So what do I ask for?  What if I miss something?  How can I make a quick request that covers every possible situation, need, shortcoming, or deficiency that exists in the world and in every one of its people, living, dead, and yet to come?

اللّهُـمَّ أَنْـتَ السَّلامُ ، وَمِـنْكَ السَّلام ، تَبارَكْتَ يا ذا الجَـلالِ وَالإِكْـرام .

‘O Allah, You are As-Salam and from You is all peace, blessed are You, O Possessor of majesty and honour.’

Allah is He, than Whom there is no other god;- the Sovereign, the Holy One, the Source of Peace (and Perfection), the Guardian of Faith, the Preserver of Safety, the Exalted in Might, the Irresistible, the Supreme: Glory to Allah! (High is He) above the partners they attribute to Him.

Nothing in the world is as important as peace- salam, from As-Salaam, The Source of Perfect Peace.  To be ok with everything, and to have everything be ok.

Ya Salaam, please give us salaam.

Ameen

Darkness lies around him
and watches with dark eyes
whispering suggestions
suggesting lovely lies
the smoothest path is downward
the uphill path is rough
(faith is but a tiny light
but faith is light enough)
a human walks in darkness
he says his eyes are bright
he cannot see his blindness
and his eyes are wide with fright
he says his heart will lead him
but his heart is dark inside
a light once sputtered there
but even that has died.

O you who have believed, respond to Allah and to the Messenger when he calls you to that which gives you life. And know that Allah intervenes between a man and his heart and that to Him you will be gathered.

The Qur’an, Surah Al Anfal, line 24

Me: Khalid, in five minutes it’ll be time to turn off the computer and take a bath, ok?

Khalid: InshaAllah.

___________

Me: What were you doing when you fell off the bed?

Iman: I was going down to get you a present, you know? Like, an adventure crown!

Khalid has a hard time expressing himself, which is very common for a person with autism.  We’ve learned to keep a closer eye on him, to looks for signs of things that he may not be able to tell us.  Today, for example, when Iman started bawling and saying that Khalid bit her, I checked Khalid’s arm first.  Sure enough, I found teeth marks and a nasty purple bruise that far exceeded the dent that Iman dramatically showed me in her finger.  Khalid bit Iman because Iman bit him first, but he would never tell us that.

It’s not as if Khalid doesn’t talk- sometimes we can’t get him to stop talking- about trains, about Amtrak and Metrolink and Thomas.  It’s just that he won’t talk about himself.  He won’t even tell us when he needs to use the bathroom, and we have a roughly 90% rate of Khalid peeing in his pants if we don’t insist that he goes to the bathroom when we think he’s looking a little fidgety.  So you can see how hard it is to get an idea of what goes on inside of his head, and how easy it is to miss what a sensitive little boy he is.

In addition to Khalid’s self-inflicted belief that HF has abandoned him due to bad behavior (see yesterday’s Umrah post) Khalid is also suffering from severe haircut regret.  One of HF’s personal traditions is to have his head shaved whenever one of our new babies has their head shaved.  This, he says, is so that the baby doesn’t feel alone.  :)   This time, when HF went to the barber to match his hairdo to Musfira’s, Khalid got excited by seeing the ‘paint’  (shaving cream) on baba’s head, and said he wanted his head painted too.  HF was skeptical, and he called me.  I asked Khalid, Khalid said he wanted to have his head shaved.  So we let him.

Khalid came home happy and we took some pictures of his and HF’s shiny new heads together.  The next morning the honeymoon ended.  Khalid woke me up by climbing into my bed with his hands on his head exclaiming ‘Oh no! Where is it? We need to find the hair!’ and since then, he has worn a hat, 24/7.  He even goes to bed in one.  He will run naked from one end of the house to the other (if he gets distracted while getting dressed) but he will be naked with a hat on.  We’ve tried to separate him from the hat, but he will cry and cover his head with his hands out of shame.  He will skulk around miserably with his head hanging, both hands covering his lack of hair.   We’ve decided that him not feeling humiliated is more important than us following vintage Western social norms out here in the Middle East where we have no such hangups about headgear, so Khalid gets to wear his hat.

This evening, the kids ate dinner without a fuss, bathed without any protest, and earned a brief cartoon interlude before bedtime.  We had ten minutes to go before lights-out, so I opened my computer and turned on a Pixar short film- Boundin’.  It’s here, and in case you’ve forgotten, tells the story of a happy, fluffy sheep who shares his joy by dancing for the other animals until one day- insert ominous music here- he is unexpectedly hauled away and sheared.  He is returned- naked and ridiculed by the other animals.  Are you picking this up yet?  Thunder rolls.  The sky darkens.  The sheep is crying in the rain.  By the time it dawns on me that this might not be a good cartoon for Khalid just at this point in his dramatic life, he has pulled his hat over his face, and I can see tears rolling out from underneath of it.  I ask him what’s wrong and he tries to run away.  I gently pull him back because I want him to see that the sheep can be happy even without his hair, which is what his friend the Jackalope teaches him.  Khalid sniffs and perks up a bit.  The sheep’s hair grows back and Khalid is happy.  But then that darn truck comes back AGAIN and the sheep is sheared and Khalid looks like the rug’s been pulled out from under him again.

It’s hard to tell how socially aware Khalid is or isn’t, but we’re learning.  When I introduced Khalid to my physiotherapist two weeks ago, she very casually asked Khalid where his front teeth had gone.  Khalid looked away from her and mumbled ‘nothing’ and then walked out of her office.  ’Nothing’ is Khalid’s response to any question with an unpleasant answer.  She apologized to me profusely for embarrassing him, but I can’t fault her.  She’s not the first person who has asked and she won’t be the last, and as desperately as I wish I could, I can’t protect him from the world.

Ya Allah, please protect Khalid from hurt and harm, whether it come from friends or enemies, and protect him and sustain him, and please keep him in Your shelter in this life and the next.  Ameen.

HF left for Umrah this evening.  We loaded up the minivan with all three kids to drop him off at the airport, even though it was three hours past their bedtime by the time we got home again, because we wanted to give him a proper send-off and to help the kids understand where he was going.  Khalid and Iman were confused, but Iman was happy because she loves this nasheed and was excited to hear that baba was going to the Kabah to pray and drink zamzam.  (ZAMZAM!)

Khalid wasn’t pleased though, and actually started crying on the way home. When I asked him why, his confused answer involved ‘scareding,’ and baba being angry. The gist of it seems to be that baba has left because yesterday Khalid made baba angry when he bit him. Ouch. Tomorrow I’ll write a social story for Khalid and we’ll read it together. I want to reinforce that baba is, indeed, coming back, and didn’t leave because he was mad at Khalid. SubhanAllah.

(Truthfully though, I have no guarantee that HF is coming back.  Not to be dramatic, but people die at Hajj/Umrah every year.  It’s a statistical inevitability: when you put 4 million people together for the world’s largest gathering, there will be mortality rates.  The sick, the old, the people in wrong place at the wrong time when accidents happen- people die in Makkah and Medina, and while it’s sad to lose a loved one, I can’t think of a better place or situation to lose them in.  If I could think of somewhere to die, in sajda in the haram would be my top choice, and if Allah chose to take HF the same way, I would be jealous.  I’m not being morbid, just pragmatic.  We’re all going to die, we might as well try to die awesomely.)

I digress.  I’ll be putting together a big ole dua list for HF.  If you would like your prayers added to the list please let me know and I’ll pass them his way, InshaAllah. May Allah accept his Umrah and make it easy for him.  May Allah forgive us all for our sins, and make us among those earn His pleasure in this life and the next. Ameen.

And right about now, I’d much rather have a cookie.

You know what the problem with typing while hungry is?  Even words look tasty.

Musfira is getting properly colicky, crying louder and longer in the past few nights than before.  The Nightly Fuss has been going on for around four weeks now, and it starts at 6pm like clockwork and last night it continued until 2:30 am.  Please remember us in your duas.  I don’t like being nocturnal.  Or cried at for 6+ hours.  No fun. Very tiring.  Want a cookie.