I’m an Adult Hot Mess From a Religious and Strict Childhood
I’m a sobbing disaster right now. Will it ever get better?
When I was younger, my brother and I learned how to read the Quran, in Arabic, from a terrifying old man.
Friday nights my dad would shlep us to Dr. Khan’s house. My brother and I weren’t close back then but those nights, we clung to each other for dear life. It’s an understatement to say we dreaded Friday nights.
A bunch of us kids, terrified, sat on the floor with our Qurans in wooden holders. Dr. Khan went to each of us, instructing us to read a few passages. He had it memorized and reading it upside down from his vantage point wasn’t an issue. We’d use our index finger to read each word in the book.
If you were lucky, when you made a mistake, he flicked your finger. If you were unlucky, your hand was smacked. Hard. It wasn’t just the pain from the strike, but it was coming from a man we barely knew.
It’s one thing for someone you know to hit you. It’s another thing when it’s someone you barely know who has permission to hit you. We feared and hated this man.
I still remember the relief I’d feel when I successfully avoided a night of being hit. I also remember another group of siblings, huddling together the same way my brother and I did. One of them made a mistake and they both swallowed their terrified tears. We didn’t know what would happen if we cried after making a mistake and getting hit but there was a silent consensus among us children that crying was forbidden.
Did I learn how to read? Sure. I guess his tactics worked because I learned how to read a foreign language under intense pressure.
I hadn’t given it too much thought until tonight.
I don’t have the kids tonight. They sat on the couch vegging out after a documentary finished. I sat across from them in a chair, messing around on my laptop.
My dad tells me how he wants me to listen to something on his iPad. Something about a guy who learned how to teach things to children.
It’s an interview with someone talking about how he had a professor who taught him how to keep children engaged. Spoiler alert: make the content fun and exciting. This guy is talking like he revolutionized learning.
“I don’t understand what I’m listening to,” I tell my dad. He gets upset at me and keeps telling me to listen. “I need context, all I hear is some guy talking about how to keep kids interested in learning which isn’t rocket science.”
My dad gets even more upset. He goes on and on about how this dude is a famous professor and how he’s learned ways to make religion interesting for children.
I should have stopped. I shouldn’t have doubled down. My dad is old, has hearing aids, and is slow to understand things. His cognitive skills dwindled with old age. Why am I still talking?
“So the trick to get kids to learn is to make it interesting? Like how Doctor Seuss in the sixties took the same 250 basic reading words and made fun stories? Or how Magic School Bus in the eighties made science interesting for children?” I roll my eyes.
My dad contradicts himself by saying that Einstein didn’t need to school to be exciting to learn. “We learned just fine without it,” he says.
“Well, it sounds as if my brother and I were justified to hate learning from Dr. Khan because it was boring, like we told you over and over. Or how sitting every single night listening to Hadith (religious book stuff) was not an ideal way for kids to learn since it wasn’t exciting like this guy is saying.”
My dad gets agitated. “Dr. Khan wasn’t an expert on children!”
“I’ve had kids for thirteen years and I’ve known since day one that things need to be fun and interesting for them to learn. This guy didn’t revolutionize anything that everyone doesn’t already know: people are engaged when things are fun and exciting.” I reply.
My dad is getting upset and my mom doesn’t help by taking my side. “Well this guy is going on and on, it’s pretty dry,” she says. That’s a shocking twist for her to agree with me.
Finally, I say that I clearly must not have understood why I was supposed to be listening to it. I switch the subject and ask more about the professor. I find the dude’s out-of-print book and download it to my dad’s iPad, which makes him somewhat happy.
The room is full of tension as we head to sleep. I ruined our night.
I’m sitting here in my son’s room (my parents are sleeping in my room) shaking. I feel guilty for upsetting my dad. I thought it was my mom who would make me crack first with my arguments. He was crushed that I didn’t share his enthusiasm for the video.
Guilty. I feel so guilty. My dad was genuinely excited to share a stupid fucking video and I went with my knee-jerk reaction.
But as I sit here, I think back to those nights with Dr. Khan (who died decades ago). I’m crying like I’m a kid all over again, angry that I have to do terrifying religious classes while my friends get to spend their evenings watching TV (we didn’t have one) or having pizza with their family (pizza delivery wasn’t allowed for us because the cheese wasn’t halal/kosher).
Am I justified in my reaction? I didn’t yell or get mean, but I did get loud and animated. I was sarcastic. I was dismissive.
My brain is sucked back to that time of religious control. Everything was first about religion. Trying to find fun in life as a kid was something we had to actively seek out and it often was considered sneaky, like watching movies in the theater. I think about how I try to infuse joy into my kids’ lives and it’s a stark contrast to my Orwellian childhood.
Am I seriously sitting here sobbing?
That’s great that this professor dude thinks he invented the wheel by saying how children learn through captivating and fun teachers, especially when applied to religious studies. A cookie for him for his fucking brilliance.
I’m an adult. Do I seriously not have my shit together right now? That was almost forty years ago. My body feels like I’m back in time, hating my life. I feel the loneliness from hiding the double life and the struggle of maintaining two identities: the religious kid at home who always got in trouble and the academic Canadian kid I tried to be outside the house.
I’m still angry. I feel like I was robbed of a childhood and while I’m forever trying to break the cycle with my kids, it doesn’t undo the weight of loss pushing on my chest. The loss of a nonexistent happy childhood. Hell, I’d settle for mediocre.
My earliest memories include being told that if we had too many sins, we’d go to hell. It’s not a standard hell with fire everywhere and Satan frolicking around with his harpoon. The only foods are berries covered in thorns. The water is boiling hot. You never become immune or numb to the pain. You’re there for thousands and thousands of years.
But God is merciful and everyone eventually gets out of hell when they’ve done their time. I’m not sure about the sentencing rules but I know a single day in hell is the equivalent of a century.
Why the fuck would anyone think to tell that to a child? My parents knew how scared my brother and I were from the Michael Jackson Thriller video we saw in Sears’ TV section. We never gave a vibe that we were tough mercenaries.
It’s all flooding back, all the times we were hit with various weapons like cooking spoons and slippers. I developed a high pain tolerance that I still have to this day, baffling those around me who think I’m a physical anomaly rather than someone who knows how to grit her teeth through the hurt.
Hitting wasn’t what made us cry as much as the rage and intensity my parents had when they struck us. My parents weren’t sources of comfort. They were the rulers who looked terrifying when angry.
I still feel the most comfortable in my bedroom sitting on the floor. I’m not saying it makes me feel at ease. I’m saying it’s comfortable because it’s familiar and the only place I would sit to self-soothe as a kid.
Fuck. I feel so guilty. The look of disappointment in my dad’s eyes because he was excited to share something with me. I rarely see my parents in person and we don’t communicate beyond texting. I’m a total dick.
I’m almost scared by the reaction I’m having right now. It’s not an anxiety attack. It’s the closest thing I’ve had to a panic attack. It feels like every childhood pain I’ve ever experienced was placed in a ball and forced down my throat. Digesting it is opening the raw emotions and I’m reexperiencing them all over again. An entire childhood of hurt and depression exploding through my body. I just want it to stop.
Deep breath.
Tomorrow, I’ll risk opening a can of worms by apologizing to my dad.
Right now, I’ll stream something funny to get me out of this emotional chokehold that’s rendered me immobile (minus my fingers as I type).
Every day is a battle to heal myself and break the cycle of abuse. I feel like a failure because it took a benign moment to undo all that work and render me a sobbing puddle on the floor.
I’m nine years old all over again but the current version of me isn’t as strong as the original, child version of me was. How am I getting weaker, not stronger, with age?