About a Boy

I'm still writing this sad,  unfinished story, which is about my son Ibrahim who was born in the Mount of Olives to me and my first wife, Aisha.

My son grew up hearing only her complaints about me.

When Ayisha and I split up, she, Ibrahim, and Zooey moved to Napa County with her new boyfriend, Ali, either in the same house or nearby. 

I didn't want Ali supervising my children-I was concerned about both kids' safety.

I was particularly alarmed that Aisha seemed to have tapped him to take my place.  

I figured she just wanted to move on, cut me off, and start up again with someone else.

 One of my presumptions about this was based on the fact that she had already done the same thing with her first husband, Teresa's biological father, by the time I married her in 1979.

When we'd married in 1979, and Teresa was about 8, Teresa immediately took my last name and stopped using the earlier one, which was her birth father's name.  I was honored to be her new stepfather and didn't think much about the rights of her birth father.

One day, the consequences of Ayisha's actions showed up when her ex-husband's mother called our house in Walnut Creek and begged Aisha to allow her some form of contact with her granddaughter.

Ayisha particularly hated it when Grandma had mentioned that Teresa was, "Our own flesh and blood". She spit the phrase out, like the woman was demented to think in such disgustingly biological terms.

Aisha evidently considered her own moral compass the most important factor. After the fact, she assumed total authority to choose her daughter's 'Real' parents.

And had apparently tried to prevent any repeat communications. At least I never heard about the poor woman again, although I felt sorry for her at the time.

Not knowing much about the situation, I assumed that Teresa's father must have been a bad actor for Aisha to cut his family off with such finality.  

All I ever learned about him was that he had cheated on Aisha.  At least, according to her.

As time went on, I never heard anything further about him. Perhaps he had just lost interest in his biological daughter, or perhaps Aisha had made it impossible for Teresa to be found.

 In any case, Aisha wanted to forget the whole episode and never told me about it again. 

 Little did I realize that I might be subjected to the same treatment one day when Aisha had reason to be done with me.

I noticed my daughter's last name was changed.

Twenty years later, I was shocked to see my daughter Zooey's drawings on Aisha's refrigerator, showing that Aisha had changed Zooey's last name to her mother's new last name, Al-Jamal."

This change was not legal, and I was not informed about it. 

Nonetheless, it was included in her school records, followed her for the rest of her life - even onto her first passport! 

This was typical of Aisha's not-so-subtle rejection of my role as a father.  

More generally, her defiance of the culturally established norms in favor of her own imperious attempts to re-create the outside world into one more acceptable to her Separate Reality.

During her overnight visitations in the early days after the divorce, Zooey would catch me up on what was being said.  

I would hear things like, "They say you're a father, but you don't act like a father." Or, "They say we have to choose between you and her, but I don't believe them!"

I could barely believe it had been put to the kids THAT starkly myself! But she insisted it had!

After Aisha announced her divorce, she gathered the children every night in one of their rooms and slept with both of them. I could understand this for Zoe, who was so little, but why include Ibrahim, who was so much older? 

Aisha seemed to be drawing comfort inappropriately from the children for her own emotional wounds. But unfortunately, in so doing, she was making them co-signers to her 'victimhood.' 

I had heard from Teresa that Ibrahim sometimes woke up screaming at night.

At the earliest visitations, Ibrahim seemed anxious to have everything I had and be like me. As the years passed, however, he began to avoid visitations, especially those involving my new girlfriend, Marilyn.

So he stopped showing up for visitations, and he definitely refused to be present at my second marriage, which took place in the year 2000.

I mostly visited my son at his mom's house, where he was often sullen and withdrawn. He was interested mainly in playing computer games or perhaps distracting himself with them. 

I rarely got him to go anywhere with me, except for day trips. 

I went to Southern California twice with his sister Zoe to visit Disneyland and other amusement parks, but he refused to go both times without explanation. 

It was incomprehensible to me why he wanted to stay home when everyone else was enjoying a vacation at California's Disneyland.

Another time, I took him skiing and was planning to spend the night at a fun, youth-friendly lodge in the Sierras.

I was sadly disappointed when he began to tearfully beg to go home because he missed his mother and Zoe too much. I begged him to give it a try because it would be a long drive for me to drive him back to his mom's and then back to my home after a full day of skiing.

 Nonetheless, I gave in. As time went on, I struggled to maintain my relationship with him. I also got busy with my second wife, her extended family, and my own work.  

It's only now, late in life and looking back, that I wish I had reached out to him more.

(And I don't recall that he reached out to me very often at any point.  Certainly not in recent memory.  But I attribute this mostly to the upside-down world he lived in as a child of mother who was hostile to her former spouse and judgemental towards him, and most everyone else, to excess.)

Ibrahim did get a job in the DMV's computer section. He was one of the youngest employees ever, and he quickly moved up in the agency because he was very clever in the computer department.  

He also began what looked like an intimate relationship with an age-appropriate person. Although he didn't include me in his life, I hoped that he would find a way to get along without a father.

Alas, he was snagged by the demon of addiction and has struggled with it ever since.

Also, he had become friends with one of Sidi's relatives, who introduced him to someone involved with crime. The specific intention was to' help' Ibrahim earn 'extra money' by cutting some legal corners through the use of the DMV computer.

So, he then had both an addiction problem and a crime problem. I vouched for this fellow on his visa application, not realizing that he would introduce my son to the world of organized crime.

The agency knew he was doing something, but they apparently didn't have enough evidence to charge him. They did let him go, revoke his pension, and make him sign a promise never to work for the State of California again.

It was a very sad ending to a position he had been proud of. 

We'd managed to resuscitate our relationship a bit in his mid-twenties.  He'd dropped his bitterness towards me, it seemed.  Being out in the world working, he perhaps realized that his parents could be respected.  

He tried his best to let me have my views of what happened between his mom and me.  He didn't demand I shut up about it all.  However, I was still careful not to go into too many details about the 'Ali Period'.

I didn't want to run his mom down, either.  As much as I tried to tell him 'my side', I knew how much the divorce must have hurt him, how he must have felt terrible about it, and so buried my anger and pain, or tried to.

So, he started working as a freelance IT person.  Living most of the time at his mom's house In Sonoma County. 

One day, apparently, he had sounded like he was suicidal to a girlfriend who was visiting him there. Enough so that she called the local police for an intervention.

Unfortunately, he was one of those boys who was fascinated with explosives. (Like I was.  I couldn't WAIT for the Forth of July when I was growing up, and the sudden access to all kinds of fireworks. Some of which could be rigged to blow up midway!)

He'd taken it one step further and bought chemicals on the Internet to turn into explosives. Though he had apparently grown out of that phase, he'd nonetheless not disposed of the chemicals.

When the police arrived, they were given permission by someone who was staying at the house to search it. When they found the explosives, all hell broke loose.

Mainly because the house was associated with Aisha's Sufi publishing enterprise and half the two-car garage was filled with her books, and the home was filled with Islamic artwork.

The police department reacted by calling in the FBI.  The neighborhood was evacuated several times, and the bomb squad was called in with a special mobile incinerator, where the explosives were detonated.

 It might have been something he'd been given a slap on the wrist for, but since the arresting officers, including their observation of Islamic symbols and books, there was a connection made between explosives and terrorism. So his bail was put at $1 million.

At this point, Ayesha's standoffish attitude towards me vanished, and she welcomed my assistance.

Our lawyer suggested that due to all the publicity that had been generated, the case might reach a more satisfactory outcome if we chilled out for a few months.

Ibrahim's bail was so high--I would have committed to losing at least $50,000 if I were to engage a bail bondsman--, and his behavior was so unpredictable and distorted by addiction that I couldn't convince myself to spring for him.

The result was that he sat in the county jail for eight months and had to detox from a major benzodiazepine addition down to 5mg of Valium in one session. The result was that he was pretty crazy for quite a few weeks.

He heard Obama making fun of him on the TV, and was convinced the jail was being bombed by some nefarious secret force at night. My poor boy!

Though the underlying opportunity was sad, it allowed Ayesha and me to be on the same team for a moment. We would greet each other warmly and talk together as we waited to visit him in his cell.

Having a relative in jail is the WORST! Fortunately, he got to stay in a county jail, which is generally nicer than State Penitentiaries.  

He got his own room most of the time. And we didn't live too far away. But so many visitations were canceled because of inmates acting out and all the families being sent home.  And then to only have 15-30 minutes of visiting time.

The affair drew us closer as a father and son than we had been since the divorce.  I sent him books by my favorite SciFi writer, Phillip K Dick, which he LOVED.   

I wrote him long letters trying to cheer him up and citing my own experiences in Alcoholics Anonymous as an indication of the freedom he could have from substance addiction once he got out.

He wrote me very sweet and humorous letters about his experiences inside. Admiring women inmates in the facility evidently (incorrectly) saw him as some criminal mastermind. They stuffed notes with their phone numbers in his door when they had their periodic recreational run of the place and gratefully praised me for not giving up on him.

The lawyer was right. By the time his case came around, it was clear he had no connection to international terrorism, and they let him off relatively easily.

When he got out, he lived with me for 6-7 years. I helped him get a wonderful job at a local foundation. We didn't have quite the warm relationship I would have liked—he kept to himself a lot—but I reasoned that at least he was getting ahead in the world, and we could have a more intimate relationship at some point in the future.

We went on one trip together to Death Valley, and another to the airplane graveyard in Mojave, Ca.

 We also, at one point, used drugs together. (After 17 years sober, I had lost my own sobriety because my second wife was a victim of Early Onset Alzheimers and had died after 4 years of decline).

I had not paid enough attention to my sobriety--had gotten lazy--and could not face the changes going on with my dying wife without chemicals.  

Or so I thought.  It was a horrible mistake.

It would take me YEARS and the loss of my gallbladder and developing chronic pancreatitis to spur on my second, and hopefully my last, major battle with alcoholism.  This one required many hospitalizations and 2 30-day rehabs.

Sometimes, he was the sober one of us and had to drive me to and visit me at rehabilitation centers.  It was a sad but real basis for connection to each other.

Almost imperceptibly, perhaps after a failed relationship with someone who was age-appropriate, for a change, I believe the pull of his mom, and he began to drift away from me again and began to live with his mother, largely giving up communications with me. 

 A few years later he told me he had lost his job and had a dramatic relapse requiring three weeks of hospitalization. I heard almost nothing from him for months, and then only a sentence here or there.

He took it upon himself to criticize my almost daily frantic emails and seemingly wanted to portray me as the instigator of all his problems. 

I feel like he was programmed to see me as a dangerous, hurtful person at any early age, and he couldn't discharge it.. My constant writing and phone calls only put him on edge.

So, in accordance with the advice of so many others, I had to dial back my worries about him and try to take care of myself.

But in his case, as with my other two children, the lack of forgiveness and some amount of appropriate communication between their parents has reduced their embrace of both parents. And I can't blame them for that.

I so miss losing the little boy I used to fly kites and talk about rockets and space with.  He says he is sober today, and he celebrates the fact that he did it without my help.

I celebrate that he did however he did--although his commitment to honesty is less than 100% and I don't realistically know if he is sober or not. 

My sense is that as a child, he felt fearful that his mother might reject HIM the same way she did ME unless he towed the line and forgot about me like she evidently wanted him to.

I greatly fear for his life. But I also hear from others that he seems much better, so I'm trying to allow him his own path.

Our relationship was so damaged by so many factors, my alcoholism (now in remission for 8 years), his drug use, and his mother's desire to cut me out, that I guess it's hard for him to find the pieces to put it back together again.

However, I'm very aware that his attachment to his mother is co-dependent and limiting. I fear may have given up on the wider world and committed himself to being a child in his mother's house forever -- as if such a thing were possible..

It's well known that sometimes children of problematic parents DELIBERATELY sabotage their lives so as not to 'abandon' their damaged elders. 

It's his excuse not to have all of life's bounty. He's always been like that. 

Not joining the rest of us on family trips so his mom didn't get left behind--even though SHE left ME behind!  It's not fair or healthy, but there it is.

My son got alcoholism from me and co-dependence from his Mom.

At least I have learned that I can't have a relationship with him unless he wants one. So, in the meantime, I will have to remember with pleasure that lovely trip to Death Valley we took together!

Next trip--The Museums and Amusement Parks of Southern California my parents took me to as a boy! And DEFINITELY stops at LaBrea Tar Pits and Venice Beach!

Oh, and I almost forgot my all-time favorite--Griffith Park Observatory--where my early days in Southern California, the Hollywood dream machine, and the dreams of space and the infinite future meet! 

It would be nice to have a few memories like that before its time to take that Final Journey that awaits us all!

Race you to the top of the building, Son!!