The Path of Responsibility Through Forgiveness

Most of my life I was driven by a lot of fear and scarcity. Even though I was born and raised here in America, I was brought up by immigrant parents. They taught me to fly under the radar. Just do enough to get by and earn a good living but not too much where you draw attention to yourself. I learned from my family that life is dangerous being a religious minority, survival was our aim. Being immigrants from India, my parents saw the tremendous opportunity that America had to offer, but they were also terrified of the culture that was foreign to everything that they knew.

I remember being mostly raised by my paternal grandmother. She would wake us up early to memorize the Quran and learn about Islam. I specifically remember one weekend where I had such a hard time memorizing this one page and I spent all day on it and it still wouldn’t click. I was looking forward to watching this TV show that Saturday evening and my grandmother told me that if I didn’t finish my task, no TV. And for the life of me, I just couldn’t do it. From moments like this and others I started to resent my grandmother and Islam/Allah as well.

My mom’s message was that if you did good then life would turn out OK. For her, doing good meant finishing high school, going to college, getting a good job, getting married and having children. I followed that plan, and really didn’t find a whole lot of satisfaction or happiness from that.

After getting divorced my focus was my daughter. Around the time when my daughter was about to graduate from high school a friend told me about the Wright Foundation and the work that it does to dig into our emotions and blocks in our lives that prevent us from being the best that we can be. I initially said heck no, emotions; those are for women. But I also realized that something was missing from my life and I did their introduction weekend and was blown away. I realized then how lonely I was and that I didn’t want to live that way anymore.

For me forgiveness has always been a loaded word. What does it mean to forgive? And there was a part of me that felt like if I forgave, then it was like the pain and hurt didn’t happen or that they were justified. The first step in forgiving for me was, that to do so, I needed to have the capacity to indict. You see I felt guilty for resenting my grandmother, for resenting my mom and for resenting Allah. As I started expressing my anger toward them, I started to heal. Since my grandmother had passed, it was learning about her. I learned how she was an orphan. How her husband used to beat her. How she lost 2 of her children to typhoid and that my dad became the focus of all her hopes and dreams. And that when I was born how that translated to me, and she wanted a lot for me. I also learned that my thirst for spirituality came from her. It didn’t make my pain go away or justify what she did, but I came to understand who she was.

With my mom I started to see how I would ask for her advice and then blame her when things didn’t go right. She was a convenient excuse versus taking on responsibility for my own life. Another part that helped with her,

was that forgiving her only meant that I gave up the right to indict her. I still owned my pain, and my pain was beautiful. Ultimately with Allah, it came with expressing anger to Allah and realizing that I actually felt abandoned by Him and in turn abandoned Him. Forgiveness started with forgiving myself for creating distance with Him and moving towards creating a greater relationship with Him. That comes with Zikr, or focused mediation in remembering God. In doing Interfaith work and connecting with all of God’s children. And sharing my story so that it may help ease the pain of others that are going through the same thing.