I haven't blogged in a while. I just don't have time for it anymore. Alhamdulillah, its a good thing really because my days are full to bursting with activities that are a more valuable use of my time. But today I feel so compelled to just write. Normally I have the ability to internalize issues and deal with them without the womanly need to "vent" or share," but not today. Yesterday my stepmother called me. This is something that never happens. I wasnt at home when she called so she left me a message. She sounded upset and she told me not to worry but she needed to talk to me about my dad. Immediately a flood of thoughts went through my mind. He's dead. He has cancer. He had a heart attack. Something awful. So I called back and my stepbrother answered the phone. We rarely keep in touch except his recent and rather random facebook "hello" to me. He told me the cops stopped my dad in the middle of the night last night (so at the time of today's post that was two nights ago) over an hour from home in Tinley Park driving erratically with a an open car of beer in his hand and a loaded gun on the passenger's seat. Now, my dad is no dead-beat drunkard. Hes an extremely intelligent lawyer who can talk his way out of anything. He also used to be a cop. So to his advantage he carries around his old police badge to get out himself out of situations like this scott-free. The cops let him go and just followed him home to make sure he got home okay. Well at this point my stepmother and uncle were at the police station in Whiting, where they live. My stepmother was wigged out because he had been gone all night. This isnt the first time hes been out during the night, been pulled over with an open alcoholic beverage, nor are guns any stranger to him (he's an indiana man who used to be a cop and at one point worked for the DEA). but this time she had just had enough. she wanted outside intervention. my dad has been a heavy drinker for years, but his alcohol tolerance is so high he never gets drunk. he used to drink abou 14 beers a night and wouldnt be drunk. i guess you could call that an alcoholic. he was never violent and has never been. hes never abused his wife or any of his children. he held is his job as a successful lawyer for many years. his family has been well known in the small town of Whiting, Indiana for years. then his back got messed up. he started having some seriously painful surgeries done on his back which required a prescription for pain meds. around the same time he also started taking prescription sleeping pills. like i said he's a slick talker and somehow hes managed to get his meds refilled waaaay more often then normal. for over 4 years hes been popping this pills until hes doped up out of his mind, then he takes the sleeping pills and drinks. his firm let him go bc of his erratic behavior (sometimes sober sometimes not) so he was at home all day. he had a few clients of his own but he lost many of them due to his inability to function. when hes sober hes still smart as a whip, but i remember from my highschool years when i used to live their part of the time that he would be out of it at night, too doped up to plug an electrical cord into an outlet. we used to think it was funny. but he was normal during the day. at that time he still had his job. i went away to school and we grew more distant then we already were. i had always lived the majority of the time with my mom and was the only biological child from his former marriage to her. i was relieved to be living my own life at college, free from any internal feelings of anger or hurt related to my dad. it always hurt that he never called, but i was enjoying myself too much to really care. then when i got married and had a child i felt this urge to reconnect. i started calling him on a semi regular basis. i was suprised that the man who normally hated answering the phone would talk my ear off. he would generally tell me the same stories over and over but i figured this was due to a bad memory. i wrote him a letter about how hurt i was that he had alwasy been so detached and distant from me, something i would never have the courage to say face to face. he wrote back about how he had sacrificed his dream job withe the DEA so that i could have a stable life. there werent really any negative vibes, but that was the conversation in a nutshell. i guess that one act of heroism, to him, shoudlve been enough to make up for any lacking on his part that had occurred over the years. i felt good though to get it off my chest. I was an adult now and i wanted to say what i had to say and move on. since then we would talk on and off and i would occassionally visit. i always had guilty feelings like i wasnt doing enough to be a dutiful daugther. i knew how much his wife and biological children disrespected him. he was out of work at home, drinking, and addicted to painkillers. they saw him as a failure and i guess he saw himself as one too. in recent months when we talked on the phone he would tell me how he barely drank and how he was getting of the meds and how good it felt. i naively believed every word of it. little did i know that his alcoholism and drug abuse were at an all-time high. my half brother and half sister and i didnt talk very much and i never talked to my stepmom so i never heard any details about it from anyone else until this phone call. one of the meds hes on totally diminishes his testosterone. he takes methyltestosterone to replace it which is a steroid. according to my stepmother he started having points where he would suddenly becoming very angry and verbally abusive which were very out of character for him. he also took a recent fascination in the guns hes had for years. bc he gets so messed up and has black outs she felt scared that he had these guns out with her two teenage kids around. the tinley park episode was the straw that broke the camel's back. my uncle, my father's brother, had been trying to encourage my dad to go to rehab but my dad always denied he had a problem. he took my stepmother to get a court order which allowed the police to come and take him to the psych ward at the nearb hopsital where he would be detoxed, so thats what they did. my stepmother took my half brother and half sister out of the house while the cops came and finally convinced my dad to go peaceably with them to the hospital where he will be for the next 7 days to undergo detox. after he was gone she and her two adult sons went through his belongings and found 30 loaded guns and about 10,000 bullets. when i heard all this i was suprised but i wasn't. thinking back to how messed up hes been on so many occasions im not suprised that it got this bad. but then again i am suprised because i thought he was getting clean because that was what he told me. more than anything ive realized that ive had such a naive, childlike view of my father. he was daddy, the successful super-smart lawyer. sure he was kinda odd in some ways but i was proud of that oddness. i was proud that i shot a colt python for the first time off our back porch when i was six years old. i was proud that he painted the street light black because it shone too brightly into the house and the mayor could kiss his a** if he didnt like it. that was my dad when he was sober, imagine that. and i loved him for it. this whole thing has somehow deflated this ficticious "my dad can do no wrong" bubble that has been floating around my head for 23 years. now i see a helpless old man. a man thats been messed up for so long and who just cant accept it. hes been talking a lot lately about how much he wished he had taken that job in the DEA, it was what he wanted so much in life-to go undercover in South America and bust the biggest drug lords of the day. But now he's just a man whose life has passed him by and theres nothing about it anymore that makes it all worth while. and then add to that that hes not Muslim. how empty would you feel inside if you werent muslim? at 50 something years of age, how happy would you be? your golden years are gone. you're a joke to your wife and kids. your brother keeps hassling you to get clean but drinking and being doped are something that you feel you cant physically live without. i dont know how much of his addiction is an attempt to mask feelings of emptiness and sadness but id imagine some it has to be. my stepmother is packing his bags and changing the locks. his brother has volunteered to take him to rehab if they release him after seven days and his mother has volunteered to let him live with her. i'm going to visit him tonight inshallah. its feels weird going after having this change of thought and heart. i feel so sorry for him, like i want to take care of him and be there for him when his wife has left him and his other kids are too angry to look at him. more than anything i want to have an HONEST conversation, something we may have never really had. i want to look him in the eye and say "Dad, what are you living for? Whats the purpose of your life?" I also want to give him a copy of the Quran and tell him to read it. For some reason i feel like ive lost the inhibitions that prevented me from really talking about these topics with him before. I was so afraid he would just outargue me or reject what i had to say. Now i dont really are anymore what he says or does. because he needs to hear it. Please make dua' for me that Allah makes my heart firm and guides my dad. Part of me is afraid i wont say or do the perfect thing but at least ill try. | 
