He Said I Was Ugly and Dumb. He Was Right About One Thing.
On holding on when the easy thing is to let go
He asked me three times in fifteen minutes if he was doing a good job.
Hani. Six years old, turning seven in August. I walked into the playroom to check on progress. Zeeves was sitting cross-legged on the floor playing a small brown toy guitar my parents had brought her. Yaana was flipping through her fuzzy rainbow notebook, looking at old drawings. And Hani was grabbing toys and putting them into their baskets, one by one, the only person in the room actually doing the job. I stood in the doorframe. Zeeves -yellow light. Yaana- yellow light. Hani, you’re the only green light in there. And he’d go back in satisfied. That’s who he is at his best - earnest, a little needy in the way I secretly love, the kid who just wants to know he’s doing okay.
By noon he was a different creature entirely.
It started with a nasheed. The girls were singing a song he’d claimed as his own. Qalbi fil madinah. My heart is in Medina. And apparently so was his patience, because he had none left. He came to find me in the living room. My wife had just handed me an iced coffee - her homemade cold brew in a Bodum glass, nutmeg sprinkled over the cold foam, the kind of thing that means a Sunday is supposed to go well - and I’d had about a minute to sit with it, slowly swirling the foam into the coffee, before Hani arrived. My wife was beside me, her own glass balanced precariously on the sofa ledge, already on a call, Hani trying to climb over her to register his complaint.
He didn’t want reassurance this time. He came in hot.
She handed it to me with her eyes. I took over. I tried to redirect, tried to talk it through. He escalated. So I threw him over my shoulder, carried him upstairs, and we wrestled.
This is a thing I do with Hani. Physical energy needs somewhere to go, and if I don’t give it a destination, he finds one on his own. I told him if he could count to ten while I pinned him, he could go back downstairs. He fought back hard. His sisters heard the commotion and came in, which made everything worse, so I locked the door and threw him on the bed.
And then he went somewhere I hadn’t seen before.
There were tears - real ones, the kind that come from somewhere deep and involuntary. But the fury underneath them was something else. He was scratching, kicking, screaming. This was not the child who asked me three times if he was doing a good job. This was a lion cub who had decided that his baba was the enemy, and he was going to communicate that clearly.
I hate you.
I love you.
You’re stupid and you’re ugly and you’re dumb.
That one made me pause. Not because it hurt - I’m a grown man, I can absorb words from a six-year-old. What stopped me was the question underneath: where did he learn that this was the right thing to say in this moment? How did he know that ugly and dumb were the words you reach for when you want to wound someone you love?
And then a scratch. A small one, on my forearm. And something happened.
I was in the back of a living room in Kansas City. My phuphoo’s apartment. My dad’s sister’s place. I don’t remember what I’d done - I remember the feeling. I was eight years old and I wanted to run, and I couldn’t run, and I was flailing my limbs at a man who was just holding me. Pinning me down. Not laughing. Not angry. Just holding me until whatever it was passed through.
I came back when I felt the scratch.
Here’s what I understood in that moment, looking at my son: I had done this. I had been this exact child in this exact state, convinced that my father was the enemy, and my father had just held on. He hadn’t taken the bait. He hadn’t matched my fury with his. He had absorbed it. And I was looking at a six-year-old who needed the same thing.
I’m beautiful on the inside, I told him. And I know I’m smart because I know what my son needs right now.
He threw a pillow. Then a towel. Then he reached for the mason jar on my wife’s bedside table.
I let him throw the pillow and the towel. The mason jar was different - I drew the line there, quietly, and he knew I meant it. He made a run for the door. I blocked it. He knocked over the Dieffenbachia (basically a bamboo like tree with big leaves) - the one my wife had just repotted, the one that had lost most of its leaves over winter and was slowly, carefully trying to grow back. Soil went everywhere. He looked at me with those eyes. The ones that say: what are you going to do about it?
He wasn’t going to leave until that room was clean.
Then I looked at him properly. His face was flushed. He’d been sobbing so hard for so long that he had no tears left - just the ragged breathing and the red cheeks and that particular exhaustion that lives just underneath rage. I filled the mason jar and held it out.
He told me he didn’t want water.
I told him I was going to let go of it anyway.
He watched the jar start to tilt, grabbed it, then looked at me. Baba, can you give it to me please. Fine. I gave him a sip. He said that’s enough. I said it wasn’t, not after crying that long. He considered this, then drank almost half the jar, and somewhere in there his breathing changed.
I told him about something from Islam. If you’re standing and you’re angry, drink water and sit down. If you’re sitting and you’re still angry, lie down. Let your body change what your mind can’t. And the reason, I told him, is that when we have too much energy and nowhere to put it, there’s a little squirrel that gets loose inside the rocket ship and starts pressing buttons at random.
He laughed. Not a big laugh. A small one, surprised out of him.
Baba, I need a hug.
I know, baby. Come here.
We sat at the edge of the bed for a few minutes. Then I asked him: vacuum and fix the room, or shower, change, and fix it after? He chose the shower. I vacuumed up the soil while he was in there - the Dieffenbachia back in its pot, still intact, still trying - and when he came out smelling like Herbal Essences shampoo from Costco, we fixed the room together. By 12:15 he was in the car with his sisters, heading to his grandparents’ house, asking about lunch.
I thought about my dad the whole drive back.
When I dropped the kids off, I mentioned to him that I’d been writing. That I write about his mindset sometimes. He smiled. Not a big smile. Just a quiet one, the kind that means something landed without needing to be said out loud.
My son called me ugly and dumb. He was wrong about ugly. And the dumb part - I don’t know. I still do some stupid things. But that afternoon, holding on while he threw everything he had at me, I think I got close to understanding what a good father actually looks like.
It looks a lot like my dad in a Kansas City living room. Holding on. Not matching it. Just staying.
He smiled when I told him I’d been writing about him.
That’s enough for me.