Step-Parenting: When the Sources Go Silent

When I reverted to Islam, I embraced all of it, knowing that God would guide me wherever I went. Every time something new would present itself, I went to the sources and would find answers. Through the life of the Prophet, pbuh, we know that there is an Islamic way to do everything.

And then, I became a step-parent and looked for answer and… nothing?? Try Googling raising step-children in Islam. If the state of the Internet is the same when you do that as when I did, you’ll find two things:

1. “you don’t have to”, as in, you don’t have to raise them and care for them.

2. It’s Sunnah to do so, meaning that it is a rewarding act in the eyes of God. But then nothing on how to.

Listen: I understand that in Islam, we all have rights. And since Islam is for all people for all time, it’s not hard to understand marriage situations where a woman might need protection from being forced to raise a child that is not hers. I support that 100%.

But that’s not me. That’s not my situation.

When I married my husband, I knew he had children. Where he’s from, divorcees rarely get remarried. Divorcees with kids, even worst. They are often shamed, judged, considered leftovers. Very anti-islamic, but that’s for another day. What I mean is: if I didn’t want his kids, I wouldn’t have married him. I wouldn’t have come between a father and his children.

The way some women dream of being pregnant, I also imagined having adopted or foster kids, or marrying someone with children. I understand whoever wants to make them, as well as I understand people who tell me I don’t know what it’s like to make them, that I’m missing out, that it’s not the same. Maybe it isn’t. The truth is that we will never know, neither I nor these people. Because we are not each other and nobody can try on two different lives to compare.

I only know I chose my life and it suits me. I know I was excited to meet these two beautiful wild spirits, to get to know them and to co-create our lives together. I wanted to do this right, and since all right things can be found in Islam, I went into research mode. Imagine my distress when I found a big nothing. And so I wrote to my local mosque. They said “Islam has nothing to say about raising step-children. It’s more a thing for modern psychology”. Thank God my faith was strong that day, because so many things in that answer were wrong and painful to read.

Nonetheless I continued. If it’s Sunnah, then what does that mean to do it right? There is nothing that escapes the power of God. Science is just another language of God, a Book for us to read to witness His attributes and get to know Him. So I focused on that, but still felt ungrounded in the Truth. There are too many contradictory opinions and research on the topic. Kids learn by seeing and so my main concern was how to represent meeting their father, getting to know each other, moving in, while promoting Islam in a world saturated with dating culture.

Sound Advice

After all of these failures, two things really helped.

Reframing Family

I wrote to an imam who had been helpful when I reverted. We had exchanged one email in 2 years and I know he receives a crazy amount of requests. I always feel like I’ll bug him. But it was an emergency and so I wrote. I will share part of his answer here:

I will always be grateful for being invited to care for these children by God. Reading this email still gets me emotional. I think I was feeling out of place and I needed validation and encouragement. May God reward this imam and his kind words of truth for soothing my soul.

Centering Children’s Feelings

I found a counsellor through a community organization. I was stressed, anxious, scared of doing this wrong. I felt I had nothing to lose. This was a moment of vulnerability for me. I felt the weight of being a good example for these children I didn’t know. I grew up an atheist child, surrounded by adults powered by corrupted religious beliefs or thinking that religion was just a beautiful story. I felt lost and under pressure until this counsellor reminded me of this story (hadith).

He said: do you know this hadith? I said yes, but remind me. He went on to talk about it and to link it back to our topic. I like this hadith, he said. I think it is so beautiful that a leader of a whole nation stops in his track and prioritizes the feelings of a child for a dead bird. He does’’t say “I don’t have time”, or “it’s just a bird”. He listens, asks questions, gives space for that child to process what has happened though he knows.

This helped me see which pieces of science to chose from. Coming from the West means coming from a culture of divorce. Something in that advice helped me understand that I wasn’t starting from scratch and that I could trust my intuition much more than I thought. I was afraid to mess it up and that was normal.

My Own Personal Experience

It was hard to choose how to approach my husband’s children with the notion he had met someone new and decided to get married. With a mother on the other side who was absolutely resolute to make this as hard as possible, this was an intense uphill battle. It still is to this day, over a year later. Then and now, we decided to do our best, to show up with good intentions and to pray for good outcomes.

My husband took the children, then aged 8 and 10, to a place they liked. We had prepared a short list of key points we wanted him to cover. Most of it was questions we knew the children would have and we wanted to answer them right away to start a conversation. Our goal was for this moment to not turn out into a monologue. Our youngest was especially eager to know things: am I thin or fat, what colour is my hair, what’s my job. According to my husband, that conversation went pretty well. They were curious and that felt like an invitation.

I decided to approach them like a wild animal I was trying to befriend. I came home after they had been there a while with their dad. I said hi and then proceeded to unpack a lot of great treats on the kitchen counter. Food. Food is a great first impression on all humans. This opened them up and my heart was just pouring out. I was trying to give them space but they kept on coming to me: look at this, let’s play this, let’s do that. We approached this moment as a moment of celebration for them: you can eat whatever you want. What do you want to do? They wanted to go into a big indoor playground and they invited me. I ran and went down slides and crawled and it was great. They were supposed to sleep at their mother that night, but they begged to stay with us because they were having too much fun.

Tough times came but this first encounter carried us through. My Lord gave me these fantastic humans to care for as part of a key-turn family package with my husband. I know that on days where they want nothing to do with me, on days they are angry, they are struggling. It must be hard to want to love someone who loves you, but to have a parent you trust the most on the other side trying to convince you everything you see and feel is wrong. We would call this gaslighting in other context. Whatever you call it, it is a form of violence my children experience every day.

I was myself raised in a violent family context myself and all I wanted was a space to take a break from it all. There is so much we can’t control, but we can control our reactions and what we make as a home for them.

So if you are considering taking on a spouse with children, I encourage you. If you have taken a spouse with children, I admire you. Having children is never easy and we never choose how we are tested. Children need our protection, and making them your own and loving them for the sake of Allah is an infinite source of rewards. I encourage you to take a breath when things get hard, to remember that with hardship comes ease. I invite you to make room for big feelings when they come, and to pray for clarity on how to best support them. Pray. Always pray. You got this because God’s got you.