I was going to write about my experience at the War Horse play, but somehow this other topic keeps begging to be dealt with first, so I’m going to go with it.

I’ve been thinking about it since I saw it on Dr. Phil late last week, can’t remember if it was Thursday or Friday.

The show was about this twenty-three year old woman who’d gone from being a beauty pageant queen with a 4.7 grade point average, studying at the university in Berkeley California to being a gaunt, 90 pound drug addict prostituting herself.

Watching her being interviewed by Dr. Phil she kept giving beauty pageant answers, putting on an act. I wonder if that’s what beauty pageants do. They teach little girls to play the part.

The mother was just sad. She kept desperately trying to believe her daughter’s lies, and sabotaging the show’s efforts to help her daughter.

Her daughter was obviously a lot ‘smarter’ than the mother and used to completely manipulating her.

And somehow it kept reminding me of one of my daughters. And that movie Forrest Gump.

In the movie, Forrest Gump is both the stupidest person and the smartest.

Ultimately that movie centres around the central theme of ‘Stupid is as stupid does’.

It’s the phrase that Gump keeps repeating any time someone calls him  stupid. And through what he does, Forrest proves he’s not stupid. His simplicity is smarter than everyone around him.

Long before I ever wrote Wanting Mor where the central theme revolves around the mother’s words: “If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good, people will appreciate it”, I had given birth to my first child whom I still suspect is a LOT smarter than myself.

It’s not that hard. I don’t consider myself that smart (and I’m not spouting any false modesty here, I’m telling it like it is). I’ve done way too many silly things to have any hyped up estimations of my intelligence. (In fact I’ve known a LOT of smart people in my life who’ve ironically come to sad ends.)

Anyway, how does a mother deal with a daughter she suspects is smarter than herself?

The way I dealt with my daughter was that every time she was ‘too clever for her own good’, I sat her down, one-to-one, told her how disappointed I was, how I’d TRUSTED her and how she’d let me down.

[I just thank God she was never near as ‘clever’ as that ex-beauty queen druggie!]

I told her quite simply that it wasn’t that hard to fool me, but that she would never be able to fool God.

And finally I put her guidance in her own hands. It wasn’t my job to make her Muslim. Guidance comes from God. It was only my job to show her the way, then ultimately it was her choice whether she’d take it or not.

I spent years explaining in painstaking detail, why I’d made the choices I’d made. Why I believed the things I did, and then I let her loose in the world to find her way.

Of course there was a risk! But I figured that if she could grow up resisting all the temptations out there, she’d be a heck of a lot stronger Muslim than if she’d been sheltered from them. And since I’d seen a whole LOT of sheltered kids go really bad as soon as the sheltering was removed, I figured better for her to grow up knowing there was wickedness than not.

I resisted the wickedness. Or I should say God protected me from it. I prayed and prayed that God would protect her (and my other children as well)–and He has.

I let her watch shows like Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael and Donahue, where she saw troubled teens making all kinds of mistakes that staying on the straight and narrow, saves you from.

And the words I repeated throughout her growing up?

“It’s good to be clever, but it’s clever to be good.”

It’s very similar to the advice Jameela’s mother gives her in Wanting Mor. It’s a sentence that’s constructed in the same manner (but without the add on): If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good, people will appreciate that.

In the case of all my daughters though, beauty was never an issue. Underneath their niqabs they’re all very handsome, masha Allah. 

But in her case, I was afraid that being too clever could be an issue.

Alhamdu lillah, my very clever daughter grew into a very clever Muslim woman. We have a wonderful relationship. So much so that every time I think of her, I smile.

True, she’s made some choices that I would not have made, but really, she’s just fine.

Watching this very clever drug addict ex beauty queen on Dr. Phil, that’s precisely what I suspect is wrong with her.

She looks at her mother in disdain as stupid and gullible. She thinks that the rules don’t apply to her. Other people lose control over drugs–not her! She’s too smart to lose control. Other people will overdose from them–not her! Don’t all the authorities act the same? Aren’t they all EXAGGERATING the claims against drugs??? They’re just trying to control her, keep her from having a good time. Make her live the life they want so they can brag at the office… etc. etc.

I was not in the least surprised that she fed Dr. Phil all these false assurances and then as soon as she got into the rehab facility she did everything she could to be kicked out.

Yup, too clever for her own good. The rules don’t apply to her. She doesn’t need them.

And during the course of the show someone mentioned that they were pouring $250, 000 worth of resources into this one girl who was doing everything imaginable not to benefit from them, and it reminded me of something my father once said.

Some people had called the house soliciting for the local children’s hospital and my father refused any sort of donation.

My parents are pretty charitable people. I’ve seen them give vast sums of money for worthwhile causes and what was more worthwhile I wondered, than a children’s hospital? So I asked my father why he refused to contribute.

You know what he said?

He said, “These people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to keep some half-formed half-dead kid alive when there are thousands of perfectly healthy kids suffering from neglect and poverty. I’d rather give my money to support a needy healthy child than throw money at one who’s going to suffer or die anyway.”

It was shocking to me at the time.

I even thought it was a little cruel.

I don’t think that any more.

It’s got a certain third world practical wisdom to it.

And I kept wondering why Dr. Phil’s show had chosen this particular girl to help?

I deeply suspect it’s because she’s pretty.

Photogenic. Beauty queen.

Good for T.V. you know.

And it makes me sick to my stomach.

But also grateful that alhamdu lillah, I never had to raise a daughter so determined to destroy herself as that ex-beauty-queen-who’s-too-clever-for-her-own-good.