A friend of mine who is a fellow homeschooling Muslim mom was facing a dilemma recently that she shared with me. She’s a mom of 5 young kids mashaAllah, ranging from the age of ten to the age of two.
Her younger sister, a somewhat troubled young woman who is 22 years old, sought her help. She asked to live with her older married sister for a year while she went to a nursing program in her state. The 22-year-old sister had a history of dealing with depression and anxiety, which she self-medicated from by smoking weed and vaping all through high school and beyond (she dropped out of college).
The 22-year-old was desperately trying to get away from her parents, whom she saw as controlling and difficult. She wanted to move out and live in a different state and get a basic nursing degree, and the only acceptable way for her to achieve that was to live with her older sister and her family. This was the only way the elderly parents would not be consumed with worry about their youngest daughter living far away from them, if she lived with her sister’s family and not on her own.
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My friend, the married mom of five, consulted her husband and then allowed her younger sister to live with them. The only condition was: no drugs. No weed and no vaping. Young kids and drugs don’t mix.
The 22-year-old agreed readily and said that she quit everything.
After about three months of this living arrangement, the older sister, much to her shock and anger, discovered her 6-year-old daughter playing with an old vape pen that had fallen under her 22-year-old sister’s bed. The 6-year-old had found it and was holding it, then put it in her mouth.
The mother quickly took the offending apparatus from her young daughter and threw it away. But she felt angry and anxious, seeing her young child touched by her sister’s drug issue.
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She talked to her sister about the absolute importance of staying clean and of not bringing anything harmful into a house filled with young children. The 22-year-old apologized and explained that it was one of her old discarded vape pens that must have slipped under her bed from when she was still vaping. She had quit already, and she was going to make sure any old stuff was gone. The older sister reiterated again over the course of this discussion that she didn’t ask for much, but the number-one rule of her staying in the house was no drugs of any kind. This was a red line, non-negotiable. Her younger sister agreed quickly.
But the next day, something even bigger and more disturbing happened: the mom of five found a stash of marijuana that had been sent to her younger sister. It was shipped in the mail, in a package that was received by her ten-year-old son. She was livid.
Enough was enough.
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She confronted her younger sister and asked her about the weed. The sister admitted that she had made a mistake but it was a one-time thing she needed for her anxiety.
“My young children are in danger. The 6-year-old put your vape in her mouth and the 10-year-old was holding your weed in his hands! This living situation is not going to work out,” the older sister told her younger sister.
What would you do?
Kick out your younger 22-year-old sister over the weed to protect your young children? Or allow her to keep living with you and your children to ease the minds of your elderly parents who are worried about their 22-year-old daughter?
You have the wishes of your sister and aging parents on one side, versus the needs of your very young children on the other side.
How would you navigate this situation?
Can the younger sister even live with them in the first place? She’ll have contact with the older sisters husband which is her non-mahram. That may or may not lead to haram interactions and activities. Besides that Islamically who does the older sister have an obligation more to the parents or her children. Even then can’t she kick out the younger sister and send her back to her parents and maybe bring her back when in the future.
Drug addicts are not to be trusted
Keep the younger sister but the elder sister (mom) firmly teaches the kids to hate the evil drugs. This can serve as a kind of training those kids in how to exercise self-discipline, which will be useful for them later in life when they grow up and will be exposed to all kinds of worse things that came from the urban ultra-liberal culture. Unless they live in the Amish-style isolated rural village that I suggested earlier, those kids are going to encounter all kinds of unwanted things anyway like sodomism, feminazism, dating, Zinaa (etc.), so the Islamic mom can start early in “socio-culturally immunizing” the kids from those cultural diseases from an early age, by taking advantage of this opportunity right in her own home, by socio-culturally immunizing her own kids from drugs which are the least potent evil strain or mildest symptom of the ultraliberal virus.