How Parenthood Can Break the Ego: A Father’s Reflection on Spiritual Growth

Two taps of the finger. The screen lit up. 2:32 a.m., read my reddish, sleep-deprived eyes. Just then, I felt the weight on my shoulder increase. Could it be true? Had this baby fallen asleep?

For the last hour and forty-seven minutes, I had been holding my daughter. My right arm supported her from below. My chest felt the warmth of her frail body pressed against it. My left hand alternated between cradling her neck and gently patting her back. My legs could barely stand, having walked all over our one-bedroom apartment in the vain hope that my own body’s movement would soothe her and induce sleep—so I could get some sleep. She had woken up crying hysterically, for reasons known only to Allah. After I picked her up and carried her out of the bedroom, her weeping gave way—after twelve torturous minutes—to hiccupping sobs and teary-eyed stares at the objects in the dimly lit lounge. The sobs had stopped a while ago, as had the movements of her head, and so the new heaviness on my shoulder could very well mean that tonight’s test had passed.

Treading carefully, I navigated my way between baby toys and strewn cushions toward the bedroom. To put her down before confirming her sleep would be to waste the entire effort. But how could I check? The mirror, of course. I opened the closet door and stood before it. For a split second, the world stopped moving. Then, slowly, I turned my shoulders. Through the mirror, a pair of shining black eyes looked straight into mine. “Hi Baba,” they seemed to say, “I’m still awake.” 

Ya Allah, a sigh escaped my heart, please put this baby to sleep.

***

Of all the things that entered our life with a baby, a crisis of confidence was the least expected and the most troubling. And not because we lacked information. If anything, we had too much of it. YouTube. Family. Friends with kids. Friends without kids. ChatGPT. Everyone seemed to know a lot about babies.

Take a crying baby. We were told it might need feeding. Or burping. Or a diaper change. Or holding. But what of the wailing when all these conditions were met? In such moments, which recurred with surprising frequency throughout the day—and night—certitude was broken. Confidence was shaken. 

Strange thoughts fill your heart. Meanwhile, you make foolish faces and silly sounds. You walk the baby around. As the cries grow louder, your heart beats faster.

Maybe I should wake up her mother, you think in desperation. But she needs rest! replies the functioning part of your brain. How in the world did I become so uncertain of myself? you wonder.

Parenting, you realize, is breaking the fiery monster inside you—your ego. Therein lies the potential: Will you surrender? 

***

Childbirth is a wrenching experience. As we evolve from women and men to mothers and fathers, we set foot on an arduous road trodden by millions of Muslim men and women before us. Every couple’s anxiety and pain, smiles and joys, are unique. But some elements appear shared across time and space.

The mother’s womb feels the kicking of the baby. There is morning sickness. Cramps. Exhaustion. Mood swings. The fear of what is to come. The thrill of what is to come. And, eventually, the agonizing pangs of labor. 

The father’s body feels something too. There is sweat on his brow as the delivery draws near. A helplessness grips him, as the woman he loves goes through the most physically excruciating moment of her life and the greatest pain that a human body can bear. Yet he knows that he can do nothing. He knows, too, that the responsibility is partly his, but the pain is hers. It’s a strange feeling, breeding its own emotional toll. If he’s in the labor room, he knows not what to do. But perhaps, as was and continues to be common in many societies, he is forbidden from entering the birth chamber. Either way, he prays in the dark, beseeching Allah for ease for his wife, for the coming of the child.

Therein lies the mysterious agency of the unborn baby. It can bring both the mother and the father to their knees, literally. Parenting, even before the coming of the child, reveals a fact that we all know but often forget: Ultimately, we are not in control. Allah controls everything. Wa-huwa ʿala kulli shayin qadir. And He is capable of all things.

Pregnancy and childbirth thus mark the beginning of an epic emotional roller coaster. In the thrills and tribulations that follow the entry of a child in the parents’ lives, one experience might be the hardest: witnessing your child fall sick. 

It is soul-crushing to watch a normally laughing, babbling, chatting, weeping baby operate on low battery. The noise becomes muted, the movements are dulled, and a terrible feeling grips the atmosphere. You rush to the doctor. You buy the medicine. You feed her the medicine—a Herculean task given every child’s innate tendency to throw up any orally injected medicine. But the child is still unable to sleep. She lies curled up in your arms, neither asleep nor fully awake. Medications, like everything else in life, work on Allah’s time.

So we have to wait, helplessly. In those moments, we establish an affinity with the parents who came before us—with our own parents, who tended to us when we were ill, but also with all the parents across history who have tended with love and care for the children who became our ancestors. As our arms cradle the child, as our knees bend while rocking the baby, as our hands are raised in supplication, our limbs imitate the bodily movements of our forebears. Most of these figures have been forgotten in the annals of history. Traces, however, survive.

***

In a small library in Rawalpindi lies a dusty manuscript. It was copied 169 years ago by a scribe who noted the year but not his name. The manuscript is a commentary on the Gulistan of Saʿdi (d. 1291). Across the premodern Muslim world, the Gulistan was arguably the single most widely read book after the Qur’an. In South Asia, it became a manual on the eloquent use of language and proper social behavior. But these were not the only topics elaborated in its commentaries, as this copy reveals. 

The commentator gives the following gloss on two names of God, Ghafur and Rahim: “The first [Ghafur] is the exaggerated form of ghafir which means excessively forgiving; and the second [Raḥīm] is the exaggerated form of rāḥim which means excessively merciful.” Straightforward commentary, but our commentator does not stop there: “I am reminded of a day when I was in the service of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Rahim . . . in the last part of the night, as per his old habit, he awoke, made wuzu, and got busy in the remembrance of God. And this lowly one . . . busied himself with recitation of the Qur’an.” Suddenly, a faqir . . . called outside the door: “O ʿAbd al-Rahim!” The faqir requested some men for help with an affair. The shaykh finished his prayers, called up the faqir, and granted his request. 

When our author returned home, he found his child unwell and the mother aghast. He tried comforting her: “Inshallah he’ll get better.” To calm her down, he began to tell her “all kinds of stories,” including this incident at the shaikh’s home. She replied that the ʿabd of al-Rahim had fulfilled the faqir’s request; her husband must beseech al-Rahim Himself to cure her child—He was, after all, the Arham al-Rahimin (the Most Merciful). So the father spent the entire night crying with utmost humility: “Ya Ghafur! Ya Rahim! Heal this child.” By morning, the boy had gotten better. Alhamdulillahi rabbil-alamin.

This mother and child lived in some unknown town a few centuries ago. The pages of history did not record their names. By some historical accident, a manuscript of the father’s commentary ended up in the Ganj Bakhsh Library. By a bigger accident, I happened to stumble across it. But the labors of these parents in that long night, the tension, the anxiety, the heartfelt duas—all of these were registered by the angels. As parents, every one of our own labors, too, are recorded by angels, whose registers place our names alongside all the countless Muslim men and women before us who beseeched Allah on behalf of their children. In fact, to do so has been the sunnah of the greatest human beings in history.

***

The eponymous founder of the Abrahamic faiths remains a figure to whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims keep returning. But what is the legacy of Abraham? The Qur’an describes various aspects of his life. His reflections as he gazed at the sun, moon, and stars. His confrontation with his idolatrous society. Yet his most enduring legacy revolves around his family. His leaving his infant son in the desert with his wife, whose frantic running around for water is imitated by pilgrims every year; his working with his son to build the Kaaba, toward which our hearts and faces constantly turn; and his willingness to slaughter the same son for God—a dramatic gesture reenacted by the bloodied hands of millions of Muslims across the globe who sacrifice animals on Eid.

If the most memorable moments of Ibrahim’s legacy involve his family, these are also the moments that render him unique, a figure we admire but to whom we can barely relate. Yet something about him directly connects him with parents today and across history: his heartfelt supplications.

“O my Master, make me an establisher of salah—and among my offspring too. O our Master! Accept the supplication. O my Master, forgive me, my parents, and all the Muslims on the day that hisab [accountability] is established” (Qur’an 14:40–41).

Don’t many of us today whisper this same dua for our children? And how many of our own parents and their forefathers have made the same prayer? In offering our namaz today, we become, incredible as it may seem, the fulfilment of those duas, offered in the long nights by our ancestors going all the way back to our father Ibrahim. Indeed, perhaps it was because our father recognized that we would yearn for the same that as soon as he prays for him and his offspring to establish prayer, he shifts to the plural rabbana (“O our Master”). 

To supplicate requires humility; it requires letting go of the confidence—the arrogance—that I alone can fulfil the needs of my child. Therein lies the reminder: For my own needs, too, I have always been insufficient. It was Allah who tended to me when I was little, and it is He who provides for me now. Alaysa Allahu bikafin abdahu (Qur’an 39:36)? “Is Allah not sufficient for His ʿabd?” By phrasing the question this way, the Qur’an subtly reminds me and every one of its readers who we truly are: ʿabd. A servant. A slave of Allah. Humbleness, then, is our most human state, where every moment we act within the agency He has granted us while acknowledging our utter dependency on Him.

***

If a parent turns to Allah in heartfelt supplication when a child falls sick, how should they respond when His decree is to not cure the child but to subject the parent to the biggest trial of their lives? The death of Ibrahim—a different Ibrahim—reveals how parenthood can bring together love, surrender, and grief.

It was the eighth year of the Hijra. Our dear Prophet ﷺ and Maria al-Qibtiyya had recently been blessed with a baby boy. What joy the people of Medina felt! But in His infinite wisdom, Allah had willed that his beloved Muhammad ﷺ, who had already borne so much grief, would go through more.

The little boy—whom the Prophet ﷺ loved to smell and to kiss—was breathing his last at a tender sixteen months. Tears were streaming from the Prophet’s eyes. His companions were shattered. But they were also confused: Is crying a gesture of discontentment with fate? And the most noble of humans clarified for them and for us the adab with Allah in such moments: “The eyes shed tears and the heart grieves, but we do not utter anything but what is pleasing to our Lord.” With these words, the Prophet ﷺ instructed his ummah how to grieve. The heartbroken father then turned to his son: “We are saddened by your departure, O Ibrahim!”

***

The Prophet’s adab reminds us of another father whose story was narrated by Allah Himself. This father, the prophet Yaʿqub (Jacob), is the secret protagonist of what Allah declares the best of stories, a story that—tellingly—plays out as a family drama. Yaʿqub (ʿalayhi al-salam) is no ordinary prophet—the Qur’an mentions him no less than sixteen times. But unlike other prophets, we do not see Yaʿqub performing any miracles. We do not see him preaching in public. We don’t even know his occupation. Instead, we encounter him first and foremost as a father.

Surah Yusuf begins with its titular figure addressing Yaʿqub not as “my father” but as “my dear father” (ya abati). It was perhaps Yaʿqub’s fulfilling this role with such excellence that an entire nation was named after him as the “children of Israel.”

In a narrative where everyone else keeps moving, Yaʿqub’s patience at the loss of Yusuf provides a constant anchor. “Patience” meant the refusal to complain, not the elimination of grief. The Qur’an records the latter in soul-wrenching verses: “And he turned away from them and cried: ‘O my grief for Yusuf!’ And his eyes became white from sorrow” (Qur’an 12:84). 

Centuries later, the poet Ghalib (d. 1869) would reflect on the magnitude of this grief:

قید میں یعقوب نے لی گو نہ یوسف کی خبر
لیکن آنکھیں روزن دیوار زنداں ہو گئیں

Though Yaʿqub didn’t inquire about Yusuf in prison
His eyes turned into the window of the prison’s walls

To comprehend the verse, let us imagine Yusuf (ʿalayhi al-salam) in a dark prison cell with only a small window near the ceiling. The little light that streams in appears almost white against the black walls. For the poet, this white light represents the white eyes of Yaʿqub, who was physically unable to receive any news about his son, but whose loving—and grieving—gaze followed him wherever he went.

In this grief lies a special beauty (jamil is how the Qur’an describes his patience). Yaʿqub makes it a means of intimacy with his Creator: “I complain of my anguish and my sorrow only to Allah.” He let no other come between him and his Lord. It is as though Allah was so pleased with him that He made this remark—uttered in utter privacy—into something recited and remembered across history.

The Qur’an thus celebrates the value of the pure love of a parent for their child. In an era where the worth of not just men but also women is defined by their “contribution” to a capitalistic economy, the Qur’anic elevation of Yaʿqub reminds us of a different paradigm of human worth. One that values parenthood for the intensity of its love. 

In fact, the Qur’an is teaching us that pure grief—as a legitimate outcome of love—is also precious. Almost as a Qur’anic tribute to every parent who experiences the loss of a child. That moment of loss, as devastating as it is, is also for the same reason an opportunity: Because we are broken, we can surrender our entire selves to God. The sorrows of our prophets remind us that parenthood is often accompanied by grief, that it can break not just the ego but also the spirit, yet in God alone can solace be found. 

***

What is special about the love of parents for their children? A Qur’anic maxim may provide a clue: Qalilam ma tashkurun. “Little thanks you give.” Alternatively, “Few of you give thanks.” Gratefulness, from the Qur’anic perspective, is a scarce commodity in the human world. Yet it is one that we expect like the laws of nature: Every kind action must be rewarded with a show of gratitude. Whether it’s holding the door of an elevator for a stranger or buying a gift for a spouse, we expect to hear an instant “thank you.” As parents, then, we are confronted with a dilemma, even an affront: Infants are utterly ungrateful.

Perhaps that judgment is too harsh. Perhaps in their cryptic baby language, in the flitting of their eyes, in their secret smiles, they too give thanks. But the fact remains that they remain utterly oblivious to how much we do for them. The waking up at night. The investment of time. The money spent on diapers and wipes and clothes and toys. They know none of it. So they will never remember it. 

At least in its inception, then, parenting becomes a giving without receiving. A giving out of love. This pure love is purifying. As parents, what we do for our kids is not bound by the snares of instrumental reason. Even the spousal relationship does not provide that transcendence, tied as it is to another adult who can—and should—say thank you. Marriage, after all, originates from a contract. But what ties the parent and child? What is this strange attraction?

Pure love is hard to describe, but one manifestation of it must surely be giving without receiving. Parental love can thus become the closest human mirror of God’s own love for His creation. He needs nothing from us, yet He keeps giving. Fa bi-ayyi alai rabbikuma tukadhdhiban? How many of His favors will we deny?

The ingratitude of our children reminds us of our own ingratitude to Allah. And what may be the biggest blessing of His that many of us take for granted? Our parents. Perhaps this is why the Qur’an pairs the worship of Allah with good behavior to parents. In fact, the Qur’an uses words from similar root letters to describe God and parenthood, the divine and human entities that nourish a child from infancy to adulthood. This is evident in a supplication that each of us are instructed to make: “O my Rabb, have mercy on my parents, as they rabba-yani [raised me] when I was little.”

***

In a sense, the series of supplications in the verses and stories of the Qur’an present us with the circle of life: We witness the secret supplication of Zakariyya for offspring, the prayers of Ibrahim for his future generations, the anxiety of Musa’s mother, the grief of Yaʿqub, the pain of Maryam, the cry of Noah, and so much more. 

These figures from the sacred past are not just figureheads; they have been sources of support and springs of comfort for Muslim women and men over the centuries who have struggled with the enormous burden of passing down this religion to their future generations. And if the experience of parenthood was shattering, it is worth remembering that those with broken egos were able to achieve the task of raising sound human beings. That is the task awaiting Muslim parents today. The task of raising sound human beings is no small feat, as we can tell by living in a society full of unbroken egos but broken human beings. 

Parenthood today thus carries the potential for spiritual ascension. The varied experiences it brings—of joy and love, exhaustion and heartbreaking grief—can engender a self-lessness to serve as a cure against the self-ishness of the ego. Especially in an era obsessed with regimes of self-care and self-love—parenthood brings an invitation to break out of the prison of the self.