Follow us on Telegram for the latest updates: https://t.me/mothershipsg

This story was originally published as a sponsored article on Apr. 9, 2020.

Mohamed Riduan Ishak and Nazirul Husna are not your average Singaporean couple.

Not one bit.

For starters, the circumstances of their childhoods couldn’t be more different.

Riduan, 46, describes himself as someone who grew up in the “ghetto”, a low-income neighbourhood in Boon Keng where up to 10 drug peddlers would be found along the stretch of HDB blocks.

“Each one holding up to 20, 30 straws (of heroin) in their hands for sale,” he says.

“Everybody can sell out (within one hour). That’s how heavy the transaction was there during the early 90s.”

In contrast, Nazirul — the 38-year-old granddaughter of a former parliamentary senior minister — tells me how sheltered her upbringing was.

“When I was in primary school, I was chauffeured everywhere,” she says, recalling how her father would drive her and her siblings to the library, and wait outside for them, before driving them back home.

As Nazirul finishes her sentence, Riduan chimes in: “Very protected.”

“Too protected,” says Nazirul in agreement.

The other thing that sets them apart from most couples is the fact that they volunteer their time to help former offenders. The pair are trained and certified by the Singapore Anti-Narcotics Association to assist in counselling recovering addicts and their families

They are also members of a grassroots initiative in Woodlands called the Path I Choose (PIC), which is a part of the Yellow Ribbon Community Project (YRCP).

As part of the initiative, Riduan and Nazirul visit ex-offenders and their families, get to know them and their struggles, and provide help either by their own means or by linking them up with other sources of support.

Today, they’re sitting down with me to share more about the work they do — specifically with recovering drug addicts — and how they go about supporting them.

Their approach is one very much rooted in and informed by Riduan’s own experiences as a recovering drug addict and former inmate, giving him a fresh perspective of the struggles facing individuals trying to kick the habit.

The price of addiction

“One of the challenges (I faced) when I was newly released at that point in time, actually was within my family,” he says.

It was 2006, and a 31-year-old Riduan — who had been released a few months earlier at the end of 2005 — had “burnt his youth” going in and out of various rehabilitation and detention facilities in the 10 years preceding his release. But this time, Riduan was “clear in his head” that he wanted to stay clean and stay out of prison.

“I was in the toilet slightly longer than usual,” he says.

“But when I opened the door and walked out, my mum was screaming at me, accusing me of using (drugs) again.

It broke my heart. It made me feel like nobody trusted me.”

Riduan isn’t giving excuses for his own behaviour though; he accepts his culpability in alienating his own family and making it harder for them to trust and support him.

He proceeds to tell me about his younger brother, whom he wasn’t on speaking terms with for about 14 years.

“He was angry,” Riduan says. Angry about how Riduan’s actions were impacting the rest of the family.

“He was so hardened,” adds Nazirul. “He was thinking: ‘why are you doing this to my mum’?”

“The most pitiful is my mum,” explains Riduan, who adds that she visited him every two weeks when he was in prison.

“She also has to take what relatives or friends are saying about her son. I feel very guilty about that.

My mother actually told me, she didn’t even go to the market because she didn't want to see anybody. She’s so ashamed to go to the market, and if she really has to go, she’ll go at 5am when there’s no one, just to avoid people.”

These are things that all recovering addicts have to grapple with in their daily lives, Riduan explains. The reality is that their actions carry consequences and repercussions. Even when they’ve gotten themselves clean, there can be scar tissue leftover from previous indiscretions; fault lines of deep-seated resentment that take a long time to mend, as was Riduan’s experience.

Recovery from drug addiction is a journey that is set upon by both the former drug user and their loved ones, he notes. It’s a process that takes a great deal of persistence, patience, and willpower from all parties involved.

Bridging screaming mothers with recovering addicts

According to Nazirul, the experience Riduan had with his mother is a very common scenario they come across with the families they help.

The couple’s role in these situations is to serve as a bridge between the recovering addict and the family and help all parties understand the struggles and concerns the other may have.

While loved ones rightly care about a recovering addict staying clean, it can be easy to miss — or even dismiss — the stresses that come with being a former drug abuser.

According to Riduan and Nazirul, drugs served as an escape for many former abusers, a method of coping with the various anxieties and stress. Once you take away their coping method, it’s easy to imagine them having trouble dealing with their worries in a healthier way. Even more so when there’s pressure from the people around them to “get better”.

“They have to deal with (the) stigma,” says Nazirul.

“Already it is hard for them to find a job, it is hard for them to — okay let’s not talk about outside things — it’s hard for them to even handle themselves.

And then you have this added pressure in society, how do you — sometimes it’s just easier for them to (relapse and go back to jail).”

Adding on, the pair shared that part of what they do is to assess the family’s circumstances and dynamics, and then offer gentle advice, subtly nudging the family and the former addict in the right direction.

“It’s not like a sit-down, formal counselling session,” says Nazirul. “It is like going out and saying to them: ‘eh lepak ah,’ you know?”

According to Nazirul, it’s a “loooooooong process” but it bears results and real change.

Facing the firing squad

A similar approach was advised by her own late father, to be applied in her marriage with Riduan.

In November 2009, Riduan had been clean for three years after his release from prison and found work as a manager in a company that sold financial products.

Nazirul, a former freelance writer, was seeking some structure in her life after a recent break-up from a four-year relationship and had just started working at Riduan’s company.

After three days on the job, she had caught Riduan’s eye with her obvious smarts.

“He asked me out,” she says laughing. “I said, ‘if you like me you can go see my parents. If you don’t want to see my parents you can f**k off.’”

And less than two months later in January 2010, Riduan found himself facing the “firing squad”.

“I went to see her late father and mother, and the whole family — the firing squad,” he says chuckling.

Nazirul had informed her parents of her intention to get married and potential suitors knew that they would have to meet with her parents and gain their approval. After about three hours with the “firing squad”, both of Nazirul’s parents found Riduan to be a suitable partner for their daughter. Aware of Riduan’s conviction, Nazirul tells me that her father had some advice for his daughter, should she decide to marry him:

“He said: ‘Think about the marriage. There are extra steps that you have to take.’

We practice tough love; I’m very hounding. But he said, ‘you can’t hound him. You need to be very finessed about things because you don’t want to (hound him).’”

Five months later, the pair were married.

Nazirul’s father’s advice formed the foundation of her philosophy to walk alongside Riduan on his recovery journey. It wasn’t about doing things in the way she was used to, but rather tackling problems in a manner that would elicit a productive response from Riduan.

“For me, my style is I like you to tell me directly. If I’m wrong I want you to tell me, ‘Look Naz, you’re doing this, and the consequences are as such’,” she explains.

“But for him, you need to — he’s more emotional. So you need to — I won’t say butter — but you need to put in a positive first.”

It’s all relationship-101, she says.

“When you love somebody, you don't love somebody how you want to love them. When you really love somebody, you love somebody how they want to be loved.”

The same goes for former addicts; the couple apply great empathy in their voluntary work and encourage the families they help to do the same. “You need to keep reminding yourself: you want to help somebody how they need to be helped,” she tells me.

“There’s no cookie-cutter approach.”

Missing that sense of belonging

Yet while the approach may differ, Riduan says that beneath it all is a shared desire; a yearning for belonging.

“One of the reasons they (offenders) go astray is because they feel that they don’t belong in a certain place,” he explains.

“I’m talking about myself. I’m not saying that my family was bad, but I’m just saying that I wasn’t given the attention that I needed as a child.”

So Riduan searched for that attention and community elsewhere. For someone who grew up in a rough neighbourhood, it was almost inevitable that fellowship would be found amongst other youth dealing with their own troubles. Of course, these were not exactly the most conducive conditions for a squeaky clean upbringing, so by age 14 Riduan was using and abusing marijuana and heroin with his friends.

For many former drug addicts like Riduan, staying clean is as much about staying away from the company they used to keep as it is about keeping clear of the drugs themselves. He tells me that the problem is when you distance yourself from what is often the only community you once had, that leaves a void. If solace and support can’t be found elsewhere, many end up returning to their previous lives, he says.

That’s why one of the things the couple tries to do is to fill that void with healthier relationships.

Riduan explains how:

“You can actually show so much love, so much acceptance that the fella can feel it. You just have to care, then they will begin to feel a sense of belonging.”

Never a recovered addict

For Riduan, it has now been almost 15 years since he was released from jail. And despite leaving his former life behind, he tells me that he doesn’t consider himself to have recovered.

“I always say, once you’re an addict, you’ll never be a recovered addict. You’re always at the stage where you’re a recovering addict.

We will be fighting the triggers (of relapse) till we die.”

He explains that many intentional decisions have to be made in order to stay clear of these triggers.

Riduan tells me that now his objective in life is now to make three mothers happy: his biological mother, his mother-in-law, and Nazirul — mother of his newborn daughter.

Now that he and his brother have mended their relationship, Riduan considers him one of his best friends.

These days, the couple run their own business, Tarkiz — an events management company that also specialises in corporate team building.

Riduan tells me that even at the height of his drug-abusing days, work wasn’t something he shied away from — “I fell into the category of maybe 5 per cent of drug addicts that actually work.”

Yet, his life then was all about drugs. The only thing that motivated him to go to work was the need to earn the money to sustain his drug habit.

“The motivation is even stronger now, for me to be away from any trouble. My family needs me. My wife needs me, and my daughter needs me. So I shouldn’t do anything stupid at all.”

Find out more about how the path to addiction can start and what happens if you decide to abuse drugs in “HIGH”, Singapore’s first short interactive film directed by local award-winning director Royston Tan.

The work that Riduan and Nazirul do is largely built on the devotion and energy of like-minded individuals who volunteer their time to help those in need. If you are interested in volunteering or supporting their initiative, more information can be found here.

---

Stories of Us is a series about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Be it breaking away from conventions, pursuing an atypical passion, or making the world a better place in their own small way, these stories remind us both of our individual uniqueness and our collective humanity.

---

Follow and listen to our podcast here

Top image by Andrew Koay