Finding My Place Read online

  As the first year of my new life as a fully fledged married woman progressed, I continued to study at the university and teach at the British Council. My grades fell victim to my newfound role as Betty Baker Perfect Homemaker, which seemed to take up most of my spare time. I attended cooking lessons with my sister-in-law so that I could master complicated Egyptian dishes with 869 ingredients that my husband loved (okay, maybe not 869 ingredients, but there were a lot), and went shopping for things like tablecloths and pillow shams – and to think, less than a year before I didn’t even know what a pillow sham was! But even within the confines and expectations of married life, I found a new sense of freedom and independence that I had been craving. People looked at me differently. When I walked in the street, arm in arm with my new husband, there were no sideways glances of suspicion and innuendo. I commanded a kind of respect that was reserved for those virtuous women who marry young, cook complex meals and shop for pillow shams. I went to parties and nightclubs and dinners at expensive restaurants with my new husband. We took camping trips over long weekends with our friends and watched American movies in our apartment while Fatima, our housekeeper, washed our clothes and made our bed. I hosted my university friends in my own home for dinner parties and long lazy afternoons drinking tea and discussing existentialism or the imaginary love-lives of our professors.

  My family had completed its prodigal return to Australia and I was left to live my life in Cairo under the shade of my husband. If my father answered the phone when I rang, he would make sure I was okay then quickly pass me onto my mother. Our relationship had changed significantly and I now understood what people meant when they told me that things would be different when I married. My mother didn’t treat me like a daughter anymore. She treated me like her equal – almost. I wouldn’t say it was a best-friends-forever kind of relationship, but I was no longer treated like a loose end that needed tying or a burden that was, at best, tolerated. I bonded with my mother in a whole new way – over important earth-shattering issues like how many hours the housekeeper worked and what form of contraception I should use.

  Our first year of marriage was by no means blissful. In fact, it was probably rockier than a marriage should be. Each time I complained to my mother that Sherif was lazy or neglectful or that he often stayed away for days or lied to me, I was handed the old Egyptian wisdom that had sustained a hundred million marriages before mine and would sustain a hundred million more: ‘The first five years are always the hardest, everyone knows that. The first year is the hardest of them all. Be patient.’ Be patient. That was it. I was too impatient, too demanding, too rash, too needy. All I needed was to be patient and I would be rewarded with a good husband and blissful marriage as had my mother and her mother before her.

  We hadn’t planned on having children straight away. We both preferred to wait a couple of years at least. We were, after all, both young. At just twenty-two, Sherif was only a year older than me and we agreed that there would be plenty of time for children in our future.

  But I knew. I knew long before I could be certain. I knew that I would have a son and I knew that I would name him Adam, and I loved him even before I knew him.

  We had taken a camping trip with eight of our friends to an out-of-the-way place called Basata, about a five-hour drive from the resort city of Hurghada. Basata was a small campsite along the Sinai coast comprising six beach huts and a communal kitchen and bathroom area. Sherif and I had our own hut while our friends shared two huts – one for the women and one for the men. At night we sat around a campfire listening to music and talking. During the day, we lounged around the communal area discussing everything from politics to pop culture. On the last morning I announced I was pregnant: ‘I just know. Don’t know how I know. I just know.’ Three weeks later a trip to the doctor and a blood test confirmed my self-prognosis.

  I didn’t want to raise children in Cairo. As much as I loved Egypt and as much as I had become accustomed to the kind of life I could and would have there, Australia was always home and was always going to be home. I was in my final semester at university and we planned to travel to Australia to set up home as soon as I graduated. In March 1990, I turned twenty-three. I had been married for a year and a half, was four months’ pregnant and arrived in Australia with my husband.

  We settled in Perth, staying in the spare bedroom in the house my parents had bought after their failed attempt to return to Egypt. Sherif was on a three-month tourist visa and had to return to Egypt in June, leaving me to live with my parents while he sorted out his residency. I got a job teaching English at one of the international language schools and collected everything that we would need to start a new life – dishes, cutlery, linen, towels and pillow shams. While I waited for my husband to arrive, not knowing for certain that he would be here to witness the birth of our child, I busied myself with work, rented a place for us to live, furnished it with second-hand furniture and found a cheap car. I went to all my hospital and doctor appointments by myself and stared for hours at the ultrasound images, trying to make out a limb or a facial feature in among the jumbled mass of black-and-grey dots.

  My sister had fallen pregnant with her third child not long after me. Mum decided that Rhonda needed her more than I did so she flew to Egypt to be with her. I attended pre-natal classes on my own and watched the other couples as each father gently held his partner’s hands, looked into their eyes and helped them focus on their breathing. I resigned myself to the fact that I would be on my own for the entire experience and felt a little sorry for myself as I sat alone in the pre-natal classes, willing myself to focus and breathe, even though all I wanted to do was go somewhere quiet and cry.

  Sherif’s visa arrived just ten days before my due date and he flew over immediately. I gave up working and we moved into the little home I had made for us with its second-hand furniture and hand-painted baby bassinet. As my due date approached, complications with the pregnancy started to arise. I was big. So big that I was sure I was going to be pregnant for the next three years and give birth to a baby elephant. So big that excited strangers stopped to ask me if I was pregnant with twins – like they’d suddenly discovered a secret I had been hiding under my ugly maternity clothes. What do you say to that? All I could muster was a polite smile and, ‘No. It’s water. I have a lot of water.’ What I really wanted to say was, ‘Seriously? I’m already panicking about having to pass a watermelon through my vagina and you really want me to get excited about the prospect of having to pass two?’

  When my due date passed without a baby to show, my doctor admitted me to hospital. Three days later Adam, my first-born son, mewed and puked his way into this world through an emergency caesarean section. I didn’t get to hold him until he had been cleared and I had stopped shaking from the epidural. I don’t think I had ever laid my eyes on anything so beautiful or felt so much love for anything in my entire life until that day. It is so indescribable that I could never possibly have all the words to express what it feels like to hold your child in your arms for the first time. And by the way, all that breathing and focusing and everything I had learned about how to have a baby went out the window with the proverbial bath water as soon as I felt that first excruciating pang of labour.

  We took our little boy with his shock of dark hair and his little chin dimple home and I settled into my new role as Adam’s mum. We soon bought our first home – a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house just three doors down from my parents’ home in Perth’s southern suburbs. Adam would have been around eighteen months old the first time his father hit me so hard it left me bruised and scarred.

  The argument started – as all our arguments did since we had been married – with me demanding an answer to where he had been for the last twenty-four hours or so, and him answering me as he always did: ‘You can bang your head against that wall until you bleed to death, you will never know where I have been or what I have been doing.’ It was his standard answer for everything and the way he maintained his cont
rol by being the keeper of the information I so wanted to know. Where had he been? Why hadn’t the bills been paid? Who was the strange man that kept calling? Why did his stories never add up? Why had his friends told me something completely different about where he grew up and what university he went to? Where was his American citizenship and why didn’t he use it to make it easier for him to come to Australia? Every question met with the same answer – ‘Bang your head against the wall.’

  After days of pleading with my parents, my mother finally agreed to accompany me to the Fremantle courts to get a violence restraining order against Sherif. Divorce wasn’t something that my parents encouraged. They were concerned about how I would survive without the shade of a man to insulate Adam and me against the harsh realities of single parenthood. Nobody in my family had ever been divorced. This wasn’t something that ‘we’ did. ‘We’ sacrificed; ‘we’ were patient; ‘we’ wore our unhappy relationship like a badge of honour that read, ‘This is what a good wife looks like.’

  I stood in front of the judge, an older, grey-haired male, and relived every painful blow and every humiliating slap.

  The judge looked at me like he was examining a dirty nappy. ‘Have you thought about this?’ he asked. ‘Do you really want this? Do you have any idea what it means? It means that the police will come to your house and take your husband away in front of your son. Is that what you want?’ He looked towards my mother, who sat silently behind me showing her support in the only way she knew how. ‘After all,’ he began, ‘surely your culture and traditions would have their own way of dealing with this.’

  As a twenty-something mother with a toddler to care for, the judge’s words eroded my resolve, and I didn’t pursue it. He might as well have banged my head against the wall until I bled to death.

  I walked out of the courtroom that day knowing that if the judge in all his wisdom would not help me, then my mother, who still believed that women were too weak to withstand life outside the shadows, would withdraw what little support she believed she could give. So I stayed. I stayed because like so many other women, I had nowhere else to go.

  Less than a year later, I was blessed with another baby – a son. We named him Karim, and if I thought I couldn’t possibly have enough space in my heart to love another child as I did Adam, I was wrong.

  I tried to follow my mother’s advice of being patient in the hope that my husband would turn into a good, loving man who wouldn’t hit me and who stayed home and looked after me. I tried that because as they say, the first five years are the hardest and all you need is just a little patience. That’s not true. Patience actually got me fuck all. I went to work so that I could pay the bills that weren’t getting paid. I took my babies to play group and child care and to the park and movies and toilet trained them and loved them all by myself. I accepted that their father did not want to change their nappies or bathe them or hold their hands and I did it all.

  And despite this – despite the loneliness and the beatings and all the shit – leaving my husband, the father of my sons, was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I held my three-year-old and my one-year-old baby close to my heart and cried – my tears falling onto their sleeping heads and making their hair so wet it stuck to their little foreheads. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I sobbed, ‘I’m so sorry that I can’t do this anymore. I’m so sorry that I’m going to put you through this. Please forgive me. I love you.’

  15

  Parenthood

  I’ve read comments and opinion pieces about domestic violence that question why women stay in abusive relationships. I recall reading one report that claimed that women who are abused stay in a relationship on average for six years before they finally leave.

  Reflecting on that, I should have heeded the warning signs early. I should have been that university girl who walked away from her first love when he wouldn’t stand up for her. I should have been that seventeen-year-old who had declared vehemently, ‘If a man even just raised his hand to me, I would leave and knee him in the nuts on my way out.’ But I didn’t.

  I would lie awake at night planning ways to escape, willing myself the courage to leave Sherif and, in the end, I would drift off to sleep wishing that I would wake up in the morning and find him gone.

  I stayed because I thought I had nowhere to go. My parents had taken an extended trip to Egypt where they spent time with Rhonda. It was easier to do this while they were away, knowing that I wouldn’t have to listen to their lectures about staying with Sherif for the sake of the children and taking a risk that their relentless arguments would catch me at a moment of vulnerability and cause me to abandon my plans to end the marriage.

  I had given up working when Karim was born but, needing something more than play group and nappies to occupy my mind, had started a post-graduate degree in linguistics and went straight into a Master of Education by research. Sherif wasn’t too happy or supportive of any of my choices and issued a stern warning that I was not to neglect my housewifery duties for my studies as he was not about to start changing nappies and doing what he called ‘women’s work’ so that I could pursue my own interests.

  When Sherif finally did leave the family home, he did not do it compliantly. He wasn’t about to make things easy for me all of a sudden, and he left me with a mortgage and some pretty hefty debts.

  In desperation, I went to the Department of Social Security for help. The glass doors of the department opened to a cavernous room where industrial-grade carpet and linoleum endured a million footsteps heavy with the weight of poverty and destitution. I carried Karim on my hip and held Adam’s hand as I waited for my number to be called. The man behind the desk looked much like any of the other twenty or so white collars behind counters where all the other people who had nowhere else to go lined up waiting to be served. I sat on the chair opposite him with Karim on my lap and Adam by my side.

  ‘It usually takes about five weeks to process a payment,’ he told me.

  ‘Five weeks? What am I supposed to do in the meantime?’ I asked, horrified.

  ‘Well, that’s how long it takes. Could be longer. Is there anyone who can help you out? Do you have any family who can lend you some money to tide you over?’

  I bowed my head and shook it slowly. ‘No. Nobody,’ I whispered, holding back the tears.

  I gathered my sons in my arms and walked quickly out of the sliding glass doors, turned the corner, leaned against the hot grey brick walls of the building to steady myself and broke down in tears. I looked up to see a man in a blue singlet, shorts and thongs walking towards me on his way into the building. He caught my eye as he flicked a worn cigarette butt to the ground and looked at me blankly. I’m not sure if he could see the anguish that must have been on my face or if he even cared. Had he seen that look so many times before that he thought nothing of it? In the split second that our eyes met, I tried to read his face to gauge whether I should feel humiliation, shame or something else. In that split second, I searched his eyes for something – sympathy or disgust – but I got nothing. I was indeed utterly alone.

  I knew I couldn’t live on the meagre social security pension and pay the mortgage and all the bills for very long, so instead of the two years it would take to finish my master’s degree, I worked out that I could finish it much faster if I worked through the nights after I had put the boys to sleep. The days and nights merged into a gruelling schedule of caring for the boys, keeping house, cooking, cleaning, studying and sleeping in what little time was left between.

  The days and nights were punctured with moments of despair when the distractions I had piled on myself failed to erase the misery of the everyday struggle to make ends meet. Despite the years since then, the humiliation of having to leave half the week’s groceries at the supermarket counter still stings. There is nothing more heartbreaking than knowing that you can’t provide the most basic of necessities for the ones you love. Nothing more soul shattering than wondering whether you will be able to feed your children tomorrow. And
nothing more shameful to oneself than feeling like you are the one who brought this on. Could I have been more patient as I was told to be time and time again? Was it my fault that my marriage had failed so miserably? I could not help but feel that I had failed my children, had deprived them of a father, of a life they could have had. Staring at the pile of unpaid bills, the empty cupboards and the negative bank balance, it was hard not to feel like it was all of my own making – because I could not bring myself to stay living in the shadows.

  If there is one regret that I have in my life, it is that the early years of my sons’ lives were lived in a haze of despair and desperation. I was so conscious of just how consumed I was with the pragmatics of being a single parent that I made an effort to capture small moments and make sure that they were imprinted in my memory so that I could at least recall glimpses of my children’s early lives. I have never been the sentimental type and so there is no wooden box stored in the back of a cupboard that holds my children’s first curls, lost teeth, or first painting or prints of tiny hands and feet marking milestones in their development. Instead, I have a dossier of moments filed away in the recesses of my memories. Moments like gently lathering soap on Karim’s tiny hands and teaching him how to wash while marvelling at the perfection of his tiny pink fingernails. Moments like running through the street trying to beat the wind as it carried away Adam’s painting of Thomas the Tank Engine, which he had clutched so tightly but let go in a second of carelessness. And moments like watching Karim climb the monkey bars for the first time while his older brother stood at the bottom watching over him and calling out, ‘Be carefully, Karim. Be carefully. Don’t fall.’