Finding My Place Read online

  If only being a parent could be about those moments and not the midnight runs to the hospital with a feverish toddler, or the nights spent sleeping in a chair in the hospital room while your son struggled to breathe after an asthma attack. If only being a parent could be about the small wins and the moments of intense pride and not about the overwhelming feelings of failure and inadequacy.

  For the first few months after he moved out of the family home, Sherif maintained some contact with the boys. He sometimes took them to his new place, but refused to tell me where he lived and insisted that I know nothing about his living conditions. I was used to his erratic behaviour and knew not to make plans when he promised he would pick up the boys for a day out or a trip to the movies. It was hard on Adam, who was old enough to feel disappointed though not old enough to understand why. I was left to wipe away his tears and comfort him every time his father failed to show up, and I would make him promises that one day I would have enough money to take him to all the movies and all the places he wanted to go. ‘Even Disneyland, Mama?’

  ‘Even Disneyland. I promise you. One day.’

  Within nine months of the end of my marriage, I had submitted my thesis in completion of my Master of Education. I immediately went to work teaching English at a language school in the city. It was casual work with no long-term security, but it was enough for our little family. By then, Sherif had all but vanished from his sons’ lives. Occasionally, he would make the time to call from his new home somewhere in Sydney, where he had moved for work.

  In principle, I believe that children have the right to form relationships with both their parents, even when relationships fall apart, so I’m a little apprehensive to admit that I welcomed him moving away. I had lived in fear of him taking the boys as he had threatened to, despite knowing that he was neither willing nor capable of raising them on his own. In some of our many confrontations during the separation process, he had invoked the Islamic sharia, which gave custody of sons to the father, threatening to use it to exercise his right to deprive me of the only thing that I could find purpose to live for – my children. Neither of us had been particularly observant in our faith, but suddenly he had found a purpose for his religion – invoking sharia to keep me married to him and to ensure that, even in his absence, he could exercise control. He argued that, as we had married in Egypt, we could only get a divorce granted by a sharia court. For a while I believed him, but mostly because I didn’t care enough about the formalities of a divorce to warrant any action. I was too consumed with trying to raise my boys (and keep them) to worry about the legalities and formalities of divorce. When Sherif threatened to exercise his rights to custody, I called my father and asked him if he was right. My father quietly told me that he was – that in Islam the mother has custody of the boys until they are two years old, then the father is given custody. ‘But,’ I cried loudly, ‘he doesn’t want them. He never sees them. He’s never done anything for them. How can I agree to that?’

  ‘Go to the courts,’ my father advised, ‘we are in Australia. We live by the law here. Go to the courts, get a divorce and get legal custody of your children.’

  As soon as I could afford it, I did.

  In the five years it took me to gather up the courage and the money to challenge my husband’s power, I researched and met many women who, like me, were separated from husbands who refused to divorce them. I learned that many of them believed that the only meaningful divorce they could get was from a sharia court. Some had even travelled to countries overseas where they had originally married to seek a divorce from the courts there. They lived their lives in a kind of relationship limbo – neither married, nor divorced – tethered to men they despised because of an inexplicable loyalty to a system that was neither accessible nor relevant to their lives. I learned that some women took this as an argument for the introduction of a sharia marriage and divorce system in Australia that would sit parallel to the existing legal system – similar to the beit din or rabbinic courts that oversee divorce proceedings for Jewish couples.

  I’ve since watched with curiosity the very public spats between conservative politicians and some Muslim spokespeople about sharia in Australia. I’ve been somewhat amused by the sensationalist headlines spewed forth by current affairs programs, populist columnists and shock jocks screaming, ‘Sharia in our suburbs!’ As a committed secularist, I stand staunchly against the imposition of religion into the laws and governance of the state. As a woman who, once upon a time, was held hostage by a man who argued that I would be married to him till the day I die, I don’t want to see other women go through the same. If I was to strip away all my personal and political beliefs, I could safely say that I would never have accessed a sharia divorce even if I could have simply because it was the one thing that he wanted and that I could not give him.

  The last time the boys had seen their father before our divorce was when I took them to visit him when he moved to Sydney a year or so after we first separated. He showed them his new home city and took them to the Opera House and McDonald’s and to his new workplace. Since then, he hadn’t called or messaged them or sent them a card on their birthdays or asked about them. We went about our daily lives with his memory hanging around like a ghostly presence. If the boys ever did ask me about their father, I lied and told them that he was doing well, busy working and thinking about them every day. I couldn’t bear to break their little hearts with the truth that I had no idea where he was. The divorce lawyer I had hired had come back to me again and again to say that they couldn’t find him to serve the papers. They even hired a private detective who had come up with nothing. The Child Support Agency regularly rang me to ask if I had heard anything from him or if I knew where he was. I had not received a single cent in child support from him and became frustrated with the agency. I had all but given up on ever finding him or getting any financial compensation for the years I was left to raise our sons on my own.

  But I couldn’t ignore the pain in Adam’s eyes whenever he talked about his father or came across a photo of him. I couldn’t ignore the questions from him about why his father let him down so often or why he didn’t call to wish him happy birthday. There is nothing more devastating to a parent than to see their child’s heart broken by another.

  Five years after Sherif first disappeared, I was jolted from my sleep by a phone call in the early hours of a Sunday morning. It was him. He was coming to Perth. He was going to stay here and had already made plans to settle back in Perth. And he wanted to see his sons. I asked him where he had been all these years, knowing that I wouldn’t get an answer. I told him that he could see them but on my terms. Then I hung up the phone, half believing that he would never make good on his threats to come back into his children’s lives.

  When their father drove up the driveway after the years of being disappeared, I told my boys to stay in the house while I went outside to speak to him. I confronted the man who had once wielded so much power over me that I had actually planned a way to vanish without a trace. I went right up to his face and said, ‘You are here only because I’ve allowed it. Understand that. You have broken their hearts over and over again and the only reason I am allowing this is for them – understand that – not you. Them. All these years I have lied about you through gritted teeth and told them that you care about them and you think about them every day. For them. Understand that. Not you. But I am telling you this now. In a minute I will bring them out here to see you. And if you dare to leave them again, if you dare to break their hearts again, I will make sure that every memory of you is gone. I will tell them that their father is dead. I will make sure that they forget you and I will not lie to them again. Understand that.’

  I stood holding my sons’ hands in the front entrance of our new home as their father leaned against his car door. I looked at Adam, who was smiling widely, and let his hand go as he ran into his father’s arms. Karim, who had no memory of his father, clung to my skirt, peeking curiously at the strange
r in our driveway. I leaned down and took my baby boy’s face in my hands. ‘It’s okay, son. That’s your father.’

  He wrapped his arms around my neck, smiled then turned and ran into his father’s waiting arms.

  For several years, Sherif rebuilt his relationship with Adam and Karim. As teenagers, they shared their time between my house and their father’s house, but the years of Sherif being disappeared were never quite resolved and grew into a lingering tension between Adam and his father, who continued to refuse to explain why he had abandoned them for so long.

  The day Karim turned eighteen was the last day that my boys saw their father before he disappeared again.

  16

  Ten Parts of Desire

  I continued teaching English at different language schools and saved up enough money to build a new home for my boys and me in one of the new outer suburbs in Perth’s south-east. I bought a block of land and started building our new four-bedroom, two-bathroom home on a 517-square-metre block with a single carport and open-plan living space. I was still only employed as a casual, but there was enough work to pay the mortgage and the bills, except when I had to take a day off to care for a sick child. I still struggled to make ends meet, but I was at least able to keep a roof over our heads and send the boys to school, and for that I was grateful.

  My parents eventually came around and I came to rely on them for support to look after the boys or help me gather the things I needed to finish off our new home. As I settled into a life of single parenting, I got a sense that my relationship with my parents had surpassed the boundaries of traditions and expectations. They were beginning to see me, not as a fragile flower in need of protection or as the vessel of their honour that continued to burden them, but as a woman who had lived with heartbreak for too many years.

  One day, they accompanied me on the long drive to Perth’s outer northern suburbs to pick up some second-hand fencing, which was all I could afford. They watched in silent shock as I argued with the seller who refused to honour his end of the deal. As he turned to walk away from me, muttering something about Arabs under his breath, I could no longer contain my anger. ‘You turn your pink, pimply, racist arse around and you talk to me like a fucking human being. I did not drive an hour to have you turn your fucking back on me because you don’t like the colour of my skin. I don’t give a flying fuck about your opinions or your delicate sensibilities about Arabs. This is a business transaction.’

  I got my shitty fencing.

  I was still fuming when we all got back into the car for the drive home. I scanned my parents’ faces in the rear-view mirror and waited for them to say something, but they were silent. I figured they were still in shock at just how many times I managed to say the word ‘fuck’ in thirty seconds (I counted three, but it could have been more). It wasn’t until my father caught the silent tears on my face that he finally spoke. ‘We thought things would be different for you and your siblings. We thought it would be easier. We thought if you spoke like them, if you dressed like them, if you were one of them . . .’

  I shook my head out of sheer frustration more than disbelief. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What makes you think that just because I can speak English things would be any different? Do you see my face? Do you see my skin? Why would you think it would be easier for any of us? You have no idea.’

  The long drive home with my parents in the back seat of my car was filled with an unspoken solidarity that I had never before felt with these two people whose lives, or so I thought, had been so different from mine, with whom I had argued and fought and challenged about everything. It was one of those moments life sometimes hands out just to mess with your head a little. I had spent half my life resisting my parents and everything they stood for. All those years, every time they said, ‘We came to this country for you’, I cringed. Every time they tried to sit me down and tell me how much they’d sacrificed to bring us to Australia, I groaned.

  And here we were. Driving home with some shitty second-hand fencing in the boot of the car, my eyes stinging with tears and an anger that started deep in my belly and threatened to burst through my fingertips, grab the steering wheel, turn it around and serve up some more ‘go fuck yourself’ to the bigot with the pimply arse. Here we were and for the first time in my adult life, I felt a connection to them not as parent and child, but as people with a shared experience.

  As my boys grew older I had to make the important decisions in the absence of their father. I had decided to send the boys to a Muslim school. It wasn’t an easy decision. The Muslim schools didn’t exactly have a strong academic reputation and weren’t the best resourced. Though I had attended religious schools, it wasn’t because of religion. My parents’ decision to send me to a Catholic school had more to do with convenience than a desire to save my soul, and sending my sister and me to an Anglican school as teenagers was only ever about putting us in a school where there were no penises in our immediate environment.

  Likewise, religion wasn’t the main reason I was sending my two sons to a Muslim school. I couldn’t bear for them to go through anything that I had to endure growing up. I wasn’t sure I’d know how to deal with their tears because they were spat on or treated differently because of who they were. If I could make things different for them, then I was prepared to do anything it took to do that. I reasoned that a Muslim school would provide them with the sense of community that I had missed growing up. Like me, they had no cousins or second cousins to grow up around. It’s not like I really knew how to be a good Muslim mother – other than the guilt thing, which I was actually pretty good at. I couldn’t teach them how to pray or interpret a verse in ways that would mean anything to them. But more importantly, I wanted them to just not feel so different all the time, at least not while they were so young. I should have known that if they could handle having me as their mum, they could pretty much handle anything. Holding my hand in the park one day, Adam looked up at me and said, ‘Mama, I’m not normal.’

  ‘Not normal? What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m different. Not normal.’

  ‘So what? What’s wrong with that? Do you think I’m normal?’

  ‘You?’ He laughed. ‘You’re not normal.’

  I almost took offence at that, but figured I had left the gate wide open. ‘And there you go. It’s good to be different. Normal is boring. Nobody likes normal. When you grow up you will see that everyone will love you because you’re different. Everyone will want to know you because you’re not normal – because you’re interesting.’

  I think that was probably one of my ‘good mother’ moments, even though I knew it was a lie and that I had spent most of my life trying to be ‘normal’.

  It’s funny how we marvel at just how different our children’s characters are, as if we could have any control over them. I really couldn’t tell you how many times through their childhood I was struck by just how unalike my two sons were. Adam, who was pensive even as a baby, sometimes looked at me as if he was mentally assessing my parenting and giving me a score. I’ve always felt close to Adam in a kind of spiritual sense – not as his mother, but more as a kindred spirit. At times, I’ve felt like his confidante or his life’s guide more than his mother. He didn’t crave my attention or my affection. He didn’t come in for big hugs or want snuggles and kisses to make his hurties better. Instead, he wanted me to show him things, take him places and teach him stuff. It was as if he knew where he was going, he just needed me to hold his hand in case he slipped or got lost along the way. Karim was affectionate to the point of being clingy. He demanded my attention and adored me as his mother. He would sing me songs about motherhood (in Arabic even), write me stories and give me handmade cards with messages like, ‘You are like a mother tiger looking after her young. Thank you for keeping us safe and giving us shelter.’ Adam, on the other hand, rarely went to the trouble and when he did, he wrote messages to explain what he was doing rather than how he felt. ‘I made this card but I stapled it the wrong way. A
nyway, happy Mother’s Day. I hope you have a nice day.’

  I reasoned that both my boys would fit in nicely at the Muslim primary school where nobody asked them if they believed in Jesus or whether they would die if they fasted from food and water during Ramadan. They did. It was me who had trouble fitting in. I was the mum with the bare arms and make-up. The one who didn’t wear a scarf on her head, who worked and wore short skirts with heels. When I walked into the school to pick up the boys, I could feel a hundred pairs of tiny eyes following me in amazement – or it could have been amusement. Not all the other mums shunned me. Some addressed me as ‘the modern Muslim’ and asked me questions about my work. I wasn’t the only modern Muslim mother. There was a handful of us and we managed to find each other amid a sea of brightly hued bobbing headscarves in the playground. I’ve always been attracted to other rebels.

  As the new millennium approached, I looked back on the decade of the 1990s with a sense of profound disappointment. Disappointment in myself for not achieving all the things I had dreamed I would in the heady days of being seventeen, and disappointment in the structures and institutions that put up glass ceilings and concrete walls. I rejected the feminist doctrines that had once inspired me and given me hope. I cast them aside with the kind of bitter discontent of someone finally disposing of a lifetime of self-help books with dog-eared pages and pencilled notes squashed into the margins. I argued with women in their twenties who insisted that, if it wasn’t for feminism, I would not have been able to get an education or enjoy the freedoms that the Western world offered. Instead, I pointed them to the plethora of books about Arab and Muslim women mostly written by Western feminist authors through the 1990s – books like My Forbidden Face, Without Mercy: A Mother’s Struggle Against Modern Slavery, Voices Behind the Veil and Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. If you scrounge around the two-dollar bin at one of the regional airports, you might be fortunate enough to still find a copy or two of these less-than-insightful books. They’re not hard to spot. Without exception, all feature an all-too-familiar graphic of a Muslim woman, eyes peering imploringly from behind a black veil just pleading to be saved.