Finding My Place Read online

  Tracey’s dad was a big-bellied, beer-swilling, tattooed truck driver who looked an awful lot like Norm, the affable couch potato from the popular ‘Life. Be in it’ television ads in the 1970s. Her mum had regular perms, wore a bikini and laughed at her dad’s lame jokes. Her younger brother was in the same year as my brother and they too became inseparable, often passing the time by having farting competitions, which both disgusted and amused us no end. Our parents never became what I would call friends, but they were as civil as neighbours could be and developed a mutual respect and affection for each other cultivated by their children’s inseparability.

  Every month, Tracey’s family ate dinner at a restaurant. Not a dodgy cafe at the mall that served crusty egg-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and cold cups of tea, but a real, fancy restaurant: The Black Stump. My very first meal at a restaurant was with Tracey’s family. I got to order real Australian food like steak and chips and salad and garlic prawns and pasta. I joined her family at games nights, where we all sat around the table playing cards or board games late into the night. I looked after their corgi when they went away to the country for long weekends.

  Being around Tracey and her family made me feel . . . Australian. It was a feeling that had eluded me as long as I was constantly told that I wasn’t because I didn’t, couldn’t possibly, look Australian. Even now, the question ‘Where are you from?’ still makes me uncomfortable. I’m never too sure what to say: Sydney? Albury-Wodonga? Perth? WA? Or Egypt? I’ve learned to gauge the meaning behind the question: whether it is out of innocent curiosity or something more sinister like a poorly disguised attempt to segue to a debate about religion or the status of Muslim women. Not that I would shy away from a debate, but it kind of gets exhausting when all you want to do is enjoy your double chocolate sundae and polite conversation about the price of free-range eggs. I’ve also learned not to roll my eyes with conspicuous exasperation when middle-aged men in suits ask me the question in a boardroom after I’ve just spent ten minutes speaking about the challenges to substantive equality and developing social, economic and political participation in a democratic political system. Most of all, I’ve learned not to focus so much on being different, but to develop relationships based on commonalities: Tracey taught me that.

  Tracey’s family eventually moved away and I lost touch with her before I finished high school. I have thought about her often and wondered what happened to her brother and her, and the family that allowed me to do Australian things with them without judgement. I missed my childhood friend, my companion through the journey to womanhood who knew, more than anyone, how much I struggled to reconcile the me in my head with the me I saw in the mirror each morning: the me I knew others saw too.

  Then an email from a stranger arrived in my inbox asking me if I was the same Anne Aly who’d lived in Chipping Norton and had a brother named Sam (Hosam’s shortened name). I had a thousand questions for Tracey’s brother, who had managed to track me down after seeing me interviewed on television. What had become of my dear friend? Did she become a vet like she always said she would? Marriage? Kids? Pets? What about horses? She always loved horses. And what of Mum and Dad? Were they still around?

  Dear Anne,

  I’m so sorry to hear that your father passed away. He was always very kind to me and he obviously adored you guys. All my memories of him are fond. As a kid I was always welcomed into your home. It all seems so long ago and yet certain moments seem so clear. I remember playing this electronic game when I would sleep over at your house. I came across that game a few years ago on eBay and bought it as an ongoing reminder of those days. We always felt safe and loved at your house.

  I’m not sure if I should tell you, as it is rather depressing, but I guess it is all out in public now. But my father was a paedophile who abused my sister from the age of five or six until she was seventeen. He’s now serving an eight-year jail sentence. Sorry about having to tell you about my father. He was a real bastard, I’m afraid. I’m always surprised that other people were ignorant of the kind of person he was.

  How? How could I not know? We shared everything, all our dreams and hopes and fears and insecurities. How could I be one of those ignorant people like the neighbours of serial killers and terrorists who are interviewed on the news saying things like, ‘But he was such a nice man, a quiet neighbour.’ How could I have missed this? How could I not have seen the pain my dear, dear friend had lived with all those years? How could I not have stopped her pain?

  I cried for days. I cried for my friend and her lost innocence and I cried for my own ignorance. I cried for the time I was seven years old and a stranger followed me into the bathroom at a function we attended with his pants down and his erection in his hand like a loaded gun, calling my name and trying to drag me close to him. I cried with relief for being spared the same torment of my childhood friend and with guilt for being the one spared the same torment. I cried because I knew what I had escaped and the burden of that knowledge, however small it was in comparison, could never ever be as immense as her burden.

  I had lived all these years in blissful ignorance. My greatest teenage challenges revolved around straightening my curly hair, bleaching my upper lip and containing my burgeoning breasts. I can take some comfort in the fact that my family, the family that I complained about constantly, that I wished could be more normal and less ethnic, gave Tracey and her brother a haven. I take comfort knowing that they felt loved and safe with us. And yet, the pettiness of my early teen obsessions and the cruel irony of it all fills me with shame and hurts my heart.

  8

  The Shadow of a Man

  I don’t recall ever wanting to be a politician. At various times in my life I have entertained the idea of being a teacher, journalist, criminal lawyer, plumber, fashion designer, Oprah, paranormal scientist, psychologist, Play School presenter, movie director, the seventh Brady and the person whose job it is to taste new flavours of ice-cream (that one I’m still toying with).

  For all the different things that I wanted to be, there was one thing that I knew from a very early age I definitely did not want to be: a street sweeper. My parents used the sad spectre of the destitute street sweeper as an ominous warning of the fate that would befall us if we didn’t do well at school and get an education. I had never seen a street sweeper and wasn’t entirely sure that the job actually existed, but I imagined a sad ashen figure, draped in rags, pushing a giant broom through grey streets clouded with dust in the bitter cold, lamenting the one time they didn’t study for their class test. It was the stuff nightmares are made of.

  If ever my siblings or I brought home a less-than-perfect report card or detention slip – which invariably consisted of a short description of the offending behaviour (usually being late to class, or being caught without correct uniform) – my parents would translate it into migrant-parent language and instead they would read:

  Dear Mr/Mrs Aly, your daughter/son has flagrantly defied you and has shown his/her ingratitude for your utterly self-sacrificial act of leaving Egypt and coming to this country at the end of the world where you have had to work hard every day of your life in this strange land to own a house with a swimming pool, two television sets, a double garage and alfresco dining area. The defiant ingrate has brought shame on you and on your family by (insert minor misdemeanour here) and will end up sweeping streets for a living. That is, if he/she does not have a baby out of wedlock and end up living on social security with a small army of illegitimate children.

  I knew early on in high school that I would never really excel at science or maths. I did well enough in the subject areas, but they never interested me in the same way as the humanities did. I could never grasp how mathematical concepts like the difference between angles or how to work out the circumference of a circle or trigonometry would serve me in life. I don’t think I have used trigonometry for anything since being forced to learn it at school – except maybe to point out that I have never used it for anything since being forced
to learn it at school. I’ve found even less use for physics and chemistry. I don’t remember the last time I had to work out the speed of a ball rolling down an incline plane or the chemical composition of salt. These things have not helped me make sense of my world in the same way that words have.

  I have had a longstanding love affair with words. As I struggled to figure out the significance of the law of cotangents, understanding the hidden lives of words and their meanings came effortlessly. But not my words – always the words of others – of writers and poets and literary composers. Their words have become my looking glass to the world as well as to my own mind. As for my words, I’ve always assessed myself as somewhat of a pond skimmer, endlessly hovering at the surface where the shit and muck floats, but always too impatient or maybe too afraid to delve deeper to the cool clarity of what lies beneath. Perhaps I’ve just always preferred the company of strangers to that of my own thoughts.

  From an early age, I had a fascination with the things that can’t be explained by logic – the otherworld. I read books on the paranormal, spirituality and astral projection. I once spent a whole hour sitting cross-legged on the floor staring at an apple in the hope of achieving a higher plane of consciousness through meditation. I was eleven years old. The only consciousness I managed to attain from that futile exercise was the realisation that the apple was much better in my tummy than as a focal point for meditation. I tried to bend spoons, move pencils and perceive numbers hidden on the back of cards. I believed in ghosts, and aliens and Loch Ness monsters and Bermuda Triangles. I was fascinated by the things which baffled and which could not easily be explained by strings of equations that used letters but did not make words. My parents had no idea of my curious pastime, which I managed to keep well hidden from them by using my powers of extra-sensory perception to read their thoughts.

  When I was fourteen I found a copy of Nancy Friday’s book My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity in the library, and it was as if I had been handed a whole new looking glass. Friday’s assertion that ‘The older I get . . . the more of my mother I see in myself’ scared the bejeezus out of me. I much preferred the other things Friday had to say about being a woman and how the ideals of womanhood passed down from mothers shackled their daughters. Those words gave voice to my teenage self, emerging Venus-like from her girl-child cocoon and staring down the precipice of womanhood:

  . . . it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us . . .

  Because the shadow of a man is as good as the shadow of a wall.

  I knew back then what kind of woman I wanted to be, but I was incapable of comprehending just what it would take to be her – this independent, free-thinking, autonomous woman who took no shit, a disruptor. Sometimes, I felt like my belly would swell and burst with all the anticipation of womanhood that was growing impatiently inside me. Sometimes, I despaired that she would never see the light, destined to live her life, my life, curled up in the foetal position tethered to an existence defined and dictated by men and mothers to save her from her own vulnerability.

  I stopped reading about ghosts and started reading everything I could get my hands on about feminism. I read Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and warmed to its utterly despairing vision of femininity and marriage. From there I graduated to The Feminine Mystique (by Bette Friedan) and a sequence of novels that featured strong female protagonists. But it wasn’t the Jane Eyres and the Jo Marches that I found appealing. As much as I discovered parts of myself in the writings of Western feminist authors of the 1960s and 1970s, I just couldn’t relate to the nineteenth-century heroines and all that politeness. I preferred reading stories about women who jumped out of planes or fought off monsters; the complexities of nineteenth-century social norms confronted me as more of a distraction.

  Looking back, my teenage baptism into radical Western feminism had less to do with any kind of feelings of sisterhood. I didn’t have a sudden urge to get my kumbaya on, join hands with Western feminists and belt out a verse of ‘I Am Woman’. For me it was more of a curiosity, a desire to know more about the clandestine lives of the Mrs Bradys, with their white skin flush with marital bliss, and the disappointments that bubbled beneath all that peaches and cream.

  I never spoke of these things with others. I never brought it up at the dinner table or had long-winded debates with my friends about women’s rights. I kept my thoughts private, retreating to the solitude of my bedroom to read books hidden underneath my mattress and away from prying eyes. This was something that belonged to me and only me. It wasn’t for sharing. I lived my life straddling two worlds, masquerading as the typical Aussie teenager or the dutiful Egyptian daughter and gliding seamlessly between the two. It was a beautifully synchronised dance and I was the prima ballerina. I could sing all the words to ‘Like a Virgin’ (and know exactly what they meant) and convince my parents that I was their little angel who brought home good grades and didn’t know what a penis was. I needed to do that to survive by avoiding an inevitable clash of cultures that threatened to implode my world. Anyone who has never had to negotiate two identities – often with conflicting expectations – cannot possibly understand just how adroit young women can be at tiptoeing in and out of identities: princess; queen; slayer; diva; damsel.

  I had become adept at being everything everyone else wanted me to be when they wanted me to be it. But this – this fire in my belly that awakened my fascination with the humiliations of being a woman and drove my search for something that could help me make sense of it all – this was my most authentic self.

  Outside the seclusion of my bedroom where I was able to meander and explore dangerous ideas, I lived a life dictated by expectations. As a normal teenager, I did normal teenage things – mostly with Tracey. We went to concerts and weekend roller-skating sessions. We talked about boys and read teen magazines. I formed my ideas about beauty and attractiveness from the glossy pages of Dolly, where pink-skinned pre-teens with shiny blonde hair and flat chests modelled the latest fashion crazes: leg warmers, polka dots and flared skirts.

  In the summer of my fourteenth year, I became obsessed with my weight and embarked on a strict diet that consisted of three eggs and a piece of cheese every day. I lost a lot of weight very quickly but found it difficult to function with no energy. I would sleep fourteen hours a day because I was so exhausted, but also to avoid eating. When my stomach ached with hunger pains that felt like gravel scraping across my innards, I took it as a sign that I was losing weight, believing that it was just my stomach shrinking in on itself. It made me happy to know that my body was responding to my demands and it pushed me to go further, eat less and punish my starving self even more. We didn’t have a name for it then, but I know now that I could have ended up with an extreme, life-threatening illness. When I could no longer maintain my strict dieting regime after months of living solely on various combinations of celery, eggs, apples and Diet Coke, I started to binge eat – sometimes consuming whole loaves of bread in one sitting. Feeling deflated and bloated, I would purge to rid my body of the calories and the shame.

  I hear a lot of women say things like, ‘I’ve always struggled with my weight.’ I’ve read about them in magazines – right next to the comments from the size-zero women who say things like, ‘I never diet. I always eat what I want,’ and insist that their dessert consists of a cup of herbal tea sweetened with honey (if tea was a dessert, wouldn’t it be in the cake aisle?). But it wasn’t my weight I struggled with as a teenager and continue to struggle with as a woman entering her sixth decade, it’s my own body image and the niggling fear that less really is mo
re: at least when it comes to the scales. It’s the incessant messaging in everything that speaks to women that tells us we need to look a certain way in order to be valued. I know this. I know how the messages are crafted and what they are designed to do. I know that magazines present women with images of the unattainable and that the weight-loss industry is a gazillion-dollar industry that relies on people forking out large wads of cash for that magic solution. I know all of this, but I have never quite managed to shed the insecurities that first caused me to treat my body with so much disdain.

  I started my third year at Moorebank High School as the new skinny Anne. But like my new svelte self, my year at Moorebank was not to last.

  I’ve read a lot of stuff about birth order and personality. Apparently, there is some scientific rigour to the old myths about birth order and ‘middle-child syndrome’ actually exists. First-borns are supposed to be natural leaders who are responsible and high achievers. According to one article, they are also supposed to have a few IQ points more than the next child. To be honest though, I think that article was written by some high-achieving first-born (typical). Middle children like me are meant to be the peacekeepers with a keen sense of justice and fairness. So apparently, because middle-borns don’t get any of the rights or privileges of their older and younger siblings, they have to become the negotiators. I’m not so sure these truths about birth order are absolute, but I do know that in our family at least, it was my older sister who led the charge in agitating against the parental regime. Rhonda pushed the envelope and tested the limits of their rules, arguing for more freedoms, later bedtimes, more television – the stuff that matters when you’re a teenager. I was happy to let her have her struggle for more egalitarianism. As far as I was concerned, we approached things differently. I handled my parents’ restrictions by appearing to conform – letting them believe that I was the dutiful daughter. Rhonda wouldn’t (or couldn’t) dance the dance. Maybe she believed that it was her birthright to demand the privileges she believed she was entitled to. I was happy to take on the role of the peacekeeper – it fit perfectly with my dutiful-daughter persona.