Finding My Place Page 7
If my sister did try to do things my way – which could basically be summarised as ‘do what you want and don’t let them know; what they don’t know won’t hurt them’, she wasn’t very good at it. She didn’t know how to hide her transgressions. She didn’t bring home glowing report cards, which made my parents watch her even more closely. She wouldn’t smile politely if she didn’t agree with a ruling. She didn’t hide her private thoughts, but spoke them brazenly without fear of the consequences they might rain upon her. She didn’t seem to care if my parents didn’t think she was perfect. Not like me with my insatiable need to have my parents’ approval. I didn’t want them angry at me and so I never gave them a reason to be. Rhonda seemed unaffected by their anger. In fact, at times, I thought she deliberately set out to arouse it – that she craved having something to argue against just as I craved their blessing.
With two daughters now in their teens, my parents’ anxieties about raising teenage daughters heightened. Like many migrant parents, they believed that the traditional values they had imported from their home country would be lost to their offspring. They believed that these values were morally superior to the values of their adopted land. They feared that their daughters would become too Australian, which meant that they would be the kinds of girls who defied their parents, ran away from home, had multiple boyfriends and a string of children out of wedlock. They believed the biggest threat to their daughters’ virtue was the company that their daughters kept because, as my father would say, ‘It isn’t that we don’t trust you, we don’t trust everyone else.’
After a succession of battles of will, mostly involving my sister, my parents decided that the company Rhonda and I kept warranted serious consideration. They theorised that all those girls who wore their skirts too short and all those boys who wore their hair too long were out to corrupt us. They cautioned us to choose our friends wisely and by wisely they meant choosing girls who came from ‘good families’ – girls who spent their lunchtimes in the library and who didn’t go to dances or have boyfriends. This was of utmost importance to them because they believed that, just as it was for them in Egypt, we would be judged by the company we kept. While I silently rebelled against their ideals, I understand now that their fears were not much different from the fears that all parents have for their children falling into the wrong crowd and being influenced or pressured by their peers to partake in activities that can have serious negative impacts on their current and future lives.
So when my parents found out that my sister had skipped school with her friends (who they didn’t like much anyway) and when they found a packet of cigarettes that she had forgotten to hide, they sprang into action to save their daughters. Rhonda confessed that she had indeed skipped school and owned up to the cigarettes too. Why she couldn’t just make up something to hide her indiscretions was beyond me. Perhaps she thought that the truth would set her free – when you’re fifteen and your parents have just caught you in an act of defiance, the truth never sets you free.
By the third week of the new school year, my parents had pulled Rhonda and me out of the local public high school and enrolled us at Meriden: an Anglican day school for girls. Plucking us from the den of sin was, for them, the greatest act of salvation they could gift to their two daughters. Once again, I didn’t get to say goodbye to my friends, and I missed my crisp new school uniform that fit my smaller frame and the long walks to and from school with Tracey. And once again, I smiled and complied with my parents’ wishes without argument. I had weaved a web by my own hand and of my own doing. I had crafted myself into the obedient daughter, the mediator, the intellectual, and I had done it so well that I just could not bear to disappoint my parents with the knowledge that deep down I wanted to agitate and question and defy all the norms I had led them to believe I had embraced. I couldn’t bear for them to know the person I was really going to become.
9
The Art of Flower Arranging
Meriden, established in 1897, is in Strathfield in Sydney’s inner west. Private school culture was definitely different from that of the public school I had come from. For one thing, the girls at my new school came from everywhere – some from as far away as Windsor.
Every morning and afternoon private school kids converged at train stations across Sydney, turning them into a chattering sea of pleated frocks, straw boaters and knee-high socks. My new school uniform consisted of a blue-and-white striped frock (no shorter than ten centimetres above the knee), teamed with a navy-blue beret that sat precariously atop my frizzy curls, tie and pristine white socks.
The class wars between the privileged private and the working-class public schoolies were fought on the battleground bus stops at Liverpool station, where the two groups marked their territory and sharpened their tools of warfare. Part of my initiation into private school culture was the realisation that, no matter how working class I considered myself, I was now one of those snobby private school kids that I used to poke fun at. Nothing said private school snob more than a pair of perfectly polished black school shoes. Public school kids didn’t wear polished black school shoes – they wore fashionable brown suede ankle boots. ‘Love your school shoes,’ they would mock. ‘Then why don’t you get your mum to buy you some?’ I would retort from the back of the bus. ‘Great hat,’ they would snigger as I walked past. ‘Yeah? I’ll take my beret off when I get home. But your kind of ugly will last a lifetime.’
I wasn’t fully prepared for just how much of a transformation it would be from public to private schooling. Religion had never been part of public school – we never talked about religion, let alone studied it as part of the curriculum, and God rarely got a mention in school assemblies. But at Meriden, God started our day. My book list for my new school included, To Kill a Mockingbird, which we studied in our first semester, a textbook for home science – which was really about cooking and not much about science at all as far as I could tell – and a hymn book for use during morning chapel services. The book was called Common Prayer, Common Praise and included hymns like ‘Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty’ and my favourite hymn, which commanded us to ‘dance then, wherever you may be’. We covered our hymn books in ways that marked us individually from each other – some with plain brown paper, others with Holly Hobbie stickers and pictures of cute puppy dogs and teddy bears. We devised ways to communicate with each other during the long, drawn-out chapel services under the watchful eyes of roaming teachers who would dart cautionary looks our way if they heard a stifled giggle. On the inside cover of our hymn books, we scrawled our secret code that we used to silently spell out warnings of a teacher approaching, share gossip or complain:
A B C D E F
G H I J K L
M N O P Q R
S T U V W X
Y Z
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
YES – NO – OK?!
NEW WORD. START AGAIN.
I remember the conversation my mother had with the school registrar at the time of our enrolment, where she was told that my sister and I would be expected to attend and participate in chapel services (which also served as an assembly where award certificates were presented and school announcements were made). When I asked my parents what I should do during chapel when we were required to bow our heads in prayer, they said that I too should bow my head and remember that the chapel was a place of worship and that we were all worshipping the same God. When I asked whether I should sing hymns, they told me that hymns were a part of that worship and that I should also sing with my classmates and remember God. And when I asked what I should do during the holy month of Ramadan when I was fasting from food and drink during the daylight hours, they said that I should remember the starving and the underprivileged in the world who fasted without choice and that every hunger pain should serve as a reminder to be thankful. I saw no clash or conflict between the religious values that my Muslim parents tried to impart to me and those of my Christian school. I saw only a mutual focus on compassion, empat
hy and gratitude. And for that I learned to be truly thankful.
As I entered my senior years of schooling, my love for the arts and humanities grew. I was my father’s daughter. From the age of ten when he bought me my first canvas, I came under his tutelage in the visual arts. He made a small palette for me out of some wood we found on the side of the road and gave me my first few oil colours to start my collection. He took me with him as we visited factories and warehouses looking for offcuts we could fashion into painting canvases. He bought me my first second-hand easel so I could sit beside him and paint still-life scenes he had cobbled together out of jugs, old curtains and bowls of fruit. ‘Gently my dear, gently,’ he would say, ‘let your heart guide your hand and your hand guide your brush – from your heart to your hand to the canvas. Do not be in a hurry to fill your canvas.’ He took me walking through gardens with him. ‘Look to nature for your colour. See how green and brown are in everything. Green leaves with flowers of every colour. God was an artist. Watch how the sun changes the colour of the leaves. See how the clouds make the world change colour before your eyes.’ I learned the names of colours and how to describe the hues of the world using terms like cadmium, cobalt and ochre instead of red, blue and yellow.
On weekends we would pack up our painting kits and drive down to the beach, where we would set up our easels and paint the day. I loved pretending that I was one of those artists I imagined on the streets of Paris or Italy in their red berets. We spent the day in each other’s silent company, pausing only to glance at each other’s work or share an observation about the way the sunlight touched the clouds and marvel at its beauty.
Passers-by would often stop and watch the father-and-daughter duo painting, commenting on how nice it was to see and complimenting my father on his skill. I never thought of myself as having even a tenth of the talent my father had. As much as I tried, I could never emulate his brushstrokes and the way he managed to capture ten colours in a square inch. I marvelled at how he could see so much colour and detail in even the most mundane objects. My father must have seen something in me that I couldn’t see in myself – as parents often do – because he never stopped encouraging me to paint, even when he chided me for using his paints and not cleaning my brushes properly.
There was a time when my father could see his future as a visual artist. But with the passing of time and the rituals of growing up and growing old, life interrupted and dreams were put aside as they often are. My father and I shared a mutual passion for the impressionists and their bold use of colour and experimental lines. My father adored Van Gogh, but I preferred the whimsical creations of Chagall. I could never imagine myself sacrificing so much for my art. But I often wondered if my father could have.
It’s a strange world we live in where we are expected to know who we want to be by the time we are sixteen. Too young to drive, drink, have sex or get married, but old enough to make vocational choices that would determine so much about our futures and our adult selves. When my younger son turned sixteen, the enormity of having to select his subjects and make up his mind about his future studies weighed heavily on him: ‘How am I supposed to know what I will want to do five years from now?’ he asked. ‘What if I make the wrong choice?’ Armed with the knowledge gained from my own experiences of changing career paths several times, I told him to study what he enjoyed and not to think about his career. It wasn’t the guidance he was looking for. As for myself, at sixteen I had finally settled on a future in the law and started planning my path to becoming a criminal lawyer. A large part of the attraction was that a law degree was generic enough that it didn’t have any study prerequisites, which meant that I could study the subjects I loved and excelled at. Sciences were completely out – except for home science (which wasn’t really a science at all), general maths (also known as Maths for Dummies) was in as was English, art, geography and economics.
I left behind the frivolities of my earlier school years where afternoon detentions and visits to the principal’s office (not for socialising) were fast earning me a reputation as one of the naughty girls. With the realisation that my final two years at school would determine whether or not I would get into law school, I became less interested in testing how far I could break the strict school rules that governed everything, from how we dressed (don’t let a prefect catch you without your beret on in public) to whom we spoke (no fraternising with boys). Instead, I got involved in debating, public speaking and high school musical productions.
As my sister approached her final year in high school, she faced increasing pressure from my parents to map out her path, dedicate herself to study and avoid becoming the ill-fated street sweeper. Rhonda barely managed to get C grades and, if she worked really hard or was really lucky, she might have got the occasional B, which was celebrated with much gusto in the hope that my parents might encourage her to realise her untapped potential and bring home the A’s. She was, by any account, a fairly average student. But average grades weren’t enough for my parents. And my stellar academic performance at school made Rhonda’s averageness look like miserable failures.
It must have been hard for her to be constantly compared to me. As my sons, Adam and Karim, were growing they often played a game where they would try to catch me out by admitting that I favoured one or the other. I was always wary of my response and would smile and say, ‘Adam is my favourite older son and Karim is my favourite younger son.’ They would groan and walk away, nudging each other and continuing to argue about which one of them carried the most favour with their mother. ‘She really loves me more; she just has to say that to not hurt your feelings,’ Karim would state. ‘Give it up, Karim,’ was Adam’s response, ‘I had nearly three years of her love before you even showed up – I’ll always be three years ahead.’
So dissatisfied with my response, they continue to test out these gotcha moments even in their adulthood. I have no doubt that watching my sister struggle with my parents’ expectations expressed in the way that it was, has had an enormous bearing on my conscious commitment to never, ever compare my two sons or show favouritism to one over the other. Not that my parents showed me any favouritism. For the most part, I was left to do my own thing. I was, as far as they were concerned, the least of their worries – the untroublesome one. What a difference from my early years when my mischievous nature had them convinced that I would be the child that brought them heartache (because there is always one, isn’t there?).
My status in the family as the high academic achiever was enough to earn my parents’ approval in a way Rhonda never could and Hosam never needed to being the only boy. They suspected her inability to bring home top marks was due to her laziness and being distracted by other things – boys, girls from bad families, music, parties, going out – everything but her own choices, passions or talents. Her average academic performance equated to nothing short of defiance; while my success qualified me as the dutiful daughter.
It could have been due to Rhonda’s activism, or just to the fact that they were so busy working to pay the elite private school bill, or even my own efforts, but my parents started to relax their strict rules and allowed my sister and me much more of the freedoms our ‘Australian’ girlfriends enjoyed. I was permitted to go to parties, though I had to negotiate and be happy with fortnightly instead of weekly outings. It was important to me. I wanted badly to go to the parties that the girls talked about every Monday. I wanted to be part of that crowd and to be included. My parents probably imagined these parties with the elite girls from good homes to be fancy affairs where we sat around sipping orange juice, playing Scrabble and discussing the next science exam. How sorely mistaken they were. The parties I had managed to talk my parents into letting me attend often involved underage drinking and things you do with boys (though they were probably much tamer than I envisioned them).
Ironically, Rhonda was much less, well . . . let’s just say adventurous than me. Her school friends really were the type who socialised over afternoon tea and c
ivilised picnics in the park. She never got detention or forged our parents’ signatures to avoid them finding out that the three hours I had to spend at school on a Saturday morning was not a reward for my hard work but a punishment for being caught out of class talking to boys at the front gates. She never came to any of the parties I attended – not because she couldn’t, but because she just wasn’t interested. She really was, authentically, the good daughter. But neither I, nor my parents, could see it at the time because I had usurped that title.
As my sister and I developed into our mid and late teens, my mother assumed her role as educator and began delivering her annual ‘talks’. I had first learned about how babies were made when I was ten years old, but somehow my mother must have missed that because it wasn’t until Rhonda and I were sixteen and seventeen that she decided it was time for us to hear it from her. I can’t speak for my brother, but I imagine that Hosam probably got a similar talk from my dad and probably several years after he had figured it out anyway.