A few days ago was the fifth anniversary of my divorce. I remembered it briefly in the midst of a busy day. I neither celebrate nor regret it, I just remember it as a landmark of my freedom and living my life the way that I want. In the past five years I have learned that I am better off without my ex, and if I was not totally convinced five years ago my subsequent dealing with him has made a complete believer out of me. It seems like the older the man gets the more alien he becomes to me and the less wisdom and sensitivity he gives to the psychological and emotional development of our son.
When I first thought of breaking up with my ex, my son Robert was not there. He was perhaps a mere thought in my mind that I was scared to articulate. After all I was 35, and my marriage was not working. I was still in love with my husband then, but the feelings were taking serious strain. On August 18th, 2005, I drove from East London to Cape Town, leaving him behind. I took my time there, to heal, to digest what happened.
I remember this today because inside an old dictionary I found a piece I wrote about eight years ago. This was before my experience with blogging, and before my brief reconciliation with my ex, a reconciliation that brought along my son Robert.
I wrote it on the back of a faxed quote for a new computer. I was starting to build up my life, and I needed a tool to work as a translator. The quote was dated August 30th, 2005. So I think I wrote these words early in September that same year. The background was my ex wanting us to reconcile and try to save our marriage. I was not sure then. I think I had a crush on a nice guy I met in Cape Town, and fancied myself starting over with someone new. I did not know what fun was in store for me, but here it is. It is too simple really to be called a poem, but I am still struck by the sincerity of my voice. It was only eight years ago, but I feel like reaching out through time and giving the immature woman who wrote this a hug, she was still somewhat of a pitiful figure just starting to build some backbone.
I am a refugee, afloat but only just
The horizon is clear, the waters are calm
And beyond them, lies the unknown.
With you I traveled far
I carried my pain
Along your side, I lived alone
You looked into my eyes you saw my soul
I looked into yours I saw your dreams
I touched you with love
I wanted you to take me under your skin
into your veins
You touched me back with fondness
and a pitying smile
The road to your dreams grew rough
I fell behind
I faltered, I stumbled, I bled
I carried on.
I forgot what this was for
but I carried on.
You never looked my way
or offered a hand, to hold on.
You know I would simply
soldier on.
The nights would come
where I lie in silence.
touching the bruised edges of my heart
while you slept.
feeling the wrinkles on my soul
dry with a thirst for love.
waiting to be given and never received.
The joyous emotions within me
were left to perish slowly.
But sometimes they erupted
in the glare of daylight
haunted and deformed into anger and pain.
The day finally came
When I would no longer bear.
I looked up from your dusty track
I saw stars, I saw sky
and a distant horizon.
I turned around to be embraced
by an endless ocean,
and I kept afloat.
Now you call me back
from your dry perch.
you pledge and you promise
you will never let go.
you love me, you say
You were wrong to drive me away.
The water is still between us
and the ticking of time.
You might not know it
but the tide has turned.
Destiny awaits me, beyond this horizon,
and it's not with you.
Changing tack from the frequent whinging about my ex, let me tell you a story about the man in my life that I never forgot. It seems like amongst the many men that come calling in a woman’s life there is always one who stands head and shoulders above the rest. It is normally one of those lucky ones that got away, someone who never had the chance to disappoint, break a promise or do any serious damage. That particular person seems to be always there, as an idea, unfairly compared in the mind to a flesh and blood husband, a jilted lover, or the person who caused the most recent heartbreak.
Notwithstanding my current cynical view of love and relationship. I haven’t been immune to the feeling in my younger days. In fact, I would say I was rather susceptible to it. During my years at university I even remember devising ways to meet an unsuspecting (or sometimes very much suspecting) object of my affection accidentally on purpose. I was never very subtle about it, so it is just as well that the young men I tried to snare mostly did not turn up for those badly planned coincidences. In time I would get over those infatuations, lose interest or find someone else to swoon over, and nobody would get seriously hurt in the process. Generally speaking, I am grateful that I never hitched myself to any of the men I once admired. Some have changed into caricatures of their younger selves, but mostly it was I who has changed.
At age 28 I left my birth country, fleeing a broken heart. It was an impossible bond with a man already promised to another. He claimed that his marriage will not change what he felt for me but I did not want to become the other woman in a miserable triangle. I now look back and shake my head at the memory of the heartbroken immature person I was back then. I wonder whatever it was that I loved in a man who lacked true backbone. At the time I found him sensitive and caring, we heard love songs together, and cried over their sad words. To him perhaps I am the one who got away, the one he remembers after all the others sank under the weight of their years, or got lost within the folds of their traditional dress and traditional lives. Perhaps I am the equal partner he wants to be with instead of coming home to his servile and hopelessly dependent wife. To me, however, the sun has revolved over a dozen times around the sun, and I have walked halfway around the world, and the simple fellow who once read poetry to me has remained the same sad spineless figure, he belongs to the past to someone that used to be me.
All the others, including my ex, are a story that has been read and written to the end. They came, they saw, and they might have even conquered for a while, but they all left, on their own or on my bidding. Some hurt me, others got hurt, but eventually they will all fade from memory. Even those who brought smiles or happy times will fade, because memory is only worth as much as the person it keeps alive. Sometimes, I cherish the ancient memory of someone long gone from my life, because that person is still dear to my soul. That memory is treasured like the photo album of a happy childhood, and no matter how rarely it is looked at it always tugs at the heart. Other memories, are discarded, like that fancy dress bought on impulse, and worn only once, that inevitably finds its way to the donation pile, because seeing it in the wardrobe always reminds of a moment of poor taste.
And so it was amongst all the heartbreaks I went through, and all the hearts that I have broken. There is always the one who got away, the one I still remember. He was the boy I loved once when I was a girl. We spent the summer of my 14th year with his family, enjoying sun, sea and sand. He was not handsome in the classical sense, but he got me hooked on the warm depth of his brown eyes. He was not tall, but his enthusiasm for gymnastics gave him an impressive broad-shouldered figure. He was also very nimble and agile on his feet. Many years later I would be reminded of him when I looked into the eyes of an African Kudu, graceful, powerful with unbelievably gentle eyes.
The summer we first connected was our first major holiday back home after two years in Abu Dhabi. Our family holidays were always a noisy affair, we spent them with many relatives’ families in a shared block of flats in a coastal resort. My childhood hero and I became friends that summer, he was 18 then, almost a university student and thus worthy of my early adoration. Later, I ostensibly wrote letters to his sister, and was thrilled beyond measure when he sent the occasional reply on feather-light pink paper. I can still see his beautifully penned sentences, with the letters curling onto each other, and twisting in a symmetrical dance between the lines. Those letters were full of his understated somewhat crude boyish humor. I read them over and over again the winter that followed, hearing his deep chuckle in the words. That year I even tried to imitate his handwriting, ending up with a barely legible version of his elegant one for a while, until sanity prevailed and I returned to writing in my own unspectacular manner.
I think I forgot about him for a couple of years after that, when I went through serial crushes on soccer stars and singers. I was mad on pop music at the time, and there were many pretty boys on the charts then, like there is now. My Greater Kudu would feature again in my life during my first year at university, when my family returned home for good. We became close again, and this time friendship was destined to grow into something more. It was in fact a breath away from becoming serious, but I just annihilated it with one word. I snubbed the first guy I kissed, who was probably my only true soul-mate on the pretext that he was an atheist. People who know me today would find this hilarious, because the girl who fancied herself then some sort of a born-again Muslim has turned into an agnostic, highly critical of religion. It is also funny because less than ten years after snubbing a Muslim atheist I ended up marrying a Christian atheist, who only converted to Islam so that we could get married.
It has been almost twenty years since I let that boy get away. After my knee-jerk reaction to his love declaration, I think I secretly pined for him for a while and wished my harsh words away many times. But I met the man who would eventually drive me away from home. While my first love lost would move in ever widening circles around me until another woman would know his true worth and sweep him away to another continent. Around the same time I would be swept away too in an opposite direction.
In some uncanny way though, our lives took parallel courses. His wife had a previous marriage and children from that marriage, and so had my ex. Some twelve more years down the line we now live in the same city. There, the resemblance ends though, because he is happily married, has two delightful children with a wife who cherishes and appreciates him, more so because of what she suffered at the hands of her first husband. Ironically, her status as a divorcee, with children from her first marriage, set his whole family against the marriage for a long time. Nobody even raised an eyebrow when I was marrying a divorced man, who left two young children behind – but that is different story, for some other time.
Twice in as many days I have been told that I should be open to change in my life and look for a mate. One well-meaning friend and her mother spoke again about getting me to color my prematurely grey hair. And my supervisor at work told me that I should not let the child rule my life. Sometimes, like today for example, I feel they are right. My child who turns five tomorrow is a tyrant in the making, he figures he owns me. When I went on a long-deferred bike ride with him this afternoon, I could not even ride in a circle of twenty meters around him, and he did not want to ride next to me complaining it is too hard. In fact, I can hardly call my outings with him exercise because I normally ride so slow, that I always feel a breath away from toppling over. Not fun at all.
Yesterday I started thinking about relationships again. After breaking up the only dating experience I had since my divorce, I have come to the conclusion that I do not have it in me anymore to invest emotionally in a new relationship, with all the insecurities it brings. If I were ten or even six years younger maybe I would have had no other choice than to go through the endless questioning of am I beautiful enough, tall enough slim enough, or hot enough to be marketable with men.
Today, I do not want to market myself as a commodity or promote my female assets and attractive appearance. Yes, I may be open to love again, but it is a different type of love that I am looking for. When I was still brand new on the marriage market I settled for a second-hand candidate, who is much older but far less mature, so I got duped twice. Had I married the boy next door from back home, I would have had the wonderful comfort of being with someone I have known all my life, growing with him and through him. I gave this transformation process my best shot with my ex, and I changed dramatically to adapt to him, but even that hasn’t helped keep my marriage together. Today I feel I have neither the time nor the energy to learn about someone and adapt my personality to suit him, least of all a man who has never gone through the journey of a marriage.
When my supervisor raised the subject, and she is perhaps the nosiest woman this side of the Atlantic (a quality that comes naturally to almost all women of a certain age, from a certain are in the middle east), I brushed off her suggestion of having a boyfriend by saying that it is hard for me to shake off my conservative Arab identity and adopt a free attitude to casual relationships; I only wanted to protect myself from her nosiness. However, I feel that my excuse is not that far from the truth. Middle Eastern culture is one that expects a woman to mold herself to the wishes of her partner, so a traditional relationship is not entirely a 50-50 partnership, the woman does two-thirds of the work while a man, a good one that is, can get away with one-third. For a long time, women have resorted to various dubious methods to overcome this particular mindset, and they usually get their way by rejecting their men in bed, or denying certain privileges. These soft-power devices can only be used in traditional settings, and are thus becoming less prominent in the modern world. Nevertheless, the traditional role of women in a marriage will take longer to evolve into an equal partnership. Men still expect women to meet them more than halfway on most issues, and what is worse, is that mothers raise their daughters to lower their expectations in regards to partnership in marriage, thus repeating the cycle endlessly.
My parents have a traditional marriage. The role of my mother was mostly confined to raising the children and looking after the home. Thus, I was raised with these lowered expectations and carried them into my marriage. It took me almost seven years to realize that when things went wrong in my marriage, it was not because I could not cook, or did not keep the house up to the standards of my husband. After years of desperately trying, I understood that my marriage was a disaster, not because of my failure to meet the golden criteria of my ex. It just shattered because I was with a man who expected me to change completely to please him, while he was never ready to do so. The lesson was tough, and it took me too long to learn. That is why I am forever afraid to fall into the same trap. And that is why I am afraid of this traditional Arab identity to surface if I ever let my guard down and entered into a partnership where I felt the tiniest bit inferior.
This is perhaps what killed my relationship project. It came down to a woman in the middle of her life, and a younger man who is still starting his first test-run. I feared that at some point I will have to change too much, or sacrifice too much to make it work. I feared that I would be obliged to make myself look younger, maybe try for another child at the eleventh hour, or change too many of my ways to be accepted as a possible partner.
My friend’s mom already flashed the warning signal in my face. No matter how much men tell you they like you the way you are, they always love you in younger or prettier versions. This was true in my experience, and unfortunately it doesn’t even stop at the color of the hair, it went beyond to influence, taste, friendships, and private activities. Even how long you stay awake every night after husband falls asleep.
If my life was a Hollywood movie, I will meet tomorrow a single father, a blameless victim who is trying to rebuild a family for his kid, or stumble upon a long-lost male friend, who has finally found the courage too look for me after he became free himself. But, eish, as we say in South Africa, Hollywood this isn’t. It is just the drudgery of everyday life, and no matter how I wish for it, It is impossible to have an already broken-in husband, without first going through the pain and blisters of trying to fit a boyfriend. If I really wanted a mate, I will have to go to square one, and look amongst the junk, the flotsam of broken marriages, or the ones nobody bothered to pick in the first place. Try to sift the one genuine gem from mountains of fakes, and go through all the idiocy of dating, pretending, and trying to please. No sorry, not for me. I am particularly proud of who I am now, and where I am. I did not arrive here without pain or sacrifice, and I am comfortable and happy in my own skin. My gray head of hair suits me fine. My boy is my buddy and my companion and I enjoy being around him, most of the time. When the time comes for him to spread his wings and leave me for his own set of friends I will resort to my work or the activities I normally never have time for. I will not be different from many of my single childless friends, I will still be happy. I will not change to catch a man, I will not change to please or keep a man. I will only change to please the woman who looks at me from the mirror every morning, because she is the only person who is guaranteed to stay with me for the rest of my life.
I want to slip into a fold of time, and steal away a man from my past. I want to come back to this moment, to having him beside me, and the children we could have had. I want him to tell me that he lives through their smiles, and without them his life, is not a life that he wants. I want to raise our kids. I want to grow old with him, a man that I knew for more than half my life.
I want to be where desperate questions have become a certainty. Where I know that he is with me because we are, because we belong. Not because of fear, or lack of options.
I want to fast-forward the groping, the learning, the exploring, the desperate tug of war for boundaries. I want to know and be known to him like the palm of his open hand.
I want to be young again, and choose the right man, and still retain, the place where I now am.
I have been living in New York now for over a year, and time has once more flown and there are many things I failed to catch up with.
Last year, against all odds I had a very close brush with falling in love. It was not pretty. I had the anxiety, the heartache, I was worried, and I was jealous. Mostly though I felt guilty and uncomfortable. When this happened, it came out of nowhere, and after all the tears and the self-blame and the fear, it suddenly died down to nothing. When I finally put an end to it, I felt nothing but absolute relief.
This puts a new spin on my life. Now I have entered the realm of villains. I broke up, without thinking twice or giving any reason, with someone who has perhaps learned to love me. I am ashamed of this, a little, but I could not pretend love once it was gone. It is over, I face it, and live with the consequences. Now there is an awkward silence between two people who perhaps could have been friends, if it was not for a period of insanity when I allowed emotion to triumph over reason.
Last March Robert and I flew to South Africa, and shortly after that trip I decided to pull the plug on my ailing project of a relationship. Since April I have vowed to devote myself to my work, and to my son. I scarcely have time for myself, let alone the energy to nurture a relationship or heaven forbid a late second marriage. Besides, now that I am past forty I think it makes sense to play it cool. I am almost certainly past bearing another child, so why should I try to find a mate? Unfortunately, unlike my mother, I find myself often swayed from the kingdom of reason, especially that there is no lack of single men in the workplace. In all the years following my divorce I was always surrounded by married men, seriously involved men, or gay men. These are my kind of men, they are safe to flirt and joke with, and they are certainly off limits. I am immune to married men. Ironically, I was also safe when I was caught in the emotional wasteland of my marriage. I only started noticing other men when I broke away from it.
If it was not for my spectacular failure in my latest attempt at sharing my life with another person, I would have perhaps thrown caution to the wind, and got to know this new man that I noticed recently. But the memory and shame of that failure haunt me. I have come to suspect that, indeed, I am not fit to share with anyone.
My ex husband used to tell me that I was way too independent. He is right somewhat. I cannot bear being questioned and second guessed by a man. I would rather live with a man who did not care much, who left me some freedom, than succumb to someone who would censor my behavior with a boyfriend’s or husband’s authority. Needless to say that this train of thought and these developments in my life are starting to worry me. Therefore I will try to write about them again. Writing helped me very much through a divorce. Maybe it will protect me from setting myself up to fall in love again, because I know in advance that any romantic project I enter into will be certainly doomed to failure. Married life is not for me. Kudos to my ex who is busy trying it for the 3rd time.
The year 2010 is for me definitely a watershed year, where I tested the ropes on great many things and I am glad with the way they all turned out.
Early this year I finally made what I have been threatening to do for a long time, namely quit my office part-time job and concentrate on my home-based translation business. The decision was brought on after long consideration, and quite by chance on the day I handed in my resignation I found out that I qualified for an interview for a translation job with a high-profile international organization. Of course, this did not mean I got the job but at least I travelled to the interview unencumbered by excuses to an employer, and I faced my interviewing panel as an independent language practitioner.
In April I found out that I passed the interview too and I braced myself for a long wait, loitering in a roster, without any idea when or where I will be called, but this did not concern me much at the time, there were other things to look forward to.
In June the World Cup came to South Africa, and my desire to live the experience to the full was also one of the reasons behind quitting my job. Robert had a prolonged holiday from school and we had our fill of the festivities, street parties and the fan walk. I was also fortunate enough to see two matches live, including the one Semi Final held in Cape Town between the Netherlands and Uruguay.
I am a World Cup baby, and I celebrated my 40th this year in style. And a ticket to Algeria Vs England was a present to myself (the match itself a dud though). My birthday month also saw me sign a contract for buying a tiny new flat in a brand new block just around the corner from where I am renting. It was a huge leap of faith as I was not sure whether I can afford it, but my parents stepped in and rescued me with a generous loan that saved me from resorting to the banks (and risking getting turned down by them). My flat was scheduled for completion in February 2011.
Later in the year I had some stress with deadline and projects but in general I gently plodded on doing my work, looking after Robert and not forgetting to have a good time.
Late in October the saga with my lengthy job application progressed one step further and I was nominated for a job in New York. The rest of the year I spent doing some paperwork and speculating about how long the process will take.
I finally told Robert’s father of these plans in November and he did not take it easily. I had a few days of emotionally exhausting talks with him, where I stood firm on the fact that my life is going on – without him. He understood that the move will only benefit Robert in the long run. I met him halfway, by offering him to rent my new apartment at a rate considerably less than market value. Of course he was very pleased with that. He saw the flat with me a few days after Christmas and was involved in suggesting some minor changes.
Befitting my new amicable relationship with my ex we had a picnic on Christmas day at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, and he was with us to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
We had a simple celebration at home with music and dancing (provided by Robert). We had champagne then walked downtown to watch the Christmas Lights on Adderley Street. Later we came home and had a quick late supper then walked up to Ocean View Drive to watch the fireworks at midnight. It was a quiet end to a wonderful year and I hope 2011 will be just as great.
My ex will not win any prizes for tact this lifetime. I have suffered enough for his tact throughout our marriage but mostly during the awful times around our divorce. It could have been worse, of course, had I at any point contested the divorce, asked for more child support or a better settlement.
One of his most awful deeds at that time was forwarding the acrimonious emails of his mom and his older sister to my inbox. The emails had been intended for his eyes only, hateful words against me from people who hardy know me, that might have massaged his pride and given him the support he “needed” in a predicament he most certainly asked for. I was extremely hurt by his action at the time-which I assume was his intention in the first place. Nevertheless, this action went unpunished on my side because at the time I still cared, and most importantly I still needed him to look after Robert while I tried to get back to work. To tell the truth I do not believe I could ever punish my ex for anything because I am fully aware of my son’s love to him and I do not want to be the one to demonize his beloved papa for him; soon enough he will get to know him by himself and make a judgment. I will not extend the same curtsey though to the mother and older sister of my ex, I still want nothing to do with them and that relationship will never be salvaged. My rationale is that my son has only one father but more than one aunt and he has a loving grandmother already. Maybe it is also my way to punish my ex indirectly since I cannot get him directly.
Today featured the latest installments of tact from my ex. He dropped off our son with me while I was attending a baby shower with the girls. I noticed a yellow envelope in the front pocket of Robert’s baby bag. I took it out to see writing that looked familiar. On one side of the envelope it said: “From: Duzi* (brown-noser)” the other side said: “To: XXX (boss)”
I could not believe my eyes, it was a birthday card I had given him in 2004 or more likely in 2005 (the year I first attempted to split up with him). What is the purpose of giving it back? I have no idea and I do not care. The card however gave me an insight into the woman I was five or six years ago, feeling the pain, the pressure, the joylessness of my life and still trying and struggling to put a brave face on it, and still loving in my own helpless way. It definitely did not make me miss that marriage.
At the time I was helping my ex run a service station in the Eastern Cape and he was my boss. It was perhaps the toughest few years in my life both personally and professionally. Not even getting thrown out of my home with a six-month old baby comes close, because in the Eastern Cape I was oh, so alone. I had no friends, and no support whatsoever. It is no wonder that in the end I sought the help of people who were almost strangers to me, to make my break and escape.
In the Eastern Cape I visited a therapist for the first time in my life. During that maiden session I poured out my disappointment and grief about a marriage that has never really given me any joy. I spoke of a husband who almost always undermined me. I will never forget the therapist asking me whether there was anything good in that marriage, and me finally admitting that there wasn’t. I haven’t been to a therapist again after that. That session was a watershed experience and set in motion my escape out of that marriage. Soon after that I drove from the Eastern Cape to Cape Town. My ex, having realized that there was no stopping me changed his tact at that crucial juncture and started prying on my emotions my still present love – or dependency, on him.
It was to be the beginning of a couple of years where I remained torn between leaving and staying, and I ended up deciding to stay once our son was conceived. It is ironic that after all that the final decision of divorce was forced upon me, but it was the correct thing to do. I have never looked back. I do not look back unless the memory is forced upon me like it was with this card.
I will just post it here for the record. It meant something in its time, but it is now just a piece of history. All I can say is, why the heck does he return the card and not return the books I gave him as presents all these years, now that would have been something I can use.
*Duzi is the nickname my ex gave me. I never looked it up and now I think he meant doozy. It is given many meanings in the urban dictionary among them: bizarre, daunting, but also extraordinary. Knowing my ex I doubt he ever meant it in a nice way. It was rather an expression of how odd he found me.
August will mark the five years anniversary to my arrival in Cape Town, a time when I finally faced up to the fact that perhaps I did not want to go on with the status quo of my marriage. You may say, and correctly that it took me a long time to realize it, but well, that is the way things were.
From where I am sitting now I shake my head in wonder. How on earth was I bullied to think for nine years that I was to blame for all the ills of this relationship. How did I ever accept the verdict of my husband and his judgment on everything when I was an adult with a healthy common sense myself. It all goes down to upbringing and culture. My mother – bless her and keep her healthy- is the most wonderful woman in the world but by her example she encouraged a subservience to the male head of the family, and unfortunately for myself and my sister we did not have any other examples to a healthy balanced relationship. If you add to that the fact that my ex is 13 years my senior with that much more experience than myself, a female who had a very sheltered upbringing, you may understand where my feeling of inferiority came from. Regardless, of the reasons I was intimidated into thinking that it was always me to blame until East London.
I am often reprimanded about my fondness for East London, a sleepy town in the Southern African province of the Eastern Cape. Admitting that you lived there is apparently extremely uncool. East London to me is the place where I finally rose up emotionally to my chronological age. It was a long, long time coming.
I will always remember East London for its rolling dunes and beautiful beaches, for the twin rivers that border it and for the simple uncomplicated people who live there. One day I will go there again with someone I love whether it is a partner or a son it does not matter, but I would like to show someone what I found there… I found myself.
It was a long journey that I made alone, without the help of a mother, a sister, a trusted girlfriend or even an agony aunt, but I did have a therapist. It was back in July 2005 that I saw a therapist in East London, I tried desperately to speak to someone and even in such a sleepy hollow as this town -or perhaps exactly for that reason- therapists were booked for months in advance. This one had a slot after two weeks, maybe she was not that good. The only thing I remember about her place is the cream-colored couch and the light pastels of her consultation room. During the hour session, the woman did not speak much she just listened and commented and in that hour I articulated all the negative feelings accumulated throughout six years of marriage. The therapist made the appropriate noises and comments throughout and pointed me to the road that I have already glimpsed when I phoned for an appointment. It was not love that I was living it was an act of willful manipulation. It was time for me to break free and I did.
One month later found me on the shores of Cape Town. A few miles away from the Cape of Good Hope, and to me it was Good Hope. I had a lot of time to reflect on my past life and to think about the way forward; what I really want for my future. I could not, or was not allowed to severe my marriage completely, because at the time my husband kept trying to win me back, for the wrong reasons now I know. It was the first time though since coming to South Africa where I lived according to my own rules, without having to defer to his every strict edict. I had a great time and indulged in simple pleasures that were not allowed at home: Staying up late, sleeping in, reading in bed, chocolate, cheese and many other treats and junk foods that were extremely frowned upon in my married life. I exercised when I wanted to, and rediscovered the simple joy of doing things for pleasure, not because I needed to break a sweat or do a chore. I also enjoyed the company of Spliff the cat, who shared my bed on some cold winter nights, another no-no in my husband’s dictionary.
The people I shared a house with – two singles dealing with their own problems with relationships and life- gave me plenty of insight, advice and anecdotes, and together we formed an unlikely but rewarding friendship. I enjoyed their company, more so because they also fell on the disagreeable side of my partner’s rules, he had something against overweight women and gay men.
Along with all these personal benefits, things were slowly going my way on a professional level. I bought a computer and worked on my first large freelance translation project, while I also attended interviews for jobs in Cape Town.
Still, no matter how successful I was, or how much I rationalized my relationship and analyzed its glaring flaws, there were many hurdles to conquer mentally and emotionally. I was helped along by a song that came out that year: All These Things I have Done by the Killers.
I would wake up at night sometimes to listen to FM radio on my headphones and would start humming along to the beautiful melody and the lyrics. Unlike the hopelessness of Losing My Religion, somehow there was an underlying theme of hope in this one, and the person crying for help, finds or at least expects to find a way out.
The best part for me was the refrain of : I’ve Got Soul But I am Not a Soldier. It translated my exact feelings: I do have a heart and emotions and I am capable of love and hope, but I will not continue this endless battle of my marriage, it doesn’t have to be that way.
The video of that lovely track, and the lyrics are below.
When there’s nowhere else to run
Is there room for one more son
One more son
If you can hold on
If you can hold on, hold on
I wanna stand up, I wanna let go
You know, you know – no you don’t, you don’t
I wanna shine on in the hearts of men
I wanna mean it from the back of my broken hand
Another head aches, another heart breaks
I am so much older than I can take
And my affection, well it comes and goes
I need direction to perfection, no no no no
Help me out
Yeah, you know you got to help me out
Yeah, oh don’t you put me on the back burner
You know you got to help me out
Yeah
And when there’s nowhere else to run
Is there room for one more son
These changes ain’t changing me
The gold-hearted boy I used to be
Yeah, you know you got to help me out
Yeah, oh don’t you put me on the back burner
You know you got to help me out
Yeah, you’re gonna bring yourself down
Yeah, you’re gonna bring yourself down
Yeah, you’re gonna bring yourself down
[x10]
I got soul, but I’m not a soldier
I got soul, but I’m not a soldier
Yeah, you know you got to help me out
Yeah, oh don’t you put me on the back burner
You know you got to help me out
Yeah, you’re gonna bring yourself down
Yeah, you’re gonna bring yourself down
Yeah, oh don’t you put me on the back burner
You’re gonna bring yourself down
Yeah, you’re gonna bring yourself down
Over and in, last call for sin
While everyone’s lost, the battle is won
With all these things that I’ve done
All these things that I’ve done
If you can hold on
If you can hold on
I read in one interpretation that the lyrics are written from the viewpoint of God. Speaking how people turn to Him only when they need help, which makes sense. However, like any work of art this song evokes different feelings, images and memories in different people. The message for me was hope, eventually I shall prevail, or find help, I have what it takes.
In April 2008, I moved with my six-month old son Robert to the same house that welcomed me when I first arrived in Cape Town. I was determined this time to finish what I failed to do almost three years ago. The circumstances this time were more difficult than the first time around, but on some levels I was much happier. I never took walks alone to the beach anymore and wondered about my future, I never worried about what I would do about love. I had all the love and the future I wanted in my son. When my song played, there were two of us to dance to it.
As my life starts to get into some semblance of orderliness and my son slowly outgrows his attachment to mommy, my mind starts to wander and think about relationships and whether I am ready for a new one in my life.
Since my divorce I have put myself completely out of that market-place, and Cape Town is notorious for being the wrong place to put yourself on the singles market if you were a straight woman. A straight man meanwhile will have lots on offer for his person, my ex can testify to this as he had started “seeing someone” before I even left. I remember asking him very offhand about another woman a week or so before I was pushed into leaving, and he went ballistic. His rage was so animated and full of pointed fingers, it shocked me into noncommittal silence, and told me more than I really wanted to know.
My ex is perhaps the strongest factor putting me off a relationship, because in all honesty there nothing that I miss about that marriage. For me it was a short step away from a wasteland in every way, and every year that passes gives me more reasons to celebrate rather than regret my divorced status. Celibacy is fine once you get used to it, and Arab women are well-designed to cope with and accept frustration on that front, so I have no reason to complain like many of my female friends do when they spend a long period of drought in relationships and sex.
An Arabic saying goes: Solitude is better than the unworthy companion, and I spend my evenings living this wisdom. My days are filled with my son and life is good, so far. Still sometimes I wonder, should I ever venture into this territory of relationships, what is there for me to find? What do I have to offer? After all, I have half of my life behind me.
Sometimes I feel sad when I contemplate all the things I have missed. I have had a childhood love, a first love, and a committed love and they have all failed for me, and in this failure I have become more cautious, afraid and cynical. I believe that I will never have the same capacity for giving in a relationship as I had in the past, and I fear that I will never really know the next man in my life. After all, it took me nine years and a divorce to truly know my ex.
A friend of mine has been with the man who is now her husband almost forever. She knows this man’s feelings and quirks like she knows herself, it must be such a great comfort to sleep next to a man who you can trust, whose history you know, who was your best friend’s brother or just the guy next door whose mother is your mom’s friend. You might have gone to school with the first girl he dated, or you might have giggled and gossiped about him with your girlfriends long before he wriggled his way into your heart and your life. The circumstances of my life did not allow for such a relationship. I grew up away from my birth country and the summers were fertile times for fantasy and short infatuations but these do not survive over long distances and do not outlive the volatility of teenage feelings. Another impediment in my character is that I am not easily impressed by the guys I meet, and even in my younger years I gravitated towards older men rather than boys of my age. In forty years of life, my heart fluttered for no more than half a dozen men. Some of my loves were platonic and childish, others were merely one-sided crushes whose only product was love-lorn sighs and a heightened sensitivity to love songs. Ironically, my lack of experience in relationship dynamics were often brought up by my ex as one of my key failures.
I don’t know how anyone can condemn such a thing as the lack of history, especially when it is such a transient state in anybody’s life. I have missed out on meeting the man whose history I would become, I was just a station in the life of my husband, he came to me from a history of another marriage and went on -I presume- to his future as a brooding single man, whose mysterious sadness and misfortune in marriage would intrigue and touch the hearts of many unsuspecting women as it did mine.
Please do not get me wrong, dear blog. I am not actively seeking to complicate my life with a relationship. At the moment I am content to put my head to the grindstone. I work to pay the bills and forge a decent future for my son. The joy I have in life almost exclusively revolves around him. Occasionally, however, I do catch the passing interest of a person, from the straight male variety, but they mostly spell TROUBLE in red capital letters for me. There is the balding middle-aged guy who greets me every morning as I make my daily trip to Robert’s school. He must be well off I tell myself because he has his breakfast every day at that fancy coffee shop cum deli in Green Point. Perhaps he does have a wife, or a couple of ex wives who are glad to be rid of him, who knows. There is the journalist and media specialist I met on one of my assignments, I went out with him for coffee once, and he makes no secret that he has a family somewhere out-of-town. I exchange friendly chats with him every once in a while but I do not see this going anywhere past amicable friendship. There is also the businessman I met on my flight to Geneva, he is getting a boat built here in Cape Town, and he will sail it one day towards Europe. He is smart and wealthy but he reminds me too much of my ex, someone who can tell a thousand and one stories about the world but is uncomfortable divulging information about his private life. This man also has an ex-wife, with grown children, and a two-year-old daughter by another woman. He did not say whether she was also an ex or a current partner; I am more than familiar with this type of omission.
These poor possibilities of relationship may seem sad to anyone else but I am a realist. Also since I was raised in the Arab misogynist society I am less likely to question the fairness of partnership equations when it comes to long-term relationships between men and women. In my culture as long as a man can financially provide and can function in the bedroom then he can marry any woman he sets his mind on; age and compatibility in minor things such as education are not a consideration. Rich men in oil kingdoms are well-known for fathering dozens of kids by teenage wives well into their sixties and seventies. This was before the age of Viagra and co, and I am sure modern Arab men can continue to break records in the next few generations. My birth country is not one of those rich oil fiefdoms and people generally have a hard time providing for one family, and this is perhaps the only reason Syrian men stick to one wife, although many of them can and will be unfaithful at some stage.
I left my birth country at 28 to go and work in the United Arab Emirates. While I was at home I still got offers of marriage from reasonably aged and decently educated men. Things changed when I went to the playground of the wealthy and would-be wealthy. An octogenarian with whom I had a professional conversation while I was working as a secretary started hinting at marriage, and a colleague of my father’s whom I know to have a wife and family in rural Egypt also tried to make me consider relocating with him to the land of the Nile. Thinking back at how depressed these encounters made me, I feel lucky that I said yes to my ex husband. At least he was younger, better-looking and more educated and intelligent than my other suitors. So if this was my lot at 28/29 years, what can I expect as a single mother of 40? Not much.
I cannot rewrite my history or unlearn what I have learned over the past decade, so the next man in my life will have a woman who cannot love as freely as she did before, which is really a shame, and my previous experience makes me shy away from any man with a past, and the only solution I find is to look for a younger partner. I don’t know why this is such a bad idea, especially in my society. History tells us that Mohammad’s first wife was a woman with history and many previous husbands. She was rich and perhaps offered stability and comfort to the younger man. Early Arabs did not have qualms about a woman marrying a younger man, it is only modernity that made such a partnership unacceptable.
Of course this is only fantasy at this stage. I cannot think of one good reason to venture again into the uncertainty of partner search. We all know that the good ones are already raising their children with their blissfully happy wives. The good-looking widower who is a single father to a child? This is a figment of the imagination or something that we saw on Sleepless in Seattle and even then he would go for the single woman who never married.
Not even escape literature has a willing partner for the 40-something single mom. All heroines of romance novels seems to be blushing virgins (not the case for the males of course). That said, perhaps there is a niche market for me, writing trashy escape novels for desperate middle-aged females.. My first novel will feature a 40-something single mom and the 30-something single hunk who falls for her; dreams are free.
Last week I reconnected with a dear friend from the home country and we had an online chat. The talk led me down memory lane and made me think of old songs and music that I listened to in the past, songs that punctuated my life and formed a sort of accompanying sound track to its incidents.
I think everyone has these songs, those that we fell in love to, and those that helped us fall out of love. Because of my background my soundtrack is an odd mixture of influences and genres, my current iPod play list has songs in Arabic, English, Spanish and German in addition to instrumentals, new age and podcasts. For this blog though I will stick with songs that have special significance for my life.
The melancholy strings of REM’s Losing My Religion take me back to my marriage. I picture myself sitting next to my husband in the car humming along to the words that spoke of my life.
My marriage was a singular fight of trying to keep up with my ex and trying to squeeze out a little bit of love and appreciation out of him. I often felt I was stuck in a corner, especially at the beginning of our relationship when I literally had nobody to turn or speak to. Sometimes I thought the feelings we shared originated only in my wishful thinking or my dreams, because there was nothing tangible in my life to show that he loved me. That is exactly what I thought the singer was talking about when he said:
That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spot light losing my religion. Trying to keep up with you and I don’t know if I can do it. Now I said too much, I haven’t said enough. I thought that I heard you laughing, I thought that I heard you sing. I think I thought I saw you try.
Listening to it now is like riding in an emotional time capsule, it takes me back ten years to the feelings, the emotions and the torment. I can see myself then, in the passenger seat of a car on a Johannesburg free-way, humming along to the song next to a silent and brooding partner. Yes, that was me in the corner.. No more, no more.
The Loskop Diaries 