Looking into my Past

I came up with an idea today to do a blog around women and their lives.  I feel that my safehouse experience of twelve years has enabled me to see the ways women do not have agency in their lives.  When a woman has to leave her husband or other any other person to  be safe, we know it can raise hell for herself and others.  She made be isolated and have no one to help her.  I am thinking it is one of the hallmarks of not being able to live her life as she wishes.  I had to hide out from my first husband for many months after I left him. I finally was able to see him a year later, after he decided to listen to the rules of combat.  It also lelped that he wanted to see the kids and Had no overnights until the next year, when I had a friend who could make him behave.  Thank goodness for small favors.  Until then he had to meet them In a police station.

I thought I was raised to be independent, but in retrospect I was actually raised to be a feminist clone.  I rad some authority in my home, being the elder, but it was clear that nothing much was expected of me in comparison to my 2 ¾ younger brother.  He had red hair and green eyes, and was the center of attention from the get go.  I had black hair and eyes, and I really was unable to compete.  I think my father loved me, but my mother really preferred my brother.  I was told how difficult I had been, and It was capped off by falling down the stairs at five.  They said another quarter inch and I would have died.  My brother was easy in comparison.  He did have a few episodes, but they were comoflauged by his charm and grace.  

I thought I was fine, now I see how upset and unable I was to voice and feelings of my own.  My mother had become a nightmare form of herself and she drank way too much.  I had no friends.  My brother was obsessed with football and his friends, and I felt so alone.  My father had to hold down the fort, and that left me very alone.  I did talk to my best friend Marilyn, But she was now three thousand miles away.  I slowly made some friends, but not the ones I wanted, instead they were the friends I developed through my Methodist Youth group.  By my senior year I had gotten contacts and was growing my hair out and I had a boyfriend of sorts, Larry.  But underneath I was still miserable, and I had no idea what I wanted to do.  My father said if I went to Stanford I’d have to live at home, so I decided on Berkeley.  I had no idea of what I really wanted to do and no way of voicing any of that to my father.  

What a fool I was at that time.  I had no one to express my feelings with, and I bounced around from person to person, without really caring.  I worked for my father that summer and the rest of the time I fooled around with David Bjourling, a darling guy whom I dated without really caring about him.  When I went to a weekend with people from my uncoming class, I fell in love with my friend Dean Jensen, and that was it for David.  He definitely deserved better.  I was assuming my younger brother would be fine.  He had not yet become an alcoholic.  I ignored what lay ahead.  When I hit college I was busy with classes, tests and getting the lay of the land.  Dean showed up, but after I had cut off part of my hair.  Everyone wondered why he’d chosen me, but I saw him as a buffer on the few times I saw him, and I had no idea he was going to leave for a boat to Brazil at the end of the semester.  We had Thanksgiving together at my house, and I was so proud of him.  What he said to me before he left was agonizing.  He said we would end up married.  If course that is what I did anyway.  But not to him.

I was in full fledged Withdrawal mode by my second semester at Cal.  Gary was in his second year of high school.  He was very popular, a great student and athlete.  I was falling apart.  And thus began my years of falling for Sadiq’s psychobabble and letting him ruin my life.  I was an accident waiting to happen.  I was working again for Levi’s in the Credit department, and I rushed around pretending to be happy.  I was actually miserable, and in the summer had a fling with a boy from Brandish here for the summer.  I only slept with him a handful of times, but he seemed to think I would leave my university and follow him to Brandeis.  When I didn’t he wrote a terrible letter to my parents, and as a result, I had to iie about Sadiq, who I still saw occasionally.  We ignored my parents pleas to break up, and in January of that year I married Sadiq without any help or advice from anyone.  On our honeymoon for two days in Carmel, I discovered that he had been clcked out of The college, but had been reinstated after our marriage.  He switched to Economics from Math.  I had not known any of this, and his lack of  sharing things Stunned me.  I also did not know that I would have to attend junior college until he would be able to transfer, so I spent a year of junior college with him and though my grades were As, They transferred everything as C’s.  When I came to Berkeley, it turned out that Sadiq had to go to Cal State hayward, as ne didn’t get in to Berkeley.  So we were on our own, with little help from others.  My parents came around, and we saw them pretty frequently.  

What happened to me?  I know I was okay before we moved to Warsaw, but after I lost a sense of myself.  I maybe was better off In a small town with less challenges.  I lost myself and I didn’t get found again.  I never should have married Sadiq, and maybe I was in love with the idea of being in love..  Certainly I loved the thought of Sadiq being from a country half way around the world.  And I loved the glamour of it.  But I knew nothing about the place or people, and I expected people to give me a chance.  So, anyway, I embarked on a course of being a second class citizen.  I gave up my place at Berkeley to take classes at College of San Mateo, For which I received C’s.  despite the fact that I earned all A/s.  We found a place in Hillsborough, over the garage house.  I enjoyed the fact that I was the housekeeper for 14 roomS and seven bathrooms, and Sadiq was the gardener.  But what was I doing here?  I still don’t know.  I gave up any chance of a good record.  I was involved in many many beliefs that were not really my own.

Well, what can I tell you?  I was nineteen, back in the area where I had lived, and working as a housekeeper for a big estate.  The night before I married, I realized my mystake, but I went through with it anyway.  There was poison in the chimney of our garage apartment, and The Police had to come to check everything out.  The parademetics cleaned out the chimney,, and we were able to go back to sleep.  But I knew, I knew it meant I should not be marrying and yet I went through with it.  The parson was a friend of the person who helped me marry.  Sadiq had forced me Into a wedding where I had no no input and no responsibility.  When we married, I knew it was a mistake.  I just went through the ceremony and accepted Whatever happened.  We had a vacation of two days in Carmel, during which time Sadiq told me he’d been dismissed and only reinstated after he married.  So now I would have to have a year of c’s in my record, and not return until Sadiq could follow.  Well, that did not happen.  I took care of it all by ignoring everything that came my way.   I was a housekeeper  now, and my husband a gardener.  I lived close to my parents, but my friends were limited.  The were now chosen by Sadiq.  My former roommate, Leslie, had to leave school as well, because her husband was drafted into the army.  That is what we did in those days.  Whatever the man needed, we were there.

I happened to realize, after my marriage, that my life was really no longer my own if it ever was.  I was ruled by my father, then ruled by my husband.  But I never really saw myself as independent anyway.  I quickly reversed direction so my father had way less power, but my Husband had more.  I went to school and back, but did not see another people.  My friends weere few and not prioritized.  My husand’s friends became the norm.  I loved one friend of his especially:  A friend from the Braham class in India.  He dared to stand up for me, and one night he told Sadiq to stop bothering me, because I was not Fast enough with the food.  Sadiq threw me in the closet.  I should have known right then to leave him, but where would I have gone?  My parents were not inclined to help, not after what I had done.  My mother was more forgiving, but she did not weld the power.  I was especially fond of her going with me to search for apartments when we decided to move after the first semester at San Mateo Junior College.  I became Discouraged because nobody would let me look at apartments.  When she accompanied me, she actually found a place that didn’t care if I was part of an interacial couple.  Thus we moved to a place nearer my parents the second semester.  I owe that to My Mom. 

I am really thrilled with how my mother became my friend.  After being more distant In High school, she developed much more compassion for me when I “fell”. She perhaps was noticing problems with Gary, and maybe also she felt closer to me now that I had fallen more to her level.  And perhaps also Gary’s probems were coming to light.  I feel like they didn’t really know Gary at all, but in my junior year they were about to find out.  So our bridge nights with them were about to take on new meaning.  She was a fantastic homemaker, and all those little touches were important to me now that I was not much more than a homemaker myself.  

I Loved our nights, for the most part, except I remember one night when the battle was so brutal than they called an ambulance for me and I had to breathe into a paper bag to get my breath.  I know that all the emotions around me were more than I could bear.  And there were the times when what was under the surface was not visible but clearly there.  By the time my brother was a senior, he had not figured out what he wanted to do, but I think he was by then an alcoholic.  I could not understand what the problem was, and we went bacjk and forth his senior year, until he finally admitted that he was going to take a job with United Airlines and think about what to do later.

I’d like to continue with my recollections of my life post Sadiq.  After we settled into our apartment after leaving the Hillsborough estate, I began working in an All-you-can-eat restaurant.  This meant little or no tips, but It was all I could find.  I especially loved making potatoes In a yogurt sauce and wrapped in dough.    I Liked waitressing, and stuck it out until we were ready to move back to Berkeley.  I found us an apartment, one of three, across the street from a Right Aid drugstore on Shattuck next to a Safeway.  It was easy to commute to school and work.  By that time I had a job five nights a week from 5-9 in the J.C. Penneys credit department.  It was exhausting, but it made ends meet.   Sadiq did find some friends but I didn’t.  We mainly ate eggs and toast.  I learned to love scrambled eggs, and if I was hungry I made myself lots of toast.  I also did small jobs like training for dance classes and playing with two kids twice a week.  I loved children.  I really wanted to have my own after graduation.

I never realized how much what I did with after we moved to Berkeley changed my life, possibly because I didn’t have the time or make the effort to examine it.  I realized that just being back at Berkeley changed my life again for the better.  I hoped that I would somehow make up for the fact that I’d lost a year.  I didn’t yet realizeI that all my junior college courses would be straight c’s.  And I had no idea what my lack of preparation would mean to me in the future.  I had no time to figure out methods and spend time at the library.  I earned many A’s, but In my last semester I got a c in my last class in English.  I had no time and no vision for what a paper on Troilus  and Cressida should be.  I knew I had done a bad job of it.  I was trying to wing it.  I figured I would never use it anyway.  But I was wrong.  I Landed a job as an English teacher, one of the first two female teachers in Marist Brothers High School.  I was thrilled.  

In the meantime, I struggled with Loans and paid back all of our loans from college.  I stayed behind in the fall and became a trainee for Social Security on Market Street in San Francisco.  And who was in my class as well?  Marsha Tingle.  We were both married and we renewed our relationship while firting with the Japanese guy in the class.  I lived with my parents, and after we paid off our loans, in Jaunary, after seeing my Dad’s grandparents in Missouri, I flew to Fiji, only in those days we had to have a layover in the airport to continue to Fiji.  

So despite myself, I continued on my revenevue with Fiji.  I took the plane in a new lime green frock with a striped coat to match and my new sandals.  My brother and parents said goodbye and and off I went.  I arrived in Fiji after very little sleep and was immediately amazed by how much seemed familiar to me.  The airport on the dry side of the island, the hardscrabble state of the compound, which was tiny, and the distance to the cows, who brought milk to my grandfather.  He was very kind and we took a lot of photos of my in my white sari and the other people with their regalia.  I couldn’t speak Hindi and they knew no English, so it was a three years late wedding.  I was just happy to be finally there, and we stayed for a couple of days eating and communicating with everyone there, and then we drove up the coast to the wet side of the island and and found a three bedroom place that was my idea of perfection.  Despite the weather, I was happy with my new job and my life.  I learned to tell people that I was an American,  but I was married to a Fijian.  We learned how to catch the bus, and soon had a car, an old dodge.  I loved the school, which was the best high school in Fiji.  My friends were happy, and Sadiq found a job as an academic, but soon switched to the Bureau of Statistics.  I thought he would be happy there, and he was, until his good friend Phillip eventually won the top spot instead of him.

 My continuing my saga of my description of my first days in Fiji.  We wined and dined ourselves in Lautoka, Then settled into our jobs in Suva.  We had so little Support that I settled myself with a lesson plan and Elizabeth followed my lead.  I grouped our lessons and the consequences which we needed to produce in order to pass muster in a way that seemed logical.  I loved the literature.  We had great fun in the classroom at times, but we also had the boys who said a woman had nothing to teach them and that an interacial couple were a bad example to us.  I ignored the criticism as much as I could.  I also gave them Ideas that they could not comprehend on their own.  I had some great moments as well, when I let them talk about which witch is which and how to train a person to be a witch.  We had a great deal of fun, when we didn’t get lost in the battle.  I also taught ethics for the boys who were not Catholic, but it was a sorted affair.  I tried my best, but they all thought arranged marriage was best, and I only had the one white boy who thought otherwise.  I  had no idea about how to reach them, and I convinced nobody about own ideas.  Rather I began to wonder if they were not the ones with sounder ideas.  I really enjoyed teaching, but after I became pregnant I had doubts about continuing and Sadiq convinced me to quit.  That left us with half our income and me with nothing much to do.  

 

I was Fine after the initial couple of months.  I Didn’t know what to do with myself,and we moved two more times until we settled on a duplex outside of town.  We also had three cars, including the first one, Which  we decided was too dangerous, as our car was firebombed.  We ended up with a Vauxhall, though in those days we had no seat belts or restraints for the baby, when he arrived.  While I languished at home, we were at least trying to control an independent movement of bipartisan participation  for independence.  I attended those meetings and others, as well as doing my thing with Colleen.  She was a white girl with red hair and green eyes who was a apple cheeked and ample friend of mine.  She was adopted and in those days could not discover her birth parents.  She was not married to Noku yet, but we soon convinced them to marry, and it was delightful ceremony.  We had a grand time celebrating.  Of course, soon after we left Fiji, they divorced.  It did not last.  But we were happy in those days.  I suppose we were united mainly by our interracial marriages, and in those days few people had them. Those statistics must have changed by now.  I remember how sweet she was, and how much I depended on her.  My brother, mother and father came to Fiji for 3 weeks, but no baby.  He was finally born Feb 2.  RiyadSadiq Koya, a 6 lb 5 oz baby boy.  Sadiq’s mother did not come out, but his father took a bus and visited us overnight, probably because it was a boy.