Abuse

My relationship with men is strange, or I seem to deliberately come across bad apples because they fit a pre-fabricated image of what a relationship looks like to me, because I tend to victimize myself, because this is what I grew up with. Good men confuse me and I become undeceive as to what I should feel towards them.

My mother got home late tonight. My father is with his second wife tonight and my mother exploits every minute of freedom when he is not home. She threw her self at the couch, kicked off her high heels, slipped of her leather red jacket exposing a top with bear shoulders. My mother started telling me, my sisters and her mother about this Iraqi woman who lives in Jordan with her husband and three children. The husband has put her under house arrest and he hits her. My mother's advice was to tolerate him for the sake of her children. In the past I would attack my mother for such statements. Now I keep quiet but my resentment shows on my face. “what do you want me to tell her!” mother gives me a defensive look. “She has no degree, no skills and no residency in Jordan. She should keep her children in school, under a roof, in warm clothes what am I suppose to advise her!” she was trying to convince me that she was right. Again I said nothing. I felt helpless.

I can't begin to tell how often I heard women justify their husbands' and fathers' abusiveness. From the horrors of Noor's father who called a man a stud for molesting his daughter while calling his daughter – 15 at the time – a whore, to Wassan being raped on her wedding night while the husband's brothers and cousins waited outside the bedroom cheering and demanding to see the blood-stained wedding sheet to prove her virginity to many other stories of the sort that I grew up repulsed at the thought of intimacy. I must give my ex husband the credit for being a very patient man.

Now that I find myself sexually and intellectually more open I hit uninhibited territories and I'm confused. Non Arab men are exceptionally confusing to me. I want all the liberties their societies have. I suppose I find them just as exotic as they find me. “you need to stop doing this to yourself, it's very destructive behavior.” he told me on the phone the other night. I thought of him and remembered some of the positive things he told me about myself such as the potential I have, all the men who will want to keep me company and all the successes I will have once I am out of this strict environment. He sees in me the woman I want to become but I still feel clumsy around him because I can't shake the victim in me that I am accustomed to. “and why are you telling her this, its not like she could hold on to HER husband.” my grandmother said to my mother thus closing the argument. I rest my case. I'm off to bed.