A Journey into Conversion - Part II

Continued from Part I

This is a true story - mine. This is the second part of many

A Journey into Conversion
Part II

And then there was Joe; the nephew of my new neighbor I’ll call Helen.

I’m not exactly sure how the love affair started, but I recall going for a walk with Helen, the kids and Joe to the Windsor waterfront to see the Peace Fountain. Windsor is quite romantic, with its summer humidity and the lights of Detroit at dusk.

There was already a tense attraction between Joe and I. He had only been in Canada two years but knew how to break this tension asking how Canadians approached each other when they wanted love.

I laughed. I told him they go to bars and stand around not saying anything to anyone unless one is drunk enough to ask someone to dance. I was actually impressed by his directness.

We made not so clear arrangements to meet in my apartment, a lit candle on the back balcony was a signal that my child was asleep and that I was willing to enter into the adventure. He waited on the front porch for an hour waiting for me to come down, while I was upstairs in my apartment waiting for him to come up.
He eventually went to bed and I eventually fell asleep.

Within a number of months I was a part of the family. Our mornings we would spend sipping Arabic coffee, tending the larger gardens he, Helen and I had dug or trying to teach Helen English before I had to go to class.
There was one occasion where Jim had taken a construction job with a young guy whose father was visiting from Isfahan, Iran. Since the job was across the street, the father would sit with Helen and I along with our next door neighbor, Maria an Italian.

No one spoke English, except for me. All we did for about 20 minutes each morning was say "Hello, how are you", each with their own accent. We would laugh at each other because we couldn’t communicate but each attempted to learn each other’s language.

I guess the old man from Isfahan was so impressed with my attempts to learn Farsi he wanted to take me back to Iran to become one of his wives.

Jim and I had our relationship difficulties as we had different cultural sensibilities. But I did learn something from this. That was to forget about being angry, communicate and came to adore his depth of compassion.

During the eight years of my marriage, the version of communication my husband and I had was to get pissed off at each other and stay so angry we wouldn’t talk for days. He used to go off and read a book while I stewed. It got to the point we fought like this so often that for his birthday I bought him the thickest book I could find so he had enough to read. It never did work because he always stayed at the first page.

I didn’t realize until my relationship with Jim that not talking hurt like hell. Jim never allowed me to be angry with him for more than an hour. He would always come knock on my door and take me for coffee so we could talk things out.

Jim’s sense of compassion was alien to me. On a number of occasions his sense of it was insulted. He couldn’t understand why my husband was not helping me with support; he was the father of my child for 'God’s sake. He couldn’t also understand my father who watched me suffer financially even demand money I owed him even though I was studying and trying to raise my child.

My parents had no qualms about taking $2000 of my student loan even though it was far too sparse to live on as it was. At this Jim wanted to confront my father, he couldn’t understand why they would demand to take money when I could least afford to give it. At least, he said, they could wait until I was finished school and working.

I was overjoyed! Finally I had a man in my life that would confront the tyrant I had hated while I was growing up and wanted my mother to divorce. Jim actually wanted to stand up for this and me was the catalyst of understanding his culture that had been influenced by Islam, or so I thought.

In the spring of 1995 a provincial election was looming. There was talk that the Conservative Party was running on a slash and burn policy. That mother’s allowance would be reduced by almost 22%, any received support payments would be deducted dollar for dollar, they were going to drop these benefits if you were receiving student loans to go to school and social housing would be sold off.

Since all of these issues would affect me, I was scared. I could barely survive as it was and I still was not getting child support. Surely Ontarians wouldn’t vote in such a drastic leader! I wanted to apply for social housing because I had inadequate housing yet was paying high market rent. The anxiety started creeping in

To top it off my lawyer had announced to me that the Ontario Legal Aid Plan had ‘lost’ $100 million dollars. They lost it. Didn’t know where it went. She told me that there was no money left on my legal aid certificate even though I had signed over a lien on my home for $6000 and in which my husband was still living in. I couldn't petition for divorce and get some support payments. (It would be years later before I realised that she had milked remaining money that was still available on my legal aid certificate after I had left Windsor.)

The previous January my husband refused to help pay for his daycare costs to bus my son to from his grade school to a Montessori school forcing the change. My son was already advanced and I did not want to loose the years I had already had been teaching him at home.

I was forced by the Catholic school system to put my son in a different school St. Angela’s, because I could not get after school care unless he was at that particular school, there was no busing. I sat there in the principal office crying at the upheaval of my son, probably guilt and a wish to do the best for him. The Principal seemed amused.
While at that new Catholic school board run daycare called Sundowners, my son fell off the playground equipment and gashed his head. I found out by staff there weren’t enough ECE supervisors on the playground at the time and the play area didn’t have adequate pea-stone to cover the foundation blocks of the bars he fell off of.

The new school was rough. I came to pick him up one day to find out my son had been choked by another student while he took a bath room break. I was told by a daycare staff member that my son had strangle marks around his neck but son was able to talk his way out of the situation. He didn’t want me to make a stink about it but I did anyway.

I spoke to the Principal at St. Angela’s about this incident and the others. He told me "it happens all the time". To make this response even more disgusting than it was I was related to him as he was married to my cousin.

Time was winding down into the summer months it was time for my son to pass into the first grade. Then came the claim that my son didn’t know his ABC’s. I wasn’t expecting such an asinine comment from a teacher. She heard back from me that it was her incompetence and neglect as a teacher because he certainly knew them before he started at that God-forsaken-school.

About a month before the end of the Sundowners, the day-care, terminated my son’s placement. Apparently, within the year I had been late 3 times. Their procedural code stated that with four consecutive late arrivals the client would have to discuss termination with the director. They didn’t bother following their own rules, even though their board chair was a lawyer. My daycare space was terminated and I had no where to put my son come the new school year.

The wicked witches that ran the show were determined to get me out because I had made complaints against their level of services. It was sad to note that the Executive who ran it were social workers. So much for the compassion of the Catholics.

This left me in complete distress. Did I have to have my son change schools again? What was I going to do?


Continued in Part III...