A Journey into Conversion - Part IV

Continued from Part III

This is a true story – mine. This is the fourth part of many.

A Journey into Conversion
Part IV

In June of 1995 Mike Harris of the Conservative Party was elected as Premiere. His policies were drastic. Public administration and running a business were like the differences between oil and water. You have to shake them violently before they can mix. Government has obligations and duties to uphold business has a bottom-line. I cried because I knew people were going to die from these policies. They did.

The summer progressed. Because there was “no money left” on my legal aid certificate, I was not able to petition my husband for divorce and get child support. My lawyer filled me with more anxiety about the Family Support offices not getting support payments to families on time, virtually starving them.

The financial abuse my son and I were suffering from his father was taking its toll on me psychologically. His efforts, I believed, were an attempt to put so much financial pressure on me that I couldn’t bare it and give up custody.

My new lawyer was a referral by my minister. After seeking support from my priest as his parishioner he said to me he “didn’t have the time because he had a meeting” and offered no other resolution in its place. This was the last insult I was going to endure, I was fed up with the Catholics. So I became a member of the United Church.

The minister gave up his law practice to become a preacher. And what a preacher he was! It wasn’t unusual for members of the congregation to cry from his speeches, myself included. Whatever he chose to talk about seemed to always relate to what new event was evolving in my life that week. He had a profound impact on my spirituality and he earned my respect.

My husband’s and mine separation was hostile and I didn’t want to fight anymore. It seemed only reasonable to ask my minister for his advice about lawyers, since he used to be one. He referred me to a “Christian” lawyer whose non-adversarial characteristics seemed to be what I wanted.

But sacrificial philosophy and reality don’t mix. It wasn’t long until she acquiesced to my husband’s financial abuse, comparing it to her own previous abuse history with the you-didn’t-have-a-shotgun-in-your-face argument, used the ‘no money’ lie to turn my confusion into attempts at convincing me to seriously consider giving up custody of my son.

Joe, who was acting within his culture now, started to do the same. I didn’t realize that until years later after speaking to another from the same area in Lebanon that he was preparing me for marriage within this cultural context. Having a male child from another man was an issue of jealousy.

Joe thought in terms of codes. He was always trying to figure me out and usually getting it right. At this he was gifted. I think he learned this as a necessity to survive during the civil war in Lebanon. He had forms of communication where direct instructions were coded messages for other meanings. This was probably useful in a violent country where direct messages could get you killed.

I didn’t realize he thought in terms of this until one day I left early for school. By this time I had started my fine art courses at the university. I wasn’t able to take my morning coffee with Helen and Joe so I couldn’t tell them personally that I wouldn’t be home for lunch as I had an appointment. Not wanting to disturb them I left a message in the mailbox letting them know I wouldn’t be home at the usual time.

Unknowingly Joe took this note as code for something drastic. He went to the library to look for me, called the police, then my mother. My mum asked him if he didn’t know me by now? That I usually do my own thing and it wasn't out of the ordinary.

When I returned he told me this story. I couldn’t believe that he was that worried about a note telling him I wasn’t going to be home for lunch, that he thought it was an esoteric message from some phantom kidnapper.
During one of our coffee shop chats, he would tell other stories that underscored a theme and a penchant for vigilante justice, some in the form of baseball bats in shopping mall parking lots. On once such occasion, in a concerned tone, he told me the “Hezbollah was here”. To me, I believed they were bothering him or trying to recruit him for something. I didn’t ask him to elaborate but it most likely was because of the reason he was here in Canada.

His story was that the Hezbollah in Lebanon had shot him but I was never to bring this story up in front of his aunt and uncle. I didn’t question him, didn’t mention as he told me because it was a non-issue to me. He also told me of the war when Christian militias were fighting against Muslim militias, brother fighting against brother and so on and so on. One horrific story was a time when he had gone to a place to fight with five other guys. They fell asleep in a house but were raided by a militia in the middle of the night. They found them all asleep in the room and slit the throats of the other five. Blood sprayed on Joe from the killing of the guy next to him. Joe had enough blood on him from his neighbour they thought he was dead, he stayed still. They left.

In later months I found out from his cousin, Helen’s son, that Joe never did get shot by the Hezbollah, that it was his own gun that misfired in his hand. This fourteen-year-old seemed disgusted by the lie that Joe told me and let me know that it was a story made up to tell immigration so he could get refugee status. I never brought it up again with the family nor confronted Joe about it. I’m sure the militia story was true.

Joe liked to try his code talk with me to either see how I reacted or to use it as a veiled threat. He related one coffee drinking day that a friend of his married a Canadian woman on welfare to get his citizenship papers. The arrangement was, since she was on welfare, that he give her a couple of thousand dollars cash and when he got his landed they would get divorced.

After the divorce she started asking for more money. Instead, the guy beat her up and she wasn’t able to do anything. As Joe said “it was his word against hers”. I didn’t believe the story although I felt slightly intimidated. I forgot it because he never raised a finger to hurt me. It wasn’t until later that I understood the usefulness of this talk.

The question of marriage had come up on several occasions. One of his best buddies had just gotten married to a Canadian woman who converted to Islam to marry him. The friend was trying to convince me to convert to marry Joe. I said I wouldn’t.

To convince me even more Joe related another story. He told me how his brother had asked his wife to have supper cooked or some other household chore finished by the time he came home from work. By the third request she still didn’t comply so he beat her. Joe said his religion allowed him to do this and gave me an example. He pointed to my pants that were covered in paint from one of my studio classes. He told me that if he was to ask me not to wear them and I didn’t listen, he could beat me. If he was trying to convince me he was doing a hell of a job of it. I again refused.

During this time he and the lawyer had continued to discuss the custody issue of my son. I was confused and had no one else to talk to besides them that summer. I sought no counseling to help me through the separation, the sexual assault, and the abuse by the Catholic school system and its daycare or the mythological account now confirmed by the area legal aid director asserting that my assets used to pay for my legal aid was somehow “public money”.

I made the rash decision, which wasn’t an uncommon thing for me to do, to send my son back to live with his father, the financial starvation winning the battle on his behalf.

We all thought, and I believed, this was the best thing to do for my son because I was having difficulty, I had delusioned myself into believing, that I wasn’t being an effective mother under the circumstances I was living. Not only that, Joe started bribing my six and a half-year-old with a trip to Marine Land if he agreed to go live with his dad.

We went to Niagara Falls. I got the happiest picture of my child dressed in his blue Maid-of-the-Mist raincoat, which I blew up and kept on my wall for years after. I got an ironic one with Joe and a RCMP officer.

When time came to drive to my son’s grandmothers to bring him to his dad, my son fell asleep for the duration of the two-hour drive. Joe said it was the stress of leaving his mother. The worst pit and nausea entered my stomach. I started weeping.

When we met his dad, we exchanged bags, a TV, and my son. I have never seen a child so brave or walk away so stoically. It shattered my heart into a million pieces that were never put back together the same way since seeing him walk away, his head up, shoulders back, fighting away the tears.




Continued in Part V



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