A Journey into Conversion - Part V

Continued from Part IV

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

A Journey into Conversion
Part V

I woke up on Helen’s couch sobbing uncontrollably. I dreamt my son was kidnapped and I couldn’t catch him in time as the van sped off me running after it screaming. Joe came out of his bedroom and Helen woke from her sleep on the living room floor. I couldn’t stop sobbing.

Joe tried to comfort me by telling me the dream just meant that he was starting another life. I shook my head. Helen tried to put things into perspective translated through Joe. She felt the same way when her husband convinced her to take her three kids to Canada. He would join them within the year.

A year had passed and he had married another woman, leaving Helen and her kids to fend for themselves. He also took the money she lent him to start his own business, not sending them a cent since they arrived. He tricked her into leaving with no intention of ever joining them. She cried along with me.

I wanted stability for my son. I did believe it was the best thing to do but I felt so out of control with circumstances that seemed at the time, beyond my control. But my baby was my life that gave me my direction. When he was gone there seemed to be endless paths and I didn’t know which to take.

Joe tried to console me by buying me a gold locket so I could put my son’s picture inside. I wore it from the day it was bought until five years later when the chain broke and one of my cats chewed through the back. It now hangs in a sculpture, a sort of clothesline of events depicting a slice of history in time.


* * *

For some reason, a neighbourhood cat had chosen to give birth at my place. I’ve never seen her before until that day. I noticed her panting and her stomach moving. She came into my apartment looking for a place to lay down and give birth to her litter. She found a spot in my closet. Joe and I stayed with her, me coaching her to push while she meowed in response. Joe thought this was remarkable and told everyone this story.

Little by little the kittens were growing and everyone who heard the story wanted one. They were soon too big to stay in my apartment and were moved to the garage because five kittens dumping whenever and wherever they felt the need was not on my list of acceptable foster mothering practices. Almost each kitten was spoken for and big enough to give away.

The mum cat was down to her last kitten when the kids saw her take it by the scruff of the neck, run out of the garage and trot quickly down the sidewalk, the kitten dangling from her mouth. They started following her but they couldn’t keep up. She outmaneuvered them and was able to escape by darting into a side yard. The mum cat decided she would run away with the last one before it was gone. She mourned her lost babies enough to save the last one for herself.

By this time I was out on the sidewalk with the kids talking over one another to tell me what happened. I just looked down the sidewalk with admiration where the kids were pointing, the empty path the mum cat had gone. I understood this cat and what it was to loose your baby too.


* * *

My relationship with Joe was straining. He though he was openly affectionate in front of his family showing them that he loved me, he was still in contact with his ex-girlfriend. Now, when his aunt and uncle came over he asked me to leave in front of them. This was supposed to be the ultimate insult according to his culture. He told me his aunt was talking bad things about me in Arabic even when I was there and it was better to get up and leave when they sat down. I couldn’t figure out what the hell I had done and Joe wouldn’t tell me.

Joe was starting to spend more time with his cousin who wasn’t actually his cousin but his maternal aunt’s husband’s brother. This cousin had one wife, five kids and three girlfriends. The story was he would stay home with his wife and kids for most of the day since he wasn’t working. At eleven o’clock p.m. he would see the first girlfriend, at 1 am he would see the second and by 3 am the third, then go back home to his wife at 6 am. It started to get messy when girlfriend number 2, who was 18 years old, wanted to get married. The cousin was about 35.

The wife knew all about the arrangements, but didn’t leave because she liked her husband. She didn’t like her kids. The cousin would try to compensate by brining her blow-up bath pillows.

Joe was spending a lot of time at his cousin’s. A lot of it was when the cousin was with either of the three girlfriends, whose identity changed but rank and time of visitation during the night didn’t. Around this time Joe began his symbolic and coded messages. He started looking at his watch when we made love as if he were in a hurry. When I’d ask him what he was doing there was no response, just that he had to go.

We were invited to go to a wedding but he didn’t want me to go on account of his talkative aunt and uncle. I protested so he brought me. We shared a dance and this drunken creep came up to us and said something to Joe in Arabic. Joe let go and the guy started dancing with me. I was furious and left the guy on the dance floor. I yelled at Joe in front of everyone never do that to me again. He gave me away to some other guy, a stranger, as if I was a sharmooda, Arabic for bitch or whore.

On the way home his friends were racing next to him in a sports car against his GMC Jimmy. There were about four guys in the car yelling and laughing at him in Arabic. Joe wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t talking to me either. I understood a little what they were saying. They were making fun of him because of me. That night he refused to share our bed.


* * *

It was nearing the end of the summer and I was busy painting the dining room. The kids raced up my stairs yelling to come down to take a phone call that it had something to do with Joe and Helen couldn’t understand the English. When I took the phone call for her it was only the welfare office asking to schedule an appointment with Helen and as Joe was her interpreter, he needed to be there too.

I went back upstairs to finish and no more than a half an hour elapsed when the kids were racing up my stairs again. They were yelling again that something was wrong with Joe. Thinking it was more a lack of not knowing the language and miscommunication I answered to hear the voice of a firefighter identify himself. A wave of burning anxiety rushed over me. Joe was in an accident. A transport truck hit his car with him in it on a heavily used main artery connecting highway 401 to the Ambassador Bridge, the umbilical between Canada and the United States. I was asked to come to the hospital.









©This is copyright material that cannot be reproduced without express permission of the author.