Eleven White Roses (Part 5)

Previous installments:
Eleven White Roses (Part 1)
Eleven White Roses (Part 2)
Eleven White Roses (Part 3)
Eleven White Roses (Part 4)

Chapter Eight – April 2008 Blog Entry

I often fantasize about leaving my husband. I actually sit down and entertain my wish of finding the emotional strength to permanently disconnect myself from him. I don’t want to believe that he is a bad person; I don’t want to harbor any harsh feelings towards him or his family. But I feel like I am slowly withdrawing from myself—and him–in order to reconcile with the sabotaging words and violent movements that takes over him every so often.

I love him. And I know that he loves me. I’ve struggled to escape from him before—during times of betrayal and mistreatment—but he’s fought back hard. He holds on. He has this way of convincing me that things will be different this time around, and he makes me feel like he sincerely loves me and wants our relationship to work. He won’t let me go. And, while this is a beautiful trait—not to mention, probably the only reason I’m still in this marriage–sometimes I can’t convince myself that it’s enough to stay.

I try to hold onto our “better” times together: cuddling in bed after a fight or soft kisses in the morning…or the magical feeling that overwhelmed me when we first were getting to know each other. But these memories can’t comfort me when I’m bleeding inside from the irrevocable pain he causes me, or from the shame that comes from him insisting that I am somehow responsible for him treating me this way.

Today I asked my husband to attend marriage counseling, and he replied that he didn’t think it was necessary. His father counsels Muslim couples in marriage all the time—but I feel like the work his father has been putting into our relationship isn’t helping. Despite his father’s efforts, our sessions with him only cause bridges of resentment between our families and exhaust his dad, who doesn’t hold enough authority over his son to actually change his behavior. More so, his father’s biased criticism of me seems like an attempt at legitimizing his son’s mistreatment—explaining that I fail to stroke my husband’s fragile ego and this causes him to feel anger towards me, anger that I am responsible for preventing.

I asked my own father today if he felt that counseling with individuals outside of our religious community was appropriate, and he said he would rather see us divorced than seek personal advice by someone who may not have a foundation based in the awareness of the Oneness of God.

My husband called to say that he would not see me until tomorrow—his friends invited him on a last-minute nighttime fishing trip. So I’m sitting here alone, sad. When my husband leaves me for long periods of time, I fall deep into thought and become painfully aware of how disappointed I am with my marriage. I feel like this unhappiness is bound to last forever—that my husband just doesn’t “see” me or appreciate my feelings and my need for a deeply profound and secure relationship with him. He’s just so worried about himself and his mission to overcompensate for his insecurities by hurting those around him.

I can’t stand myself for yoyo-ing back and forth between hope and divorce, and I wish sometimes that I could just make a decision—any decision—and stick to it with no regrets. Sometimes I feel like the old “me” that existed before I met him could have done this. Now, I seem to be losing the ability to trust myself any more than I trust my husband.

Chapter Eleven – December 2007

I lay in bed in the afternoon, feeling completely paralyzed. I stared across the room at my beautiful red Quran. Once upon a time, I used to read that book. I fluctuated in consistency with my reading but sometimes I would go through phases in which I would complete all six hundred or so pages each month and then begin reading it all over again. I also used to memorize this wonderful, blessed gift to humanity. A page a day—then a verse a day, then review only, then not even that. And now it sat, lonely and beckoning to me to open it. But I did not heed the call.

Instead I just stared at the Book. I wondered what it would feel like to touch the cover and remove the book from it’s case, to open it again. I used to enjoy feeling the indentation of the gold Arabic script on the cover. I wondered which page the woven, attached bookmark was on and imagined reaching for it and opening to the page. But once I imagined those sacred words being exposed into my ugly world—open and vulnerable—my imagination would stop and I would return to my own reality.

It had been less than two months in the marriage when I just stopped praying the sunnah prayers entirely. My world had become so crude and vulgar. How could I connect with the Merciful in prayer—a world of Him and I alone—when I had lost all purity and inner peace? I rushed through even the obligatory prayers—my bones ached with each prostration and my mind screamed inside my head.

“B*tch,” his words from previously that day would ring in my head as I performed wudu, or ritual ablution for prayer, “No one in this world loves you. Your Dad couldn’t wait to get you out of the house and marry you off—he sure as f*ck doesn’t give two sh*ts about anyone but himself and your stepmom. And your sister can’t love you because you’re so f*cking terrible. I can’t think of a single person who would mourn your loss if you died right now. Except maybe your grandfather in Lebanon, but he was only able to love you because he never took you seriously.”

It wasn’t that I was retaliating against God by leaving the sunnah prayers. And I wasn’t consciously being self-destructive. But these holy, sacred acts that once saturated my life seemed so out of place for me now. My surroundings were nightmarish and cruel and my spirit was surrounded by this thick veil of ugliness. So how was I supposed to find inner peace and tranquility when I was existing in a world with only its enemies? How would I connect to God in actions of worship and purity when my mind wouldn’t stop replaying profane and demeaning words to myself? I tried to remember what life was once like—to tap into that spiritual strength that I once believed I had despite any external forces—but instead I just lay there in this bed with tears flowing down my cheeks when I knew my husband wasn’t looking or wasn’t home.

I began to feel extremely fatigued all the time, even without exerting myself physically. I would sleep at night but wake up unrested and exhausted. I stopped answering my phone and returning calls to friends. How was I supposed to face their endless, excited questions about married life? I could not. I also withdrew from family. I avoided calling my father and sister and delayed my phone calls back to them.

I stopped brushing my hair every day. I stopped flossing my teeth. I ate to soothe my soul, but it instead only left a larger void and the quick weight gain gave my husband even more ammunition to fire away at me.

“You’re so flabby and gross,” he would say, “How the f*ck am I supposed to be attracted to someone like you? The only thing you do well is cook and clean.”

And he was right. Despite my aversion to maintaining myself spiritually and my failure to live up to a perfect standard aesthetically, I still kept up the marital home well. I hosted dinner after dinner with his family—his sisters and their children, his parents and his non-married younger siblings. And I kept the house impeccably clean and made sure to make every meal prepared and ready for him from scratch. Some days I would make American food, some days I would do Italian, some days Arabic. I also experimented with baking and appetizers, soups and salads. And fancy blended drinks. But my family was not invited to these wonderful meals, even though my father lived only five minutes away.

As I lay in bed, I thought of all this. I thought of myself, my family, and my husband. I thought of love, and what it means to love unconditionally. I did not love my husband unconditionally, I decided. I loved him under the condition that he would treat me right, and I didn’t feel that he was doing so. I knew that my feelings for him were fading quickly.