Elanso

I’m packing up, consolidating my house and my heart for yet another iteration of self in this transformation from married woman to single mother; sifting through what to keep, what to sell, what to give away. I remember the faces of each of the women who came to my rented, crumbling home in those first weeks with pots and pans, towels, books for the kid and books for me, a cup of coffee, a glass of wine. I remember them all, and remember what they gave to me in those first, frightening days.

As I pare down all these gifted belongings, I am trying to give away what was given to me, in the hopes that some other woman or man in a place of transition might find comfort in the act of possession, without the burden of spending. The dressers, the daybed frame, the pots and pans are all good things, and can do good for other people. I let them go with gladness.

The things I am trying to sell are things I’ve owned, or good pieces my father gave me when I moved in here. These are pieces I can’t afford to buy or replace; my life is scaling back, moving into a smaller place. We’ll be creative with what we have left, and I’ll be glad for the reduction in clutter. They will, insh’allah, allow me to finance the physical move, if every piece is purchased for the very reasonable asking price. I’m not trying to make money. I’m trying to make ends meet.

The things that will come with us are the things that survived that first, cruel cut from Washington to Dubai in 2004, and then a crueler cut still, returning as half of a life, from Dubai to Washington again. Touching things, like the piece of cloth Bushra gave me, a shiny piece of confection used by women to cover the drying henna on their hands during the wedding days, and waved by the female guests in joy when the marriage is blessed and the dancing begins. Here, too, is a place for the first stuffed animal my son ever loved, ripped and torn and dog-mauled, waiting for me to find a spare $100 to send him to the Stuffed Animal Hospital for a cure and an eye transplant.

What I had not prepared myself for was the walk down memory lane… and a forgotten book that once served as my only refuge and friend during that last summer as a stranger in strange lands. I read my own words and am heart-sick for the acrobatics I was willing to perform in order to stay married to … But if ever there was a doubt in my own mind as to the validity of my choice, all I had to do was read past my last sentences in that book to the very different handwriting there, and look once more on the words my ex chose to write in my personal diary. Such manipulative, hateful words, designed to wound and destroy, so full of a narcissistic certainty of their own self-righteous validation, so full of denial that the death of marriage lays at the doorstep of two hearts, not one… oh I am grateful to be free of the millstone that was his disdain and distance, be it the simple refusal to ever hold my hand or the nasty words left for me to view, even now, a year and a half later. I will find a new relationship with this man, because he is my child’s father. But never again will I have to destroy myself to remain his wife.

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