Witness or Martyr?

Shahid or Shaheed?

I got an email today from a stranger. Now I know most of you get lots of emails from strangers. Most of them from people who’d be delighted to offer you a mo!rt g4ge at 0.1% for the cost of your soul and permission to bombard you with ten times more junk than you already get. Or from those happy to offer you, at low cost, access to an unlimited supply of v14gr4, whether you’re male, female, child or antelope, no matter. This email was different. It was a real email from a lady who has been reading my archives.

She, (lets call her Fatima), doesn’t think it’s worth my while to be the real martyr while my ex continues to play at martyr. Fatima doesn’t think that it works out in the long run. Fatima thinks that my daughters will one day be replicas of their mum, will hate me and by then, it will be too late, their characters will have been moulded and whether they know the truth or not, they won’t really care. Of course, this is the outcome I secretly fear when all my well-meaning friends tell me to endure the bumrape until the kids are older.

This is not a trial-run. This is it. I can’t experiment. Life will be over before we know it. (Positive today, aren’t I?) My girls need the answers now.

I learned something from my parents’ divorce. Using the children as a battlefield is counter-productive. Your children will hate you. I also learned something from life. Your children will hate you anyway. By the time kids turn into adults, and inevitably, their parents, it’s too late. Mum and dad are dead. No one to say “you were right!” to anymore.

Fatima also suggested I tell my side of the story to my friends. I have done this with a select few. Not everyone needs, or indeed wants, to know the gory details. If nothing else, it made me feel that people were listening to something other than lies and shit.

No one wins in a divorce. It’s a nuclear war. Everybody loses. My ex is also the loser. I’m not pretending she’s winning a victory while I lie mortally wounded on the field of battle. We are all mortally wounded. What she is doing is trying to destroy the enemy’s morale by slicing up our children with her sword. She’s like the woman in the parable of Solomon who doesn’t mind the kid being cut in half so that the rival claimants of motherhood can have the dismembered pieces, equally distributed. I’m like the other woman who says to Solomon “don’t cut the child, let her keep the child as long as it lives”. Except of course, the courts don’t have Solomon’s wisdom. They generally give the child to the mother, no matter who is right or wrong.

Meanwhile I’m in limbo. My kids want to see more of me, I want to see more of them, but their mother last Friday told me categorically that I couldn’t have them on their birthdays, on Eids, or any other important day. And she also warned me that we could play it nice, or nasty. She knows I would rather let the children go than fight for them, and of course, the kids don’t want me to go to court. The rightly say “if we couldn’t sort things out as a family, how will an outsider make things right?”.

I got a call from the kids yesterday. I have been notified that they have a hectic schedule over the weekend. A party to go to on Friday, on Saturday and on Sunday. And there is no day during the week when their mum can drop them off at my place. And they can’t call me today.

I endure with fortitude. What’s the alternative Fatima, that I tell them what their mother is really like? They already know. But she is their mother, and always will be. And anything negative I say about their mother will make them hate the lousy instituton of parenthood, never mind just their parents. Their mother knows I won’t rubbish her to their faces. Or even tell them the truth. I am paralysed, but I am learning to accept it. The options are rather limited.