Stop Being Mean to Yourself Read online

  Although I stayed at a hotel in Cairo, then later moved to a hotel in Giza, the dusty sandlot with the boys and the men, the camels and the horses, the bread and the cheese, and sometimes the black and white television became my home in Egypt.

  On this day, immediately upon my arrival when my taxi squealed to a stop in the dust in front of the store, Essam scurried to the side of the cab. When I started to pay the driver the fare he asked, Essam scowled, shook his head no, and pulled me aside.

  “He is overcharging you,” Essam said. “Do not just give people the amount of money they ask for. It is considered a point of honor here to negotiate the price of everything. You will not be respected unless you do. Give him half of what he asks. No more,” Essam said firmly.

  I did what Essam said. Essam and I were satisfied. Eventually the driver was, too.

  The taxi driver from the night before had told me about the man in the souk, the one I had found so compelling.

  I first saw the man as I was darting through the crowded streets. Actually, I saw his stick first, as the long, thin rod came whipping through the air, rapping certain people about the head and shoulders.

  I cringed and ducked when I saw the man whack a shifty-looking young man just a few feet away from me. That’s getting close, I thought. I wondered if I was next. Something told me not to worry.

  Later, looking down over the crowds from the balcony at the juice bar, 1 could see the man with the stick more clearly. He sat on a stool across the street from me on the corner of a busy intersection, perched just high enough so that he was slightly elevated above the heads of the crowd. I watched, mesmerized. At first it looked as if he was randomly striking out at people with the long, thin, wooden rod he held in his hand. Soon, I began to notice a rhythm to his whacks, the same chaotic yet measured cadence I had seen in the traffic of Cairo’s streets.

  “He hits the bad guys,” my driver explained matter-of-factly, when I tugged at his arm and asked him to tell me about this mysterious man. “There’s bad guys out there,” the driver said. “They steal. They rob. When the man hits them with the stick, the people know who the bad guys are. And it tells the bad guys to stop.”

  When I asked if the man with the stick worked for the police, the driver said that he didn’t. From what I could discern from my driver’s broken English, it was a self-appointed mission. When I asked how the man with the stick knew who the had guys were and who he should hit, the driver said, “He knows.”

  I need one of those, I thought instantly. I need a stick.

  So much of this civil war with myself had been over this issue. I wanted to attribute kind, generous, benevolent motives to many people and sometimes to the wrong people. That belief system didn’t create a world that was nice and kind—it opened a door that let the bad guys in.

  In the days to come, I would notice that many of the men and boys of the village of Giza carried a stick. Often, it was associated with riding and used to direct a horse, camel, or ass. But I began to see that the stick was more than a necessary tool. It was a symbol of protection and power.

  Years ago, when I had started learning about setting limits, saying no—getting a stick—I thought it was something I would need to do for a short while. I assumed that as I progressed in my life, the situations where I would need to use my stick would decrease and eventually be eliminated. But at each new level of play, an abundance of new situations arose requiring that I pick up and use my stick. Some of these circumstances were obvious situations of manipulation, deceit, or chemical abuse. These situations were simple to deal with and easy to recognize. But many situations at the new levels were far more subtle. The energy patterns were similar. I’d feel off balance and confused. Something wouldn’t feel right, then I would doubt whether I could trust myself and I would be uncertain about what to do next. But dealing with these situations became more complicated. Recognizing them was often tricky.

  At first, this had caught me off guard. Slowly I began to understand that I needed to pay closer attention. From shopkeepers to healers to lovers, in personal life and in the business world, there are a wealth of people ready to cast their spells on anyone walking softly and not carrying a stick.

  It’s said that Joan of Arc used to make her warriors get down on their knees, confess their sins, and cleanse their souls before going into battle. Maybe she knew intuitively that any lingering, unresolved guilt would muck up the soul and weaken a warrior’s power.

  In Aikido, students learn the art of sending negative energy hack to the sender. It is an art based on nonresistance. Strength and speed are not considered power. Students learn to stay alert and focused—not paranoid—watching in front of and behind themselves.

  I felt confused at first—and for a while—when I began studying Aikido. Each time my teacher or another student made a move on me in training, I would look at my teacher and say, “What should I do? I don’t know what to do.”

  My teacher wouldn’t respond. He believes that students learn best by struggling through the confusion and figuring things out themselves. I would be twisted, pulled, pushed, yanked, and sometimes punched. And I would just stand there. After months of passively allowing myself to be mauled, I caught on.

  “I finally figured out what to do when someone tries to punch me,” I said to my teacher one day.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Duck,” I said.

  Back in the sandlot, Essam asked me what I wanted to do that day. To my surprise, I decided to go horseback riding. I had never ridden a horse before in my life. Once, when I was about three, a relative had placed me on top of a horse. That stallion looked so big. I immediately toppled off. The fall knocked the wind out of me, in that painful way that happens when you take a sudden, unexpected blow to the solar plexus. A group of relatives stood around laughing, watching me roll on the ground groaning and trying desperately not to cry. I never mounted a horse again, except the beautiful, carved, wooden ones on the merry-go-round at the fair.

  Now, I swung my leg over the side of this horse and mounted it as if I had been riding all my life. The saddle was layers of old blankets tied around the horse’s back. Essam’s nephew, the young man who had accompanied me to the pyramids, rode next to me again. We started at a slow trot, precariously scaling the rocky hills. When we reached the flat expanse of the desert, we both began galloping through the dust. I leaned forward, riding that horse as fast as he would go. The February air blew cool against my face.

  I felt powerful and free.

  After an hour or so, we came to a pile of rocks and dismounted. I sat in the sand, leaning against the rocks, drinking from the bottle of water I had stashed in my backpack.

  “Do you have a husband?” the young man asked.

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I’m divorced.”

  “You ought to come to Egypt and live,” he said. ‘You could have more than one husband here.”

  I gave him a strange look. “Women can have more than one husband here?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  “What about the men? Do they get more than one wife?”

  “Yes,” the young man said.

  “I think you’ve got that confused,” I said. “You’re telling me that women get more than one husband, men get more than one wife, and everyone is able to make sense out of that and live happily?”

  The young man smiled. “Yes. You should come here. You’d like it.”

  I laughed.

  “I probably would,” I said.

  We got back on our horses and returned to the perfume shop.

  Essam had lunch waiting for me. He didn’t eat; it was Ramadan and still daylight. We sat on the bench outside the shop talking while I ate. I was so hungry I felt only slightly guilty about eating in front of him.

  When I finished eating, I looked around for a restroom. I didn’t see one in the store. Essam said there was none in the shop, that tourists usually went somewhere in the village to use facilities. Then he said
I was more than welcome to go to his home, which was next door, and use the bathroom there.

  I followed him around the store, through a courtyard littered with children’s toys, to the door of a sprawling one-story home. It looked new and fairly modern. Essam told me that in the village of Giza his house was considered a mansion. He lived there with his aunt, his sisters, his brother-in-law, and their children. He told me to go in, turn to the right and I would come to the bathroom. I walked into a maze of rooms, then found a series of rooms each of which seemed like part of the bathroom. The first tiny room contained a sink. I wasn’t sure if the water worked or not. In the next room, a faucet projected out of the wall. I guessed that was the shower. In the next room was a toilet. Next to it was a large basin of water and a wooden ladle for flushing.

  When I exited the bathroom and walked back through the house, I inadvertently turned the wrong way. Suddenly I was standing in the midst of a room of women. They were sitting on the floor on layers of rugs and pillows, watching television. They wore long, colorful dresses. I smiled. One woman, the woman in the middle, motioned for me to sit down next to her.

  I did.

  They didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak Arabic. So we just sat there. Their eyes glowed. They seemed so happy to have company. I got a little nervous after a while. I didn’t know what to do next, and they didn’t want me to leave. Finally, Essam entered the room.

  He talked to them for a minute, then turned to me.

  “They like you,” he said.

  When we returned to the bench on the sandlot, I told Essam what his nephew had told me and asked him if it was true that women were allowed to marry more than one husband.

  Essam shook his head. “No,” he said. “That is not true. Women are allowed one husband. Men can take four wives.”

  “What about divorce?” I asked. “Can a woman divorce her husband if she’s unhappy or they have serious problems?”

  Essam shook his head again. “No. The woman cannot divorce her husband. Only the husband can divorce the wife.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.”

  A heavy pause filled the air.

  “It is not a good thing to be born a woman in this country,” Essam finally said. “It starts at birth. Everyone gathers around waiting to hear whether the child born is a male or a female. If they come out and say it is a boy, fireworks! The people scream and cheer. They celebrate—sometimes for days! But if they come out and say it’s a girl, there is silence. No one says a word. The people act like they heard nothing. They turn, walk away, and return to what they were doing.”

  As I listened to Essam tell me about Egyptian women, I again felt a faint stirring within me, as I had outside the pyramids my first night in Cairo. For much of my life, I had quietly raged about being a woman and about the inequality in power, not just between the sexes but between people. It seemed to me that so often, certain people of title, role, and sex were naturally afforded power—it was an entitlement of sorts—while others had to work so hard for this same power, often even to convince others or themselves that they had power. I had raged, albeit silently, about the constraints I felt—the expectations, the limitations, and the constant need to prove my power—power automatically bestowed on some whether or not that presumption of power was warranted.

  Sitting in the sandlot, I began to see that some of our beliefs about power are prefabricated, doled and rationed out to us in our youth, sometimes at the moment of birth, sometimes before we’re born. So are many of our limitations—like not being able to ride a horse.

  I was getting tired of presuming others had power and I had none.

  I wondered how deep, and how ancient, my rage really was.

  It had taken me many years to understand that I had power. It had taken me even longer to begin to understand how to use it. Often I became confused about what power I had in any situation and what power I didn’t have. When my son died, I felt so impotent that I forgot I had any power at all. When the doctor told me there was no hope, I swallowed my rage and bitterly accepted my powerlessness. There was nothing I could do.

  I had set down my stick and walked away from it. I had forgotten I had a stick.

  By now, back at the sandlot, the sun was almost ready to set. I told Essam I was tired. It had been a long day; I was ready to return to the hotel. He talked about things I could do the next time I visited.

  “Usually the women do not mingle with the tourists,” he said. “But they really like you. They asked that you come back for dinner or at least dessert. They want to see you again.” He scanned my attire. I was wearing a dark sweat suit. “I want to get you a dress,” he said. “With your dark hair and dark skin, I could then take you into the village. People will think you are from here. There are many things for you to do,” he said. “And soon you will be ready to go inside the pyramids and meditate. Then you will get the special powers.”

  I felt excited, curious, and honored to meet the women. I didn’t understand what Essam meant about “getting the special powers” from the pyramids. But as I sat on the bench outside Lotus Palace Perfumes remembering how I had felt riding that horse across the desert, I knew I had unearthed and resurrected my power.

  A boy was riding a donkey around the sandlot. In his hand, he held a stick—a shorter model of the one I had seen the night before in the souk.

  I told Essam I would be happy to do all the things he discussed, then I pointed to the stick in the boy’s hand.

  “But I want one of those, too,” I said, “to help me remember.”

  Essam smiled. He didn’t say anything. I knew he understood. I finally understood, too. I didn’t need to buy a stick. I already had one. Each of us does. All we need to do is pick it up and use it.

  Scheherazade, the mythical heroine of the Arabian Nights, put her stick to good use. She lived in a land where the sultan—the king—had been deeply betrayed by his wife. (One day, the sultan had returned home unexpectedly from a journey and found his beloved cavorting with another.) To deal with his broken heart, he had had that wife beheaded. Then, to ensure that no woman would ever again betray him, he had mandated that each night he would take a new wife, a virgin. After sleeping with her one night, he would have her beheaded, when she arose the next morning.

  This had gone on for years. Mothers in the land were weeping, either in grief from losing their daughter or in fear that their female child would be next. Scheherazade went to her father, a consult to the sultan. She asked her father to give her to the sultan so she could be the sultan’s next wife. Her father recoiled in horror, but Scheherazade insisted. She said something must be done, and she was the one to do it.

  She said she had a plan.

  For the next one thousand and one nights, Scheherazade enraptured the sultan with her storytelling skills. Each night, she told the sultan a portion of a story, taking it to its most engaging point. Then she would suddenly stop, asking the sultan for permission to continue the story the next day. The sultan of course agreed. Scheherazade’s stories were marvelous tales about oppressed, middle-class people who used their wills, wiles, artistic skills, and faith in Allah to fulfill their destinies and desires in the most magical ways. Scheherazade’s storytelling skills were so artful the sultan could barely wait to hear the rest of each story. To behead her was unthinkable. On the nights she finished a story, Scheherazade would simply say, “But that story is no more strange or wondrous than the one I am about to tell you next.”

  By the time she finished telling all her stories, she had given the sultan three children and he had fallen in love with her. He repented of his hatred toward women, deciding not all of them were evil. He made amends to the people of his land, the best that he could, for the harm that he had done. Scheherazade saved the women of her country. She healed the sultan’s heart. And her wonderful tales taught millions of people how powerful they and Allah were.

  Scheherazade didn’t let anyone tell her
how much power she had. She knew how powerful she was. She had learned a most important secret about life and about power. She didn’t dwell on the power she didn’t have. She mastered the art of working with the power she knew was hers.

  Scheherazade picked up her stick, then used it masterfully, with flair.

  I STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND what the women in Egypt could possibly have to do with the women in your country,” the interrogator said, whipping me back to the airport in Tel Aviv. “These women have no freedom. They do not even leave their homes.”

  Ah, I thought. Now you’re beginning to understand codependency . . .

  I leaned forward on the desk, letting it brace me for support. By now my back ached and my voice was scratchy. “I write to women and to men,” I said. “And you are right. I live in a wonderful country. My people have many freedoms, freedoms and luxuries unknown in some parts of the world. But many people in my country do not understand how free they are,” I responded.

  “Take me, for example,” 1 said. “For ten years, I was locked in a box . . .”

  chapter 8

  Locked in the Box

  Sunset was the sacred signal that broke the daily fast. At dusk, the quiet village of Giza came to life.

  This day was no exception. The men and boys scurried about the sandlot with a vitality obscured during daylight hours by hunger and the sheer strain of abstinence. Three camels knelt on the far end of the lot, smiling mysteriously as if they possessed a secret unknown to any other creature or being.

  I followed Essam past the perfume shop and down the dirt path leading to his home. In his hand he held a white cardboard box of treasured delicacies from the village bakery—half a dozen lemon bars made with flaky, golden pastry and a dozen date-filled Egyptian cookies.

  We had already eaten a scrumptious meal. Now we were going to his house to eat dessert and take tea with the women.

  “So how old are the women when they get locked in the box?” I asked.