Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

Laura was part of a pioneer group of children to have these surgeries. At that time, there were no older survivors who had gone through them. So as parents, we had no idea if we were doing right by our baby or not. We had no blueprint to follow. We just did the best we could with the information we had.

  Part of that meant I had to plan for Laura’s funeral when she went in that second time. The doctor was honest about the odds, and I just wanted to make a few arrangements ahead of time so that if anything happened, I wouldn’t have to do everything under distress. I went to the funeral home, and I picked out the sweetest, happiest casket I could find. I called a florist and arranged for roses. We’re Jewish and technically we don’t “do” flowers for funerals, but Laura loved red roses, so I ordered them anyways.

  I tried to talk to my mom during this time. I just wanted to say out loud to someone, “What if she dies?”

  She looked at me and she said, “Don’t even think that way.”

  She was angry with me that I could think such a thing. But this was real to me. I had to prepare myself.

  But she survived, and life—improbably, it seemed—went on. I had another baby—a son with colic who needed to nurse at all times. I made it work. I would stay in the hospital overnight, in Laura’s room, with the baby. I woke up one morning and the head nurse told me that I couldn’t have the baby there overnight.

  I said, “Please don’t do this to me. It’s not his fault.” I begged, but in the end, the answer was no. It was some sort of insurance liability issue. I ended up having to pump.

  The hospital was filled with people like me, repeaters, who were there a lot. We knew the doctors and the nurses, and they became like family. There was one young nurse in particular, such a sweet soul, who wore these pink barrettes in her hair. She had very thin hair, so the barrettes were for kids, and all the pediatric patients would tease her about them. Laura went in for an X-ray one day, and the nurse was there.

  I asked her, “How are you doing?”

  And she kind of sighed and said, “You know, Edie, I’ve gotta tell you. I have cancer. I’m dying.”

  And she did, she passed away. I wanted to do something for her, so I started a scholarship fund at the hospital in her name. Her parents contacted me to thank me, and I told them, “I’ll never forget your daughter and everything she did for my daughter.” Her parents are ninety-eight and ninety-six now. I talk to them three times a year, for birthdays and holidays.

  A couple of years after Laura’s second surgery, her father and I divorced. It was very friendly. But the heaviness of our situation got to us. Her valve replacement held tight until she was twelve, but eventually she outgrew it and she needed another one. The doctor said that they were going to get an adult woman’s valve for the replacement, a size 27, that way Laura could grow into it and she wouldn’t need another surgery down the road.

  But she developed a severe arrhythmia after the second replacement. The size 27 was too big for her, so we had to go in to cardiovert her often—they would shock her heart back into a normal rhythm. We were in the hospital fifty-two times during her twelfth year of life. Fifty-two. An average of once a week. And I was in there with her every single time. I saw her body convulse from the shock. Every single time.

  One of these times that we’d ended up in the hospital, I just wanted to lighten the mood a little bit, so I took her to a store across the street. There was a basket of cards on the ground, and one of the cards had these bright red roses gorgeously etched on them. She saw them and she said, “Oh, Mommy, look how beautiful! I want these to be my wedding invitations!”

  So I bought them for her, and I went to a friend and had her make three hundred identical cards. Because sometimes you need to have the audacity to believe that it will all be okay, that it is okay to have the same kinds of dreams as everyone else.

  Today, Laura is thirty-eight. When she was planning her wedding a few years ago, I went into my attic and pulled out that old box of invitations. I gave them to her one day, and I said, “You know you don’t have to use them.” I didn’t want the memories associated with those years to be a stain on her special day. She said, “I know I don’t have to, but I really want to.” And so she did.

  I’m a grandma now, to a set of twins. When the twins were born, the parents of that nurse who passed away from cancer sent us a gift—they had made the twins bracelets from one of the nurse’s necklaces. It was a gentle reminder of what we’d all survived, a protective talisman for the little ones. And Laura is an exceptional mom, an amazing person. She hasn’t let her limitations instill fear in her. She is a warrior woman, so brave, and I’m so proud of her. She takes my breath away.

  Zarah, early twenties

  I attended a top school in my country—a coed university that specializes in STEM education. There were only fifteen women in my class, in a sea of men. I was the first woman in my family to be allowed to pursue higher education. I had envisioned a very ambitious life for myself—a fulfilling career, some travel, and perhaps marriage and children later on. I abandoned hope when, a few months into college, my parents told me they’d started looking around for possible marriage proposals.

  I should have seen this coming, but I guess I had thought that my parents would be different. My father and mother were supportive of me going to college, even though it was very expensive. I made ends meet by tutoring. I was very independent, and I was raised to stand up for myself and seek more from life. I had expected, at the very least, that I would be able to pick the person I’d marry.

  My mother approached me one day and told me they’d found a nice match for me in the UK. I cringed. I frantically searched his name on Facebook and LinkedIn but found nothing except photos of fast cars and a sparsely populated work history. In a panic, I told them I knew nothing about him—that I couldn’t be expected to marry just anyone. What about his education? In my experience, men who are more educated are less likely to be very religiously conservative. I feared that he might treat me like a piece of property for the rest of my life, not let me work, or not let me have my own thoughts.

  “He’ll be here in a week, for his sister’s wedding,” my mother told me. “And you’ll have a chance to meet him, and then we can have your engagement ceremony.”

  The day came quickly. I spoke to him for a few minutes—there was no connection whatsoever, it seemed totally preposterous that I was supposed to share a life with this stranger—and I went back to my parents in tears. I told them, categorically, no. They sat me down over the next several weeks and, underhandedly, made it clear that I had no choice in the matter: “This is what we’ll do for your wedding,” my mother would say, showing me photos and brochures.

  The more I tried to resist, the more they began to taunt me: “Do you think you’re too good now—because you’re educated? You’re becoming arrogant.” And when the coercion failed, they appealed to my reason: “You can’t turn him down; it will cause a rift between our families. We’ll be shamed in our community. If you don’t care about us, at least think about your brother and sister.”

  The back-and-forth went on for six months. The more I resisted, the more they panicked until, one morning, my father came into my room while I was sleeping. He whisked the sheets off the bed and dragged me along my bedroom floor. He was taking me to a local religious figure so that he could pray for me. I started crying, his yelling ringing in my ears, sending chills down my spine. I’d never seen my father so angry before. I’d always viewed him as benevolent and incapable of violence, but the look in his eyes that day was foreign. When he hit me the first time, I was so shocked that I didn’t quite register it. We both paused and looked at one another, acknowledging what had just happened. And then, as if that first smack had unleashed some pent-up anger in him, he kept going and going—hitting me while I cowered on the floor, hiding my face.

  In between my fingers, I caught a glimpse of my mother. She was standing aside, looking down at me. I had hoped that she would intervene, that she would
bring him back to his senses. I looked for pity in her eyes, for understanding or leniency. Or perhaps just for love, for a basic acknowledgment that seeing me like this pained her. But what I saw—her arms crossed, her eyes staring down at me, her nostrils flared—looked more like disgust.

  I finally got away from him and locked myself in the bathroom. He screamed and yelled for a few more minutes, pounding on the door, and then eventually the noise subsided. I stayed put for two hours until I heard a faint knock on the door.

  “Zarah. You can come out now. They’re gone.” It was my sister.

  “Swear it,” I told her. “Swear that they’re actually gone.” I feared that they’d put her up to lying to me.

  Thankfully, a few days later, I convinced a close family friend to look into this guy I was meant to marry. She had family in the UK, and word came back that he was barely employed and not the most reputable character.

  “Don’t pressure your daughter,” she told my mother meaningfully.

  When I came back home from a long day of classes, my parents sat me down and told me they’d decided to refuse his proposal.

  I breathed easy for the first time in months, thinking the worst was behind me. But I was a few months shy of graduation when my parents came to me with another proposal—this one, from the US. I was distracted with finals and, having dodged one setup, felt strangely less threatened by this one, so the months went by quickly. Before I knew it, I was sitting across from him in my parents’ living room and he was asking me about my plans after college. He told me he wanted his wife to be educated and to work, to have ambition. I guess he was trying to make sure that I wasn’t trapping him into a marriage just so I could come to America. The next day, our parents announced our engagement. The next, we had the engagement ceremony; at the end of the week, he went back to the States.

  My parents wanted the marriage ceremony to happen quickly—within the next three months. I was so depressed, and so in denial about what was happening, that I decided I would try to kill myself before we had a chance to marry. I started taking Panadol, the equivalent of Tylenol, after googling its cumulative effects. On any given day, I’d take anywhere from eight to twelve, hoping that, by the time my marriage arrived, it would have killed me. But it didn’t—I threw up many times, lost a lot of weight, stopped getting my period, and I probably destroyed my liver, but I didn’t die.

  I was terribly depressed, with no way out. I looked to my parents to save me, but they had no mercy. My grandmother had an arranged marriage; my own mother had an arranged marriage. This is all they knew—and if it had been good enough for them, it would be good enough for me. Whenever I spoke out, my mother or father beat me. And my little sister looked on fearfully, catching a glimpse of what would likely be her own future.

  After my future husband returned to the States, he added me on Facebook—which is how we communicated for the next couple of months. The conversation was dry. He didn’t seem all too interested in me—never told me that he liked me or that he was looking forward to a life with me. But I guess I didn’t say anything of the sort, either.

  In January, one month before our big wedding celebration, I reached out to this guy I’d met in school, kind of like a last-ditch effort. I told him about the situation at home, and about the fact that I was, in the eyes of the law, spoken for. In my stupid daydreams, I had imagined him saying that he’d save me—that he would go to my parents and ask to marry me, instead. Of course, he did no such thing. He did something that I can only appreciate now. He encouraged me to speak up for myself: “If you don’t speak up now, you’re shutting up for the rest of your life.”

  “The worst thing that could happen,” he said, with a wry smile on his face, “is that they could kill you.” And with my life on the line, I called my fiancé and told him that I’d changed my mind, that I’d been pressured into the engagement. We hung up, and I shut myself in my room, waiting for the storm. No time at all went by. The phone rang and it was his mother—my future mother-in-law. I heard my mother’s voice get more and more frantic as she spoke on the phone in the next room.

  She pushed the door open, and in a flash, she was slapping me. “God will never forgive you,” she kept saying. She made me call his mother and recant. At the time, I still had faith in Allah. I thought, He won’t let something happen to an innocent person, so I kept praying for a miracle.

  But the day of my wedding came. I was freaked out, and, judging by the look on my husband-to-be’s face, so was he.

  “You’re not really getting married yet,” my father told us. “This is just a formality. It’s just a contract. It will be months before you’re living together. You have time to decide.”

  My fiancé seemed mollified. I wasn’t. I knew it was a lie. I was about to sign my life away.

  In a haze—I don’t remember much except that my heart seemed to be exploding—I signed the nikah. I was a married woman, just like that—forever bound to someone I’d spoken to in person once before, for less than a half hour. I was trapped. If you get divorced after you sign the nikah, you become a pariah, “a bad woman.” People won’t talk to you; they won’t sit near you. You can’t get married again. So women tolerate a lot of things—they tolerate abuse—because the alternative is worse. I’ve never known anyone to get divorced, no matter her situation.

  The day after the wedding, my husband and I had breakfast together. There we were—married and barely speaking. He went back to the States and started the paperwork to bring me along. In the meantime, I had to go back to finish the last two months of college. I was so depressed, so absolutely hopeless, that I emailed the registrar and withdrew from all my classes. Once my parents got wind of it, though, the threats started again. They told me that if I didn’t go back to finish, they wouldn’t let my sister go to college. They weren’t concerned about me, of course. They feared that my not being a college graduate would lower my “value” in the eyes of my husband.

  I managed to finish out my degree only after speaking to a school therapist.

  She told me, “You’ll remember this moment in a few years’ time. Don’t let it be one that you regret.”

  My parents kept up their steady pressure: “Talk to your husband,” they told me. “Create an understanding about the type of marriage you want.”

  In the meantime, they took me to the US embassy in our country to get our end of the immigration application finished. We started packing my things.

  “We’re going to miss you so much,” they kept telling me, which rang untrue.

  Once the application was approved, my husband came to pick me up and then we flew back together—a brutal flight, about twenty-four hours in all. And that’s how I ended up here—in a big city, married to a complete stranger, living with his parents and his siblings. On the way over, I kept thinking, If it’s not tolerable, if he beats me, I will leave him, or I will kill myself, to set my heart at ease.

  But he’s a really wonderful person. He’s not conservative—with his encouragement, I’ve started taking classes. I’m not enrolled in a degree program, but the hope is that someday my résumé will be sharp enough to apply for a master’s program in engineering. My husband tells me that he wants to see me be interested in life; he wants me to be happy. His parents are amazing. His father cooks for us—“You’re both my children,” he says—and his mom, who is an entrepreneur, encourages me to stand up to her son: “Fight with him when you disagree; don’t just say yes.”

  But when my parents call, my heart won’t allow me to talk to them. They didn’t see what it was like here for the first few months—how lonely I was, how much I wished for death. They will see the situation now—80 percent luck, and 20 percent determination to survive—and take credit for it. My father will say, “You see? I arranged marriages for six of my siblings, and I was never wrong.” I am happy with my husband—as happy as I can be with someone I didn’t know when I married him—but I’m not ready to thank my parents for that. How can I? I could hav
e very well ended up with the guy in London—the one who couldn’t even hold down a job.

  I met with my friends from college the other week—they’re both single, independent, and attending graduate schools in the States. I can’t help but envy them. I could have been in their position. I try not to live in the past; what happened, happened. But I fear for other women who don’t fare as well as I have. My heart aches for them. My heart aches for my little sister.

  Andy, early forties

  Exactly thirty-eight minutes of my day are mine. I wake up every morning at five o’clock and get myself ready for work. I brush my teeth, shower, and groom—in that order. Then, I look over my work emails while I’m walking downstairs to the kitchen, where my wife is waiting with a cup of already-brewed coffee.

  I tell her good morning, usually without looking up from my phone. I grab the coffee in one hand and gulp it down in one go, setting it back down on the marble counter with a clink that signals I’m ready for my second cup. Then I grab an apple and head back upstairs to wake up the kids. It’s five forty-five.

  By six thirty, the kids are dressed and their lunches are packed. I’ve asked them if they’ve done their homework, and they’ve nodded with a roll of their eyes—an obligatory gesture at their age. I make a mental note to engage them more, to find out more about their lives, but there’s not enough time. There’s never enough time.

  In the next ten minutes, I give my wife a kiss—our only form of intimacy in the last several months—and I head to my car. She will drop off the kids before driving to work herself. My thoughts for the next nineteen minutes will be occupied by myriad worries.

  I arrive at work at roughly 7:00 a.m. I greet my coworkers and grab yet another cup of coffee on my way to my office. And then I work, often uninterrupted, until late afternoon. I work hard because I’m in my early forties and these are peak years for upward mobility. But that’s the short answer.