by Saeeda Hafiz
I met new people each day, but never really clicked with anyone like I had at the YWCA. I thought going from the YWCA to the MCHC would merely be me going from a big fish in a small pond to being a little fish in a big pond. But instead, I was just a fish out of water in a dry, hot climate, flopping around.
* * *
September 11, 2001, was a deep shock to everyone. I, like most Americans, had until then lived with a sense of being hypnotized by the American Dream in an insular bubble that didn’t require us to learn about or understand others.
My life in San Rafael was becoming a nightmare. I felt like I was buried alive. I’d wake up each day and feel dead. And to not feel dead, I’d buy tea at the coffee shop inside the MCHC. Literally, it was called Awake. It was the strongest black caffeinated tea I’d ever had. I usually drank greens and herbals. This was one of the first times that I started to feel what some of my food clients had described to me. “Saeeda, I have to drink so much coffee just to get through the day, and then at night I have to drink alcohol to wind down, and sometimes I’ll even pop a sleeping pill just to fall asleep.”
At this job, I became one of those people. My work life was so bad that I was using a strong stimulant to start and push me through my day. I’d never really lived like that before. As the weeks progressed, I was in the habit of putting two Awake tea bags in a 20-ounce cup of scalding hot water just to be able to go into work and sit down at my desk. I’d eat fatty croissants instead of fruit and warm whole grain cereals. I was getting first-hand experience of how and why fat, sugar, and caffeine in the morning are such a great combination for people who are not living the life they want to live. The caffeine sped me up, while the fat dulled my senses, and the sugar let me pretend for a minute or two that things were sweet. Right before my eyes, I was becoming a weirder version of myself. I wasn’t doing any yoga. I was coming home, vegging out, and looking for ways to bury my inadequacies. I started watching TV again. I hadn’t had a TV in quite a few years, but that was all I did when I got home. Not doing my yoga was also a way to not be present or feel what my body was trying to tell me.
I wasn’t cooking much, either. I was hanging on by a string. With all the caffeine in my system and doing a job I hated, I was coming more undone every day. The puzzle pieces that had been so carefully put in place from the time I moved from Atlanta to Pittsburgh, up until the time I left the YWCA, were all being pulled apart and scattered far from each other.
“You have been through much worse times,” I told myself.
* * *
It was October 2001, a month after I’d started working in Marin County. I saw Nick on weekends. I still wasn’t considered his girlfriend, but I wasn’t bothered because I wasn’t living in the shadows of his life. One day Nick’s roommate, Mark, who didn’t have a girlfriend and wanted one, shook his head while we were all having dinner together. Then he said, “I don’t get it, Nick. Saeeda’s great. Why isn’t she your girlfriend, again? She’s here every weekend. You seem to get along. Dude, I don’t get it.”
Nick didn’t answer. He was like that. If he didn’t want to or couldn’t, he didn’t answer you. It appeared that he was ignoring you, but I knew that he was thinking.
While Mark was talking, I thought back to the time when I first told Nick that I loved him. It was an April day in 2001, at three in the morning. We had only been having sex for about a month, six months after my first date with him in November 2000. I still wasn’t the girlfriend, but we’d had a good lovemaking rendezvous—the kind where each person communicates to the other how they really feel. Just as I couldn’t hold back then because I felt dishonest, I couldn’t contain these feelings of love. I confidently whispered, “I love you.” I didn’t need him to say it back, but I did need to say what I was feeling. I was remembering the words from my spiritual teacher: “When you can unconditionally love like that, YOU WIN.”
Nick immediately caressed my skin in response. His thumb gently rubbed the fleshy part of my hand, between my thumb and index finger. This is the part of the hand that an acupuncturist might squeeze to alleviate a stress headache. Nick wasn’t squeezing it. He was stroking my flesh. He stayed connected to me. His actions showed me how he felt. I didn’t need him to love me back. I just needed to feel safe enough to express my love.
The next weekend after Mark asked Nick those questions, Nick invited me to a San Francisco bar named Basque with some friends. Nick knew the bartender. He grabbed me by the hand and said, “I have someone I want you to meet.” We walked up to the bar, and he said to his friend, “This is Saeeda, my girlfriend.”
I smiled, but I was also laughing inside to myself. I wondered, “What changed his mind? Was it Mark’s comment?” I didn’t object, and I didn’t care what had changed his mind; I was just glad he acknowledged our relationship to himself and to others.
By November, we were officially a couple again. I wanted to be Nick’s girlfriend. But this time being a girlfriend had no end in sight, and that was new to me. I must admit I was frightened. Nick started to ask me questions like, “Do we have anything on the calendar for this weekend, because Bob wants to know if we can have dinner?” or “The group is getting together for a barbeque; do you want to go this weekend, or do you want it to be just us? We could stay in.”
On the other hand, if he scheduled something without me, I was immediately hurt and felt left out.
This felt strange, but good; a good kind of strange and a strange kind of good. It felt like the kind of relationship I might have had in college, maybe even in my senior year of high school: simple, slow, uncomplicated, and kind. I also felt like a little girl, because even though I’d had spiritual training in how to love others and myself unconditionally, I had only seen a few good relationship role models in my life. How does one bond and grow with a significant other healthfully?
In San Francisco, Oakland, and Marin, we went to the movies, watched videos, went to museums, had dinner with friends, went on hikes, talked, laughed, and even cried together sometimes.
One thing Nick and I shared was napping. Every weekend, usually on a Sunday, we would organically find ourselves locked together, midday, in bed, sound asleep. He would spoon me and I would curl up like a fuzzy caterpillar. One particularly pretty East Bay fall day, I was taking a nap while he was outside at the neighborhood block party. The neighbors had the street closed off for the party. Nick’s neighborhood in Oakland had great sidewalks and shops, a place where upper-middle-class families wanted to play and party together. The street was tree-lined on both sides, and the leaves were bright and bountiful. The live jazz music was festive, but it didn’t disturb my slumber. In fact, knowing that people were having a good time and bonding made me feel more peaceful. I could sleep much deeper knowing that all was right with the world.
“Hey,” Nick said, shaking me to wake up. He leaned in close. I could feel the warm heat from his body hovering over me like a cozy comforter. “Hey, I have something to tell you. Wake up.”
“Yeah….Whaaaat,” I replied softly, yet a little bit irritated.
“I love you,” he whispered into my ear while my eyes were still closed. The jazz band was playing “All Blues,” from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re going to make me cry.” He softly kissed me on the lips, and then he went back outside to the block party and I fell back into an even more restful and peaceful sleep.
Later that day, I teased him, saying, “It took you nine months to say that you love me.”
“Well, it took you six months to have sex with me,” he said. “Funny, we live in a time where the sex happens before the love.”
For the next few months I watched us function like boyfriend and girlfriend. My job still sucked, and I couldn’t wait for the weekends. I wasn’t sure what I should do. Nick hadn’t found a job yet, and it had been seven months since he’d graduated.
The holidays we
re approaching.
I was used to spending the holidays doing something spiritual, or alone, or with some good friends. I didn’t want to be that girl who insisted that I should go to her boyfriend’s family’s house. I could see Nick struggling to determine if it was the right time to invite me home for Christmas. It had crossed my mind, too. Perhaps it was too soon to share such a holiday with his family.
Although I didn’t hear the conversation in its entirety, I knew that Nick was discussing with his mother the possibility that I would come to visit Madison for Christmas.
Later that day, Nick asked me to come home with him, but he was also honest about his mother’s concerns. His mom wanted to know why I wasn’t going to Pittsburgh to be with my family during the holidays.
I didn’t show it right away, because I wasn’t sure what my thoughts and feelings were, but I remember being highly pensive about that question. I thought about it a lot, because I knew Nick’s Latin mother believed that family was everything. For the first time in a long time, I felt trepidation. Nick and I did normal dating things, and we did them a lot. For me, our connections reinforced trust. Mostly every night, we’d talk on the phone. Several times a week we had an outing to local museums, coffee shops, dinners, movies, hikes, friends’ functions, and walks through the neighborhood. I found myself thinking, This is how regular people do it. This is how they fall in love, even more simply than in the movies. I noticed his guard was dropping, the guard he’d had up to protect his heart from feeling hurt after his divorce. My guard was dropping, too, the guard that I had up from always living in the shadow of a man’s life.
One night, I sat up on the edge of Nick’s bed in the dark, my back toward him and the window, waking him.
In a low whisper, I said, “What kind of woman am I? What kind of woman doesn’t love her mother?” I started to sob softly, then more heavily, but making very little sound. It was late, and I didn’t want to wake up Mark or the neighbors downstairs by wailing.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right,” he said. He held me close and just let me cry, feeling my body shake. Nick didn’t offer much in the way of therapy or resolution; he just let me cry, and that was therapy enough.
I didn’t have a resolution, either. I just knew that I had worked for a long time to have a relationship with my mother. I had tried to love and protect my mother during my childhood, adolescence, and right after college up until the time I’d had the awakening on the 71A Negley bus in Pittsburgh. I even pretended to love her afterwards, even when I knew that I loved her less and less every day. So when Nick’s mom wanted to know, “Why isn’t Saeeda going to Pittsburgh?” I began to feel like a freak.
I had learned that a lot has to happen for a child to stop loving his or her parent, but once he or she does stop, it is nearly impossible for them to love that parent again. That was happening to me. My love for my parents—any love that I had left—was dissolving every day.
I knew that Nick’s mother, who valued family above all, wouldn’t understand me or my choices. This was going to be trouble, especially since I didn’t quite understand everything myself. I definitely couldn’t explain it in a way that would present me in the kind of good light that she would want shining in her son’s life.
In December 2001, I had never felt more trapped or unprotected. In all my years of growing up in poverty and domestic violence, I had never felt trapped. I’d always thought that I could get out of the drama eventually. But this was different. Nick’s life was something that I wanted to be a part of, but it came with his family expectations. Between the MCHC and being Nick’s girlfriend, I didn’t feel in control of my own destiny anymore. My true self was being buried by expectations and values that I didn’t know how to integrate into my own values and expectations. In my family, I was a solo operator.
* * *
Madison, Wisconsin, in the wintertime was ice-fishing cold. I had donated my Pittsburgh winter coat to Goodwill the day I knew I was moving to California. “Let someone who is staying in Pittsburgh enjoy this coat,” I thought as I put it into the donation bag. So, when I got to Madison, I had only a light jacket. I planned on staying in the house most of the time, next to the toasty fireplace.
It was two days before Christmas, and the Greens were having a holiday dinner party. I’d never had arroz con pollo. I didn’t really eat much chicken or Latin food for that matter, but I wanted to break bread with Nick’s family, and eating his mother’s cooking was important to me.
Before the family holiday party, I took a shower to refresh myself and put on black opaque pantyhose, a rust-colored suede miniskirt, a black turtleneck, and black high heels. I didn’t care much about clothes or how to put together a look, so I leaned toward a simple and hopefully elegant outfit.
As I walked down the stairs from the second floor, at the bottom of the stairs stood a Turkish woman, Nick’s godmother and Mrs. Green’s best friend. I looked at her as I held the railing with one hand and smoothed out my skirt with the other. Her eyes gave me a slow, piercing once-over. Then she said, as my high-heeled foot landed on the bottom step, “Let me meet the girl who is good enough to be with our Nick.”
I thought to myself, This doesn’t sound like a compliment. This sounds like a dig.
“Yep. She needs to be a special kind of girl to be with our Nick,” she repeated.
I’m sure that I was polite enough, but at that point I tuned her out. That evening, I observed the family dynamics, played with Nick’s two-year-old niece, Margarita, and enjoyed what it was like to be part of a solid family—a white, Latin middle-class family.
Nick, his dad, and I played my favorite board game, Scrabble. Mr. Green was great. He was definitely the kind of father every girl should have: consistent, firm, and loving.
Over the course of the week’s visit, I met more of Nick’s extended family. I couldn’t gauge whether or not I was being accepted, but everyone was kind to me. Nick’s mom presented me with a beautiful gift, an Eileen Fisher sweater. She also had one for herself. She said, “Saeeda, this color goes well with our skin tone.” The sweater was a honey-mustard yellow, my style and my taste. I was truly grateful. I could tell she put some effort into it, and I felt like she did want to include me.
One night while I was there, Nick and I were talking about the fact that I was four years older than he was. He blurted out, “I’m sure my mother thinks you’re too old for me.” This worried me. I had a feeling that I was not measuring up to what she wanted for her son. “Yeah. I’m sure you’re right,” I said. Then I told him about a conversation his mother had had with me the day before.
His mother had been teaching Margarita to bless everyone in the family, and when they blessed Tio Nick, Margarita would immediately say, “and Sa-dee-da.” And then his mother told the little girl, “But Saeeda is not part of the family.”
Nick looked me square in the eye and said, “Yeah. My mom is serious about family. Family is everything. She is very protective about our family.” I sat there in his family’s home, hurt. I was also philosophically confused because of his mom’s statement of non-inclusion. It wasn’t a Christian teaching, especially to a two-year-old. And then, an even stranger wave came over me. If I were his mom, I would be protective, too. I was hurt, but at the same time I admired Mrs. Green for being an excellent Mama Bear, preserving her family and its future. I knew for certain that if I had been in her position, I would want the very best for my son. Quite frankly, if someone had come to me with my background and my family issues, I’d hesitate. I might even say those same words, “Saeeda is not part of the family.”
It was sad for me, but at that time Mrs. Green and her friend only reinforced what I thought about myself. I tried to let it roll off my back, but I was in my most vulnerable state. I felt like life was getting a little worse every day. I had brought the MCHC Health and Wellness Department budget with me on vacation, and I couldn’t figure it out. My mind wasn’t c
lear. I was failing at work. I was failing this family interview. I was failing myself by doing things that weren’t me at all. During my visit, I would sometimes look in the bathroom mirror after my shower and ask myself “Who are you? Why are you here?”
I left the Greens’ before Nick did. Usually, this would have been great because I like to have some solo time in between gatherings or events, but I was coming back home to shit, pure shit. I flew back alone, and the moment I got on the plane from Madison, I felt very alone in the world. I had a small layover, and then I boarded the plane to San Francisco.
As I buckled my seatbelt and leaned back in my seat, I thought, “If a terrorist blew up this plane, I would be free from all of this. It would be sad for the others who are not ready to end their lives, but I am ready to be blown to bits….THE END. I am tired, so damn tired.”
I was tired of trying to piece together a life. I was tired of trying to be friends with my mother. I was tired of hoping that she would be the mother I needed. I was tired of thinking about how to answer the question, “Do you have brothers and sisters? What do they do? What does your dad do? You live so far away from your family, you must miss them.” I was tired of tensing up every time a Pittsburgh number appeared on my phone, since it might be bad news about someone in my family. I was tired of thinking about my sister having been raped and my dad beating her afterward. I was tired of not feeling good enough for the Greens because of what my family represents. I was tired of thinking about the mental health statement that said, “If two of the major three things (primary relationship, job/career, and family life) are not working in your life, it is just cause for a nervous breakdown. I was tired, tired, tired…mostly because all three things in my life were fucked.