Shelf Life

by Nadia Wassef

  “I didn’t see you walk into the building,” he said defensively.

  “I used a different door,” I explained automatically. We left to attend our weekly family Friday lunch. I stole a moment with Hind to tell her what happened. Her pained look matched mine. I filled my already taut belly with food and drink. After lunch, I screamed at him, but I was really screaming at my own stupidity.

  On schedule, two days later, I was wheeled into the operating room. He was there, looking at me beneath furrowed brow, with an inscrutable expression. I felt vacant. This was happening to someone else. I recognized neither him nor myself. At the time, I didn’t want to be a divorcée, and I didn’t want my daughters to grow up always feeling deprived of one parent.

  As soon as my incision healed, I went back to work. Diwan had always cured my ailments, but this time was different. Whenever the subject of marriage or divorce occurred in a conversation or a book title, I felt hyper-visible. I didn’t want to talk, or be talked about, until I could get my own story straight. I found myself wondering whether Sabah, our house cleaner turned carrot cake supplier, knew more English from her former American employers than she let on. She must have noticed that Number One and I no longer ate meals together. Or that our interactions had become polite but strained. I imagined her gossiping about it with Samir between his errands. In the car, I carried on my private conversations in French or English, languages Samir didn’t speak—but I began to worry that he, too, had finally pieced together enough vocabulary to decipher sentences. I imagined it as if it were happening: Samir sipping his tea, telling a group of staff members on break about my marital woes with dramatic virtuosity. Every time I emerged from the office, I swore I saw a cluster of workers disperse. During the months that followed, whenever Samir drove me to marriage counseling, I’d have him drop me one street over. Then, for good measure, I would send him on an errand so he wouldn’t be able to see the building I entered.

  My paranoia increased. I had imagined conversations with the books of Diwan—increasingly with one specific author, Elizabeth Gilbert. When we’d first opened, Number One had discovered her first novel, Stern Men. He liked her voice. He urged me to order several copies. I remember standing on the shop floor recommending her to anyone who seemed curious, with no success. I brought in the cavalry: I stuck the Diwan Recommends sign on the untouched pile. Still nothing. Many months later, defeated, I tore out the title pages and sent them back to the publisher as part of our annual returns. I bore a grudge. I didn’t like books that let me down. In 2006, the same year as Number One’s revelations and our divorce, Elizabeth charged back into my life with the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, promising self-discovery after her own divorce. The book sold itself. Every time I passed the stack, or restocked it, whether in Zamalek, Heliopolis, or Maadi, the author spoke to me.

  “Get lost. It’s the only way you’ll find yourself.”

  “Shut up, Liz! You don’t know my life.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Surrender.”

  “Fuck off. You know how your story ends.”

  * * *

  Hind and Nihal never left my side. In the middle of meetings, I would glimpse them looking at me with concern. When they realized they’d been caught, they’d offer reassuring smiles. When that wasn’t enough, they’d spell it out: You will be fine, you will come out of this better and stronger, you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last. Shit happens.

  After six months of marriage counseling and infinite advice from close friends and casual acquaintances, I had to face my worst fear: disappointing my mother. Up to that point, when I’d brought up the affair and its aftermath, she’d only made cryptic comments. I assumed she disapproved. That was a small truth. The larger truth took longer to see, that mothers want better lives for their daughters than they had.

  “Shall I make molokhiya or fatta for today’s lunch? What would the children enjoy more?” asked my mother on our daily morning call.

  “I don’t think the kids give a shit, Mum. They’re eight months and two years old. Make fatta.”

  “Fine. I will tell Beshir to make molokhiya. Children should eat greens.” Our conversations always followed this pattern: she asked for my opinion, I gave it, and she did what she wanted. “I had something else to ask you. Why are you still with him? Did your father and I raise you to eat shit and then stay for the second helping?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “I have to go and talk to Beshir about the garlic, he didn’t put in enough last time.” The following day, I exercised the ‘isma, a woman’s right to divorce in Sunni Islam. While legally sanctioned, it was socially frowned upon: belly dancers insisted on the ‘isma when they married. I got divorced not because he cheated but because he took me for a fool. And he was right, I was a fool. I’d never seen this coming. There was minimal recrimination. Neither of us wanted to be victims.

  Maybe Liz was on to something. I had to surrender to what was. The next day at work, I casually announced that I had divorced, then noted how well the kids were doing, and how much they already enjoyed having each of us to themselves. At home, I opened myself to the emptiness of the flat, welcoming the quiet that had moved in. I reorganized my cabinets, filling the new space with my own things. I started seeing my old friend the Naked Chef again. On our regular dates, I cooked his recipes, artfully plated them, and then took the leftovers to the office the next day. I took comfort in one thought: when Zein and Layla were older, we would sit at the same table, share food and stories. There would be no leftovers.

  Oddly enough, I found solace in my sorry state. I was a sympathetic figure, the wronged wife. I felt momentarily unburdened of the need to be strong. I’m sure people behind my back justified Number One’s infidelity with my work/life imbalance. What else could a man do to a woman who didn’t need him, aside from supplementing her with others who did? As time passed, I realized that I wasn’t angry at the other women. They were free to do as they wished, and they weren’t responsible for my disappointment. I was even more surprised by my lack of loathing for Number One, by how much I continued to cherish our relationship. Maybe his transgression was insignificant in the scheme of things. Perhaps my gratitude toward him outweighed the hurt. His actions, our demise, liberated me in a way I hadn’t been able to liberate myself. In the ten years our marriage had thrived, I couldn’t imagine myself fully outside its parameters. I’d left my younger self, the one he’d married, behind, but I hadn’t fully come into my adult self. Now that I was released from my obligations, I felt freer to be my own kind of mother, my own kind of (ex-) wife, my own kind of person.

  But I didn’t really see myself as a “wronged wife” or an “ex-wife.” “Ex” suggested a crossing out, an undoing. After the implosion of our marriage, we worked toward a new relationship. We didn’t let our kids use the divorce to manipulate us. We stayed in close contact and compared notes. Of course, we still argued. About schools, sleepovers, and strategies for dealing with playground bullies (my favorite of whom was the son of a children’s-TV producer, whose father threatened to send his driver to beat up Zein’s nanny in the playground). But we learned to pick our battles until compromise became a habit. We each remarried. We each divorced, again. We didn’t need to explain our failures to one another. Without realizing it, we had become friends and confidants, too aware of each other’s flaws but still happy to ask the other to listen or to advise.

  Fifteen years after we split up, despite the standard bickering, I had no doubt that we had become a successful failure: we were happily divorced. He read this book along with our daughters, Hind, and my mother as I wrote it.

  We had made a deal. When the girls were old enough, we would tell them about the affairs. Then: “I know our family secret,” said a precocious thirteen-year-old Layla.

  “Just one? How disappointing!” I teased.

  “Dad told us he cheated on you.” She caught me off guard, as she’d clearly intended. Now she flashed me a coy smile, trying to gauge my response.


  “Well done, Dad, for taking ownership.” Of course, Layla was not satisfied. She wanted drama, embellishment, carnage. I wouldn’t give in.

  “I don’t know what I would’ve done in your shoes,” she said.

  “You would walk. I walked for you, in spite of you. I walked away from your father and our marriage because I knew that one day you would ask, and I wanted to have an answer I would be proud of. You walk.”

  “Ending it must’ve been hard.”

  “Indecision and regret are harder.”

  “You must have some regrets. Aren’t you scared of growing old alone?”

  “Don’t confuse being alone with being lonely. Some of my loneliest times were when I was in a relationship.”

  “Mum, is this one of those things you say that I’m gonna get when I’m older?”

  “Let me make it simple. Never make a decision based on fear or guilt or guided by what you think is easier. Choose what rings true to you.”

  “Why can’t you just admit it was tough, and it wasn’t fair?”

  “Very little in life is fair, but it is what you make of it. I am no trailblazing heroine, and I’m no better than the millions of women who stayed in shit marriages. I could afford to divorce. It was that simple. I had a roof over my head and yours and I was financially independent.” I leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “And when I pray for you and Zein, I ask that you know what contentment and gratitude feel like, and that you grow to be confident and self-sufficient.” Zein, like Hind, never broached the subject. Both of them prefer to reflect on things privately.

  * * *

  My no-frills approach to parenting stood in stark contradiction to the guidebooks. Throughout my daughters’ childhood and teenage years, I was as blunt and candid as possible. When my daughters were younger and they would ask for some indulgence, ice cream or toys or a delayed bedtime, I would answer: “I want to say yes because I love you, but I’ll say no because I love you more.” My urge to please was secondary to doing what was best for them. I often told them, “As your mother, I can guarantee that I will love you unconditionally. But I can’t promise that I’ll always like you. You have to earn that.” I still say this to them! And I still mean it. Authority and authorship are inextricably linked: we are responsible for who we become, and who we become is a deliberate act. My narrative for myself and my children still has no room for victimhood.

  I can call our divorce a success, but I can’t yet say the same of our parenting. I’m waiting to see how Zein and Layla turn out. The terrible truth is that how they turn out is completely beyond my control. Parenting, like authorship and entrepreneurship, holds no guarantees. Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, famously uttered the phrase “An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.” Children, and other new ventures, are not issued with manuals. We embark on endeavors with some assessed risk, lots of hope, and the certainty that any plan will need modification, because so much can and does happen along the way. Diwan is a case in point: we created her exactly as we had imagined her, hoping she would fare well. To ensure her continued survival, we had to adapt her to our shifting world. Hind, Nihal, and I were often divided on decisions regarding Diwan’s future. Now, all these years later, we agree it doesn’t matter what or who was right or wrong—it’s done. In the case of parenting, we don’t learn the outcome of our efforts until well past the time to make changes, and we don’t stop blaming ourselves or one another.

  * * *

  As I continued to read books and people over the years, Diwan, and Egypt, changed around me. As always, my shelves offered me an unexpected education on these changes. Reviewing publisher catalogs, I witnessed the increased diversity in pregnancy and parenting books, which shifted over time to accommodate political and social norms. Words like “family” and “childcare” began to proliferate, while “parent” transformed from noun to verb. A parent, once an authority figure who disciplined children, had become a mentor who holistically raised children as individuals. This was a departure from my mother’s generation, who’d expected their children to be obedient. Girls looked after their parents, and boys carried the family name. Brothers and sons were free from active obligation. Our generation expected our kids to be geniuses who would outpace us because of all we had given them. Our hope was rife with the pressure we unknowingly inflicted on ourselves and on our children.

  This shift from parent as disciplinarian to parent as mentor didn’t quite align with Hind’s and my own upbringing. Our parents evaded categorization. My father was strict, but more indulgent than my mother. He’d always tell us: You are shit, unless you prove otherwise. And once you’ve proven it, wake up tomorrow and prove it again. The minute you think you’ve succeeded, congratulations, you have taken your first step on the path to failure. He was seventy years old when Hind and I were teenagers. As a survivor of lung cancer, he gave us daily lectures on the hazards of smoking. Drinking and gambling were fine. Conscious of his own mortality, he was determined we would flourish after his demise. In this, he unknowingly became a compartmental feminist: insistent on his daughters’ independence in all aspects, while ensuring that during his lifetime his wife never had true autonomy. It was his training that made it all possible—Diwan and divorce.

  My mother’s parenting was stricter, as was her own upbringing. She attended the Mère de Dieu, a Catholic school run by nuns, then the Lycée Franço-Égyptien in Zamalek. At the lycée, she learned discipline, her love language; Arabic, her native language; and French, the language of her country’s colonizers and of her own religious worship. My mother had little time for opinions or indulgences. Ours wasn’t a family where adults asked children for their opinions; we were expected to obey. She never differentiated between Hind and me. As children, we received the same punishments and rewards. Her ruthless parity reminded me of an Egyptian saying: equality in oppression is justice. Our leisure time was structured by her militant to-do list (I keep my own lists to this day). She aimed to educate us, and herself, taking us to every museum, art gallery, and theater in town. She collected the programs and saved them for when we were older; Hind and I do the same for our children when we drag them to cultural events against their will. As kids, we were so indignant about spending our summers keeping up with my mother’s rigid regimen of cultural appreciation. Of course, as usual, she was right. She taught us to savor literature, music, art, and dance, and for that, I’m belatedly grateful. As time passed, I was able to see my parents’ harshness for what it was: a surplus of love and dedication. They parented us strictly and gave us opportunities they’d never had, to raise not child geniuses, but survivors.

  * * *

  One of Diwan’s bestsellers, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, chronicles the lives of three generations of the family of Al-sayyid (Mister) Ahmad ‘Abd al-Jawad in Cairo from 1918 to the 1952 revolution. The paterfamilias, a despotic patriarch who rules his family with an uncompromising severity by day, carries on affairs with dancers and singers by night. His intensity and hypocrisy are underlined by the infuriating docility of his wife, Amina, who patiently and dutifully waits for him to come home every night. She places a gas lamp at the top of the stairs to light his way up to his room, washes his feet, speaks only when spoken to, undresses him, puts away his clothes, and if nothing further is needed, retires to her room. She is up at dawn daily, praying, wakes up the maid and the children, ensures that all are fed and packed off to school.

  Up until my twenties, I couldn’t see my mother as a person with her own ambitions and past experiences that predated me. In my twenties, I tried to get to know her. I began to confide in her. I expressed myself as I would to a friend, using the language that suited the situation. I swore. A lot. My mother never swore. In her recounting of the story of the nurse who denied her water, she could only refer to her as a pest—not the word I would’ve used. Reluctantly, she began to reciprocate, to tell me things about her life and her marriage that I’d ne
ver known. I started to wonder if I knew too much about my parents and their marriage. But then I realized that Number One and I had done exactly the same thing with our teenage girls.

  As a parent myself, I began to confront this dissonance between mother and person. I saw my own friends set themselves aside for their children, neatly separating their identities. This got trickier as our kids got older, as less and less went over their heads. They understood what they saw and heard, like when Layla asked me about Number One’s affairs. For better or worse, I never had the time to compartmentalize my various roles: I was the same Nadia with them as I was at work as I was at the bar with friends. I drank and swore in front of my kids as much as I did in their absence. In school, they had learned of the dangers of smoking and it terrified them. When I quit, I still had the odd cigarette, and I didn’t hide in the bathroom like other mothers I knew. When they asked me about sex, drugs, and alcohol, I tried to tell the truth. I figured that I’d rather say too much than be forced to lie. I’m sure I’ve passed on my neuroses, like all parents. The more I looked for models, for advice, for guidance that would help me get it “right,” the more I became convinced that trying to control pregnancy and parenting is a Sisyphean task. We try our best, hoping only to minimize damage.