I woke up from a dream about the time when the Shadow surfaced in my family and I left home for good. It was a pivotal moment in my relationship with my parents. In the summer of 1972, many things came to a head. The repressed secrets came to light and nothing would ever the same again.

My parents had just moved to Beirut , Lebanon after spending ten and a half years in Jeddah , Saudi Arabia. I’d just graduated from high school in Beirut and for the first time in four years we were all living together again. There had been no higher schooling for girls in Arabia so I’d gone off to boarding school at fourteen and was used to a certain amount of independence.

That summer in Beirut was the last time my brother, sister and parents lived together as a family. The Shadow drove us apart. My father’s half Turkish, half Lebanese mistress was one of the reasons my parents had relocated to Beirut although I doubt my mother knew this . Amal was a stewardess for the same airline my father worked for. By then they had been involved with each other for several years. Amal had a sister who had married one of the Bin Laden brothers. Her own brother, Amin was a doctor of gynecology and obstetrics, with Beirut office and a Swiss wife.    

I knew about my fathers’ adultery. The two of them had even invited me to their little love nest in a Beirut apartment. I can still remember the animal print bedspread in their room. Why didn't my mother suspect some thing? There’s a photograph of the three of us together; Amal, my mother and I. I never told my mother what I knew. Perhaps being my fathers’ confidante made me feel special. And I had a secret of my own.

Amal would soon betray me too. I should’ve expected it. Once I’d finished high school, my father put the two of us to work, recruiting restaurants and shops into a discount coupon network called International Savecard. He knew about my Lebanese Druze boyfriend Ayman by then and he had forbidden me to see him.  At the time Ayman and I had the only normal, legitimate relationship in the group. We were secretly engaged. I felt my father had no right to lecture me about morality.  

Amal told my father I was secretly still in contact with my boyfriend. This provoked a confrontation. I’ll never forget my mother crying and my father screaming at me in a rage, Did you sleep with that creep??!!

Yes, I answered, and the proverbial roof blew off.

I went to my room where my mother soon followed. Why did you have to tell him? Don’t you know every daughter is a virgin until she’s married? 

My own mother considered a lie was preferable to the truth, perhaps because she was living one herself. Writing calmly about this thirty years after the fact is quite different from living through it. Her recommendation that I should lie is one of the reasons why I went into the bathroom later and took out a razor blade with the intention of cutting my wrists. It was one way to exit the hall of mirrors I felt trapped in.

A few years later, on my 21^st birthday in London , my father and I reconciled. He commended me then, for daring to tell him the truth, despite his reluctance to hear it.

Sex was important to my ‘Fire in the body’ father. He and my mother had married, at ages 19 & 20, and I'd been born seven months after their wedding. I guess he hoped I would make different Choices.  And I have.