GDO

What do you get when three chicks (counting my V) head off to the beach for the day? A lot of Christina Perri. My sister is expanding my music library. She came to Qatar for a visit and decided to stay for a year in between moving from Denver to San Diego, to live with my parents. I was sceptical, after all, look how I ended up, but I'm enjoying having the kid (almost 27) around. I left home at 17 when she was just 11 and we have lived on opposite sides of the world ever since. No matter our ages we've always regressed to the spoiled brat (I'm sure she has a different perspective) and bossy older sister dynamic so it's wonderful to have the opportunity to form a new relationship as adults. And it's wonderful for my daughter to have more family around.

La Sœur started working almost as soon as she arrived. Her job searching has motivated me to start looking around and in the last few days I've already found enough options that even if none of them work out, I know something will. Light at the end of the tunnel? Better packages, the side of town I want to live on, and better hours. In my current job I've been given my schedule for the next three months. Later mornings, so it's going to be a mad rush across town to pick my daughter up from school, and four split shifts a week, although I will finish earlier than I have in the past. Nuff said.

And today is beach day! I was hoping it would be warm enough for bikinis, to feel the sun on my skin, but it actually looks very dark and rainy. Even better. New road, new tyres, (another story), so bring on the treasure hunting.

Counting Sleeps

Our lives seem to have taken on a two week cycle revolving around visits from my daughter's father. Her highs as she counts sleeps until he arrives, and then the crash after he leaves.

I have decided we need to count sleeps for something healthier, that we can both look forward to. Here I talked about looking for space to breathe, and this is what I found.

Now every week we count sleeps down to beach day. She thinks it's a great adventure. Last weekend as we walked along I picked up pieces of debris, lots of wood with rusty nails, and made up a story about a pirate ship wrecked on the rocks and sunken treasure. So this week she's counting down to Saturday when she'll be on a mission to see if any treasure has washed ashore. I might have to take something for her to find!

Name the movie

Full Circle

You know how sometimes a singer or a song will take you back to a time or place? And you feel like they were part of an experience or situation? I confess to listening to a lot of James Blunt last year during all the transition. So I added him to the Life List. Number 55.

Last week he came to Qatar and did a Valentine's Day concert on the beach. I ended up getting a VIP ticket with friends. One of them knew James and had arranged for us all to meet up for drinks before it began. This was just after he had met with music students from my daughter's school which I thought was nice of him to do. When he joined us he made his way through the crowd and I wondered what he thought about it all, the nameless faces, handshakes, smiles, and nods. He looked tired but was a good sport. After Qatar he was going on to do concerts in Oman and then Dubai on the 15th and 16th.

It was lots of fun, luckily I had flip-flops so I could change out of my heels! After making fun of all the women who show up to stand in the sand dressed for clubbing in stilettos I couldn't actually become one of them.

He didn't play much of the music I've been listening to for the last year, like the one below, definitely not concert material, but it felt like closure. That he'd been part of a journey that was over. I will always like those songs but they won't be played on repeat anymore.

Cicatrix Manet

I have a friend in an increasingly abusive relationship. It is particularly upsetting because I've been on both sides of the fence she's on now. It's easy to say she should leave, how freeing it will be to live without fear. But that's only one kind of fear.

My friend has small children, plural. Choosing to become a single mother with one child depending on you is difficult enough. There is still fear and sometimes I think this kind is worse. It's fear of the future, the unknown, of being able to provide a home, education, safe environment for your child. Fear of unexpected car maintenance, dental bills, etc. So much more overwhelming and longer term fear than fear of a fist.

When you're in an abusive relationship you hold your breath as you wait for the next outburst. It doesn't take long to realise that by provoking it you can determine, somewhat, when it will happen. It gives you a false sense of control over the situation and so you take it, after all, the pain will be temporary and then hopefully you'll be left alone and have some breathing room before the tension and dread builds again. That kind of fear starts to feel predictable, the cycle familiar, and the familiarity comforting.

I have to admit I'm not as strong as you all think. I didn't make the choice to 'get out'. And my situation(s) were less complicated in that I wasn't married and didn't have children at the time. With the first one I didn't have a choice after the police became involved, who knows how long I would have stayed otherwise. And with the second one I knew I would be leaving the US soon so I just let it go on until I could leave with false promises of "being back soon", avoiding a confrontation and break-up.

There is no telling someone caught in the cycle, it has to be their decision. All you can do is listen helplessly, be at the end of the phone, or on facebook chat. But I worry about her. And her children. Especially her daughter who is old enough to remember. How will this affect her? The way she thinks she deserves to be treated? The way she thinks she should be loved one day? And the boys, still too young to follow the example their father is setting of how they should treat women. How they should treat their mother. I ache for the weight of the decisions she carries and wonder what the trigger will be for her to leave.

Tit for Tat

It's all about diplomacy. Or the lack of. My sister failed her driving test. I did too the first time, but unlike her, I still walked away with a license. If we were British we could just present our UK license and automatically get a Qatari one. Since the US requires Qataris to take a driving test and apply for licenses in the US, Americans have to do a driving test and apply for a license in Qatar. 

There are limited times for women to get licenses. It's all very clandestine, intimidating and frightening to those who don't know any better. I was picked up at 0430 to get to the driving school at 0500. It felt like I was doing something illegal, under the cover of darkness. I joined a few other women and stood in line, freezing, in the dark, until the police arrived at 0530. In the order that we arrived we had to do the 'reading test'. Identify a stop sign on a filthy laminated card of various road signs. That was it. Seriously. After that we waited in little huddles, shivering, until it was light enough to do the 'parking test'.

This consisted of pulling a sharp right into a single parking space on a steep gradient, reversing out and driving forward, all in one movement without stopping or correcting. That was no problem for the new drivers who had attended the driving school, all they do is drill that move into them to get their students to pass the test. For me and the handful of other Americans it was a disaster. Unlike the newbies who wouldn't survive a day on the streets, we'd all held licenses from around the world and been driving for years. Each and every one of us was stopped, told to get out, and that we had failed within seconds of starting the engine. We had one cop yelling at us in Arabic to pull forward, another shouting at us to stop, and another telling us to go back.

I was not about to go through the early morning madness again so as the others stood around complaining I walked over to the row of offices and knocked on the door of the guy with the most stripes on his shoulder. I wished him a good morning, introduced myself, and said that I was there to get a license. I explained that I wasn't sure what was going on but that I believed I had been failed before I had driven at all, that lots of people were shouting at us but that the other English speakers and I didn't understand what we were supposed to do. I asked nicely if it would be possible to have a policeman explain in English to give us a fair chance. He agreed and voilà, we all passed the 'parking' test. We could join the group going on to do the 'street test'.

We had to wait around for another hour until after school traffic had died down and the roads wouldn't be quite so busy. Then a police man jumped in a driving school car and two buses full of us women followed to the designated area, a street of about 1/2 km with three roundabouts one after another. The convoy pulled over onto the shoulder. A women from the first bus got into the driver's side of the car with the policeman in the passenger seat. As she pulled into traffic, so did we. The whole convoy followed her as she indicated, successfully manoeuvred her way through a roundabout, and then pulled over. I had never seen anything like it. The whole thing was repeated with another lady, then another. Sitting on the filthy smelly bus as it lurched into traffic, then screeched to a grinding halt on the side of the road, I was getting ready to vomit. Watching the women taking the test might have been entertaining otherwise. Some used the wrong indicators, some didn't use them at all, some took the racing line through the roundabouts, some pulled out without checking oncoming traffic, some were stopped for speeding and some didn't creep up over 10 kph.

When it was my turn I have to admit I was nervous. The same policeman who had 'failed' my parking test was waiting for me. I buckled up and adjusted my mirrors. Then I asked him in Arabic what he wanted me to do, to show him that I could actually understand him earlier. He answered, in perfect English, "nothing, I know you can drive". And that was it. I didn't even drive. But he signed the paper. And I passed the driving test.

The Escalator

I'm back. From a timewarp of sleep, fever, chills that started with my daughter two weeks ago and that she kindly passed on to me last week. It was only a matter of time, I feel like I've been holding on by my fingernails for a while now.

I'm not sure I want to be back. I dragged myself into work yesterday only to drive home in tears. I had asked either to use a day of annual leave or for a 1.5 hour class to be covered Sunday morning so that I could attend my daughter's first Sports Day. The request was denied. My precious four year old, with no one to cheer her on, hold her hand, praise her, it broke my heart. Admittedly I was feeling pretty fragile already, the flu will do that to you, but that was the last straw.

My company has become increasingly difficult, and I'm sure they feel the same about me. I'm the only single mother they have to deal with. None of the management have children. I've requested not to work evening shifts or weekends which goes against their policy of distributing hours 'fairly' between staff. I have had to stay home with my sick child. I have asked to use my annual leave days for time off to watch her first school concert, and now her first sports day. I'm not sure how normal those requests would be in the real world. Here, it seems it is too much to ask.

Luckily the manager who had refused is away on leave so his decision was overturned. But he'll be back and the schedule will change again next week. I'm dreading it after last time. I'm tired of fighting them. The latest is our annual leave flights. Those are the words in our contracts. And those words have meant exactly that in the six years I've worked for the organisation up till now. Now they're telling us it's a mistake and should really just be one flight per two year contract. So they aren't honouring our contracts.

It's kind of ironic. In Saudi I was all about my career, working 10 hours a day (my husband wasn't around and it was long before I had a baby so I had nothing else to do), earning three promotions in three years, doubling my salary in four, proving myself, being independent, I was going to do it all.

Now there is nothing I want more than to stay at home, to have the time to prepare healthy meals for us, to have the time to take her to ballet, or swimming, instead of rushing to school between shifts to pick her up, feed her lunch, and leave again for a second shift, getting home long after she's been put to bed.

I feel like I'm walking up a down escalator with burnout nipping at my heels.

Tug of War

I sometimes feel that I have a little angel perched on one shoulder whose voice I hear saying:

"you can do it you can do it you can do it".

On the other shoulder is a little devil saying:

"you're gonna crack you're gonna crack you're gonna crack".

Being a Mother

A lot of friends have been posting and liking this mommy article recently on facebook. While it resonates with many of them, it doesn't quite do it for me.

Yes, being a mother is a struggle. I think that would be the case no matter how many children one had. But I also think that life is a struggle whether you have children or not. I find that being a mother is empowering, I do more than I ever thought I would, I love more than I ever knew I could, and my patience has depths I never knew it did. Sometimes something has to give and it is frustrating and disappointing not to be able to do it all. My choice. My priorities. Other people's opinions don't enter the equation.

The only thing that did strike a chord was when the author wrote about waiting for that key to turn in the lock at the end of the day. Oh how I used to wait. And wait. And now there isn't one. No one is coming home to talk to, to listen to, to touch or to be held by. Recently that's been my struggle. Not the juggling act.

And that we do it all "Only so that you can become strong enough to be a woman who will be left." Because if you do it right, they leave. I wonder where I will be and who I will be when that happens, if I will be left alone.

But I need to snap out of it. While everyone else sees smiles and laughter, my daughter quietly takes my hand and says "mommy why are you sad?"

Another Hurdle

My baby is four, actually, as of a couple of weeks ago but given everything that has been going on I waited to do a party. I would rather face deadlines such as year end reports or forecasts than a child's birthday party, and that's when it isn't even my own. But it went perfectly. Everyone helped make it happen.

The best part was that I realised I've overcome another hurdle. I'm so grateful her father is who he is, and relieved that we've reached the point where we can still work together as a team when it matters. I never want our daughter to feel that she doesn't deserve or isn't important enough for the two of us to put aside our problems and get along for her sake. 

She was the happiest little girl in the world and that made me the happiest mommy in the world.

Anticlimax

I've been waiting to blog until today, hoping I'd have An Announcement following the latest appointment at the hospital, a new diagnosis perhaps, preferably one that could be treated and would result in me being miraculously cured. What was I thinking.

The day actually started last night, with a circuit tripping out so I lost power in the kitchen of all places. Three times. Fridges don't do such a good job at keeping food cool without electricity. I woke up feeling like I hadn't slept, listening to a little voice in my head singing "pain pain go away... don't come back another day..." I turned off my blaring alarm at 0530 and stumbled into the cold dark bathroom only to find that there was no water. The problem with the electricity was actually caused by the motor on the water pump blowing yesterday. Mad rush to get my daughter to school, stop for a shower on the way to work at my parents and then get to the hospital before the doctor left for the day. Just made it.

And he had the results of last week's tests. Apparently my Vitamin D levels are less than a third of what they should be which isn't a surprise but they expected worse given my symptoms. So much for that theory. They decided to start me on Vitamin D injections anyway to monitor for any improvement. I thought that it was all under control, I would be done in time to grab lunch (breakfast!) on the way to pick my daughter up after school. Until I tried standing up after the injection.

Everything went a little swirly and white but I still thought I had it under control, I held onto the hospital bed for a couple seconds and then started walking out the door. Only my leg was numb. So plan B. Lay down and facebook on my crackberry until I could walk to my car. The injection was in my left hip and all I needed to drive was my right side, right? Yes. But sitting in traffic for 45 mins was not the best feeling. 

Ah well, the hurricane is in bed. It's all downhill from here. I only have to hang three sets of curtains, change 6 bulbs, and wrap millions of layers of presents for pass the parcel for The Birthday Party on Thursday.