Rumours starting coming in the month following Pierre’s birth that there were boats taking the trip from Jounieh to Cyprus – a hazardous trip given that the other side in the war had bombed the coast near us in the past. The rumours strengthened over time and we heard that a boat had been successful and there would be a regular service to those who had somewhere to go and the money to do so.
Pierre was doing well, I had no trouble with the children and my own health appeared okay. Spring had come and we were looking at another long hot summer.
We baptised Pierre at the local Maronite church, with Michel’s brother as godfather and his cousin Fadwa as godmother. The ceremony was in Aramaic, a dead language which the Lebanese themselves do not understand very well (although if spoken slowly and using simple words, I can understand). The ceremony was the full “Greek orthodox” style ceremony with incense, and the group walking around the church several times. The choice of godparents was political, and I had no say in the matter. Funnily I don’t remember Elizabeth’s godparents’ names; I remember the ceremony itself, but cannot remember who her god parents were – they must have been fair weather friends indeed if I cannot remember that.
It was with great excitement but some reservations (given Michel’s trick of the previous year) that Michel told me that we would be going back to Australia, by boat to Cyprus. This time we did actually go.
The trip was in the second boat making the trip to Cyprus from Jounieh, and was a tiny fishing boast with a small bedroom with two bunks – which were allocated to me and my children. I was the only female on board. We travelled at night and it took all night to get there. I was sea sick all the way there – the crossing was rough and the boat too small. Elizabeth was sick as well for a while and then mercifully slept the rest of the way. Pierre was not affected as I was still breastfeeding him. We landed at Nicosia in the early morning and then had to find our way to a hotel, so we could get Pierre registered on my passport and to buy tickets to get back to Australia. We stayed at a hotel which was not nice, as Michel was trying very hard to save as much money as possible to send back to his brother in Lebanon. We lived on hamburgers as they were the cheapest thing on the hotel menu. It took a week to get everything in order, and Elizabeth turned 2 while we were in transit from Lebanon; which, as I had pointed out to Michel that she would need a child passage, infuriated him that I was right, and he had to upgrade her ticket at the last minute.
The trip home was as one would expect with two small children and stressed parents. We had to travel to Athens and then to Sydney, over 24 hours travelling. I managed to get a message to my parents to say I was coming – just as well, as they met us at the airport. We needed it.
Looking back, it is obvious to me that we were very stressed and disturbed. I was close to a nervous breakdown, and in fact would say I was so badly disturbed that I should have had psychiatric help. My health was also very poor, without me being able to say what the problem was. The children were also stressed. Elizabeth acted out, throwing tantrums at the drop of a hat. Pierre changed from a docile three month old baby to a screaming demon. We spent two weeks with my parents while Michel looked for somewhere for us to stay. Luckily he had managed to get his old job back – it was now simply a matter of finding a place of our own. We had arrived in Sydney with $US40 to our name – Michel had sent back all his money to his brother in Lebanon. I later found the money went to continuing the building project he had started whilst I was pregnant with Pierre.
It was not fun living with my parents. There was not enough room and we felt very crowded. With the children acting up, I felt very stressed and desperately wanted to be by myself as I had become used to in Lebanon.
Michel found us somewhere to live – but it was not the solution I thought it would be. For me it was going from the fat to the fire. He found us two rooms with some friends of his – living with a large Lebanese family, sharing facilities with them, really just lodgers in an already crowded household. These people had four children of their own and a mother in law living with them, in a four bedroom house in Rockdale. Then we came and took two bedrooms. The children in the family were in primary school. I felt crowded. I could not do anything without an audience, and as Pierre crawled at 4 months and was walking around the furniture at 7 months I had the devil’s own time trying to keep my parenting together whilst I was trying to live with these people I disliked intensely. Michel responded to my protestations by ignoring me. I barely saw him in the three months we lived there. I told him we had to get out of there as soon as we could. He agreed, reluctantly, he could see I was not happy and that the arrangement (whilst good on paper) did not work as it should have. I was sleeping with the children in one room and Michel was sleeping in another, sharing with the boys of the family. So not a good time for me.
I was finding that Michel’s attachment to his Lebanese friends was greater than his loyalty to his wife and family. He would go out and leave me with the children, to visit his friends, or, on the weekends, make visits with me and the children to the homes of his friends. Thus most of my time was spent with the Lebanese people. As well. I was acting as an interpreter to the old lady living in the Rockdale home. She was a type 2 diabetic with little understanding of her condition. I would accompany her to the hospital diabetic clinic and interpret for her. I fear that my efforts went nowhere, as she completely ignored anything the doctor told her to do. However I did learn a little about diabetes.
The next accommodation move was a little better. Michel found us a granny flat in Carlton which was three rooms on the side of a house. There was a grotty little kitchen, a living room and a bedroom. One entered through the bedroom to the living room and then the kitchen and a small laundry shower room off the kitchen area. I did not have a washing machine, and did all my washing by hand. The clothes line was in the back yard and I was limited to the days I could use it – the landlady washed on set days. I tried to wash whenever I could. The backyard was the run of the chooks and if I dropped anything it had to be rewashed. It was better then staying with the family, but only marginally.
I felt better having a place of my own. However it did not help my relationship with Michel. Whilst we were in Lebanon, he was a more considerate husband. He knew that if I said that he was not being nice to me to any of his relatives or friends, it would be a “loss of face” to him, about which he set high regard; so he was careful not to put himself in the situation of me talking badly about him to others. In other words, whilst I was in Lebanon our marriage, whilst not fantastic, managed to be reasonably okay. He neglected me shockingly, and relied on the Zogaibs to entertain me, however he was not mean to me in private, nor did he nag me excessively. And since my parents were not there, in sight or in mind, there was no conflict on that subject. So we cohabited in a wary peace.
However that changed as soon as we returned. Firstly, we were all very stressed by the journey and the change in circumstances, and then Michel became paranoid – the only way to describe it - over the influence my parents may have had over me. As he put it, they were whispering in my ear to influence me; on what I do not know, as I never got to the bottom of what he suspected them of influencing me on. He began to nag me, pre-empting what he considered to be the whispering in my ear from my parents by doing the same thing he was accusing them of doing – and it amounted to mental cruelty.
Nothing I did was good enough. From the time we returned my expenditure was questioned – every cent I spent had to be accounted for, and even a bus fare would be queried as excessive. I found this very hard to cope with, and I remember in particular the time spent living in Carlton as difficult from the money position as there was no really satisfactory transport and Michel kept me very short of money.
He also began a campaign of “no-talkies” – where he would not talk to me – ignore me (whilst still availing himself of my services by eating the food I prepared, accepting the clothes I had washed etc), but for weeks at a time not uttering a word to me. On the rare occasion he needed to communicate, while he was in “no-talkies” mode, he would use the “tell your mother” route by talking to Elizabeth. In the beginning I found this very distressing. I was essentially alone with no friends and for him to stop talking to me distressed me – for most of these instances I had no idea what I had done to merit this “punishment” – as that is what it was meant to be. As he was not talking to me, he could not tell me what I was being punished for. So I would get very upset and cry and beg forgiveness for what ever it was that I done to upset him – and most of the time it was something so insignificant, so minor that it seems remarkable to me now that I put up with it. After a year or so of this treatment where he spent nearly half his time not speaking to me (and consequently not being able to have normal marital relations with me, under his “rules” – biting off his nose to spite his face) I began to see these periods of him not talking as an advantage and began to enjoy them. I saw them for what they were – the weapon of a selfish martinet. It was in Carlton that my marriage began to fall apart. Until then I would have considered that whilst I was not happy in my marriage I did not consider myself so unhappily married that I would look for a way out of it. Sexual relations were mostly on a stop start basis – if he was not talking to me there was no sex. It had been a long time since I had initiated sex, ie actually wanted to have sex with Michel, and by this time I lay back and thought of England – I went through the motions in order to keep the peace.
As well as being unhappy, the Carlton period marked the beginning of my health issues. Very soon after we returned it became obvious to me that something was wrong with my reproductive area, and on consulting the gynaecologist who birthed Elizabeth, was told my uterus had inverted – tipped over backwards due to weak ligaments- and the only solution was surgery. Since Pierre was at this stage a crawler and I knew I would get no help from Michel, I deferred the surgery until I knew Pierre was walking and I would not have to lift him. This he did at eight and half months, right on schedule. At this point I scheduled the surgery which was done in mid January of 1977, coincidentally on the day of the Granville train disaster.
I was also suffering from swollen glands, fatigue, pain in the joints – like having a perpetual flu – which no-one seemed to be able to fix. I had bouts of this flu-like illness off and on. It sapped my strength and energy, leaving me unable and unwilling to do anything I did not have to do. There were many days in this period which mimicked the time I was sick in Lebanon – I looked after the children and spent the day on the sofa.
I did try to make friends and started to go to playgroups in the Rockdale area. My attempts to form friendships however most did not last long. Michel was very suspicious on any friend I made and would be not very civil to them if they were there when he came home. He was not comfortable of anyone who might have influenced me – I see now he was insecure about me, but he had a funny way of showing it. I also found it difficult to attend functions or visit as a couple – his idea of visiting was so different from my own, so in the end I gave up trying to get him involved with any friends I made on a couple level. I kept the friends I made (which weren’t many) to myself.
Pierre was doing well, I had no trouble with the children and my own health appeared okay. Spring had come and we were looking at another long hot summer.
We baptised Pierre at the local Maronite church, with Michel’s brother as godfather and his cousin Fadwa as godmother. The ceremony was in Aramaic, a dead language which the Lebanese themselves do not understand very well (although if spoken slowly and using simple words, I can understand). The ceremony was the full “Greek orthodox” style ceremony with incense, and the group walking around the church several times. The choice of godparents was political, and I had no say in the matter. Funnily I don’t remember Elizabeth’s godparents’ names; I remember the ceremony itself, but cannot remember who her god parents were – they must have been fair weather friends indeed if I cannot remember that.
It was with great excitement but some reservations (given Michel’s trick of the previous year) that Michel told me that we would be going back to Australia, by boat to Cyprus. This time we did actually go.
The trip was in the second boat making the trip to Cyprus from Jounieh, and was a tiny fishing boast with a small bedroom with two bunks – which were allocated to me and my children. I was the only female on board. We travelled at night and it took all night to get there. I was sea sick all the way there – the crossing was rough and the boat too small. Elizabeth was sick as well for a while and then mercifully slept the rest of the way. Pierre was not affected as I was still breastfeeding him. We landed at Nicosia in the early morning and then had to find our way to a hotel, so we could get Pierre registered on my passport and to buy tickets to get back to Australia. We stayed at a hotel which was not nice, as Michel was trying very hard to save as much money as possible to send back to his brother in Lebanon. We lived on hamburgers as they were the cheapest thing on the hotel menu. It took a week to get everything in order, and Elizabeth turned 2 while we were in transit from Lebanon; which, as I had pointed out to Michel that she would need a child passage, infuriated him that I was right, and he had to upgrade her ticket at the last minute.
The trip home was as one would expect with two small children and stressed parents. We had to travel to Athens and then to Sydney, over 24 hours travelling. I managed to get a message to my parents to say I was coming – just as well, as they met us at the airport. We needed it.
Looking back, it is obvious to me that we were very stressed and disturbed. I was close to a nervous breakdown, and in fact would say I was so badly disturbed that I should have had psychiatric help. My health was also very poor, without me being able to say what the problem was. The children were also stressed. Elizabeth acted out, throwing tantrums at the drop of a hat. Pierre changed from a docile three month old baby to a screaming demon. We spent two weeks with my parents while Michel looked for somewhere for us to stay. Luckily he had managed to get his old job back – it was now simply a matter of finding a place of our own. We had arrived in Sydney with $US40 to our name – Michel had sent back all his money to his brother in Lebanon. I later found the money went to continuing the building project he had started whilst I was pregnant with Pierre.
It was not fun living with my parents. There was not enough room and we felt very crowded. With the children acting up, I felt very stressed and desperately wanted to be by myself as I had become used to in Lebanon.
Michel found us somewhere to live – but it was not the solution I thought it would be. For me it was going from the fat to the fire. He found us two rooms with some friends of his – living with a large Lebanese family, sharing facilities with them, really just lodgers in an already crowded household. These people had four children of their own and a mother in law living with them, in a four bedroom house in Rockdale. Then we came and took two bedrooms. The children in the family were in primary school. I felt crowded. I could not do anything without an audience, and as Pierre crawled at 4 months and was walking around the furniture at 7 months I had the devil’s own time trying to keep my parenting together whilst I was trying to live with these people I disliked intensely. Michel responded to my protestations by ignoring me. I barely saw him in the three months we lived there. I told him we had to get out of there as soon as we could. He agreed, reluctantly, he could see I was not happy and that the arrangement (whilst good on paper) did not work as it should have. I was sleeping with the children in one room and Michel was sleeping in another, sharing with the boys of the family. So not a good time for me.
I was finding that Michel’s attachment to his Lebanese friends was greater than his loyalty to his wife and family. He would go out and leave me with the children, to visit his friends, or, on the weekends, make visits with me and the children to the homes of his friends. Thus most of my time was spent with the Lebanese people. As well. I was acting as an interpreter to the old lady living in the Rockdale home. She was a type 2 diabetic with little understanding of her condition. I would accompany her to the hospital diabetic clinic and interpret for her. I fear that my efforts went nowhere, as she completely ignored anything the doctor told her to do. However I did learn a little about diabetes.
The next accommodation move was a little better. Michel found us a granny flat in Carlton which was three rooms on the side of a house. There was a grotty little kitchen, a living room and a bedroom. One entered through the bedroom to the living room and then the kitchen and a small laundry shower room off the kitchen area. I did not have a washing machine, and did all my washing by hand. The clothes line was in the back yard and I was limited to the days I could use it – the landlady washed on set days. I tried to wash whenever I could. The backyard was the run of the chooks and if I dropped anything it had to be rewashed. It was better then staying with the family, but only marginally.
I felt better having a place of my own. However it did not help my relationship with Michel. Whilst we were in Lebanon, he was a more considerate husband. He knew that if I said that he was not being nice to me to any of his relatives or friends, it would be a “loss of face” to him, about which he set high regard; so he was careful not to put himself in the situation of me talking badly about him to others. In other words, whilst I was in Lebanon our marriage, whilst not fantastic, managed to be reasonably okay. He neglected me shockingly, and relied on the Zogaibs to entertain me, however he was not mean to me in private, nor did he nag me excessively. And since my parents were not there, in sight or in mind, there was no conflict on that subject. So we cohabited in a wary peace.
However that changed as soon as we returned. Firstly, we were all very stressed by the journey and the change in circumstances, and then Michel became paranoid – the only way to describe it - over the influence my parents may have had over me. As he put it, they were whispering in my ear to influence me; on what I do not know, as I never got to the bottom of what he suspected them of influencing me on. He began to nag me, pre-empting what he considered to be the whispering in my ear from my parents by doing the same thing he was accusing them of doing – and it amounted to mental cruelty.
Nothing I did was good enough. From the time we returned my expenditure was questioned – every cent I spent had to be accounted for, and even a bus fare would be queried as excessive. I found this very hard to cope with, and I remember in particular the time spent living in Carlton as difficult from the money position as there was no really satisfactory transport and Michel kept me very short of money.
He also began a campaign of “no-talkies” – where he would not talk to me – ignore me (whilst still availing himself of my services by eating the food I prepared, accepting the clothes I had washed etc), but for weeks at a time not uttering a word to me. On the rare occasion he needed to communicate, while he was in “no-talkies” mode, he would use the “tell your mother” route by talking to Elizabeth. In the beginning I found this very distressing. I was essentially alone with no friends and for him to stop talking to me distressed me – for most of these instances I had no idea what I had done to merit this “punishment” – as that is what it was meant to be. As he was not talking to me, he could not tell me what I was being punished for. So I would get very upset and cry and beg forgiveness for what ever it was that I done to upset him – and most of the time it was something so insignificant, so minor that it seems remarkable to me now that I put up with it. After a year or so of this treatment where he spent nearly half his time not speaking to me (and consequently not being able to have normal marital relations with me, under his “rules” – biting off his nose to spite his face) I began to see these periods of him not talking as an advantage and began to enjoy them. I saw them for what they were – the weapon of a selfish martinet. It was in Carlton that my marriage began to fall apart. Until then I would have considered that whilst I was not happy in my marriage I did not consider myself so unhappily married that I would look for a way out of it. Sexual relations were mostly on a stop start basis – if he was not talking to me there was no sex. It had been a long time since I had initiated sex, ie actually wanted to have sex with Michel, and by this time I lay back and thought of England – I went through the motions in order to keep the peace.
As well as being unhappy, the Carlton period marked the beginning of my health issues. Very soon after we returned it became obvious to me that something was wrong with my reproductive area, and on consulting the gynaecologist who birthed Elizabeth, was told my uterus had inverted – tipped over backwards due to weak ligaments- and the only solution was surgery. Since Pierre was at this stage a crawler and I knew I would get no help from Michel, I deferred the surgery until I knew Pierre was walking and I would not have to lift him. This he did at eight and half months, right on schedule. At this point I scheduled the surgery which was done in mid January of 1977, coincidentally on the day of the Granville train disaster.
I was also suffering from swollen glands, fatigue, pain in the joints – like having a perpetual flu – which no-one seemed to be able to fix. I had bouts of this flu-like illness off and on. It sapped my strength and energy, leaving me unable and unwilling to do anything I did not have to do. There were many days in this period which mimicked the time I was sick in Lebanon – I looked after the children and spent the day on the sofa.
I did try to make friends and started to go to playgroups in the Rockdale area. My attempts to form friendships however most did not last long. Michel was very suspicious on any friend I made and would be not very civil to them if they were there when he came home. He was not comfortable of anyone who might have influenced me – I see now he was insecure about me, but he had a funny way of showing it. I also found it difficult to attend functions or visit as a couple – his idea of visiting was so different from my own, so in the end I gave up trying to get him involved with any friends I made on a couple level. I kept the friends I made (which weren’t many) to myself.
The photo is a rare photo of Michel and Elizabeth taken in August of the year we returned to Sydney, at the house of a close friend of Michel's - Alexi. Alexi was a Russian - Lebanese mix with a french-Lebanese wife who was the most ditsy hopeless person I have ever met. I did not like this couple but found them fascinating in their horribleness. They had one child, Lara, who managed to survive despite the inept ministrations of her parents. Michel's fondness for Alexi meant that he spent a lot of time with him - with and without me in attendance. I was not there when this photo was taken.
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