Monday 8 February 2010

Counselling For Imane

For over 2 years now I have had serious problems with my daughter, the real problems started after our last visit to Switzerland to see her dad.

The main one is she refuses to eat anything I cook and at home lives on crisps, chocolate and cucumber. Just a few days ago she began to eat roast potatoes with gravy.

She has lost an alarming amount of weight and my doctors just basically told me to starve her by refusing to give her the things she will eat. I did try it once, she refused to eat for almost 2 weeks until I had to give in.

Funny enough she eats her school dinner and also eats her breakfast at breakfast club but at home ZERO.

A lot of her behaviour is control related, she seems to want to be the adult and for me to be the child. What with the controlling, hitting and kicking, screaming and just being downright nasty sometimes (as though she hates me), her obsession with wanting to be a boy, dress and act as a boy, I was finding it hard to cope.

When my husband is at home she is sooooo good, as soon as he leaves for Uni, she is back to her normal behaviour.

Her school have finally referred her for counselling and I had to meet with the woman who will work with her this morning.
We spoke a lot about my own childhood, when I lost my only sister to cancer when she was 9 and I was 10, about my life in UAE, my marraige to Imanes dad, the way we ended up back in UK with ZERO, my mother dying the month before Imane was born etc

The counsellor believes 100% that any major stress that happens during pregnancy passes onto the unborn child, and she believes apart from the damage Imanes father has done to her by ignoring her and making it obvious he has more or less washed his hands of her, she has also suffered due to the amount of stress I was under while pregnant.

She was born into a lot of sorrow and grief and maybe that is why she is such an angry little girl.

I hope through counselling my daughter can let us see what is on her mind, why she is so angry with me (this has been going on long before my husband came into our lives) and what she actually feels about her father.

I am also going to get some counselling as I have never really spoken to anyone professional about what I have been through and maybe this will help Imane in the longrun.

I worry about Imane, she hates me speaking arabic, and when we talk about Islam and tell her she is a Muslim she get very angry and screams at me to speak english and that she is not a muslim as she is not vegetarian (have no idea why she associates Islam with Veggies). Maybe arabic and Islam are things she associates with her father and thats why she is so against us talking about it....

I pray to Allah my little girl will grow healthy and happy and loose the anger she has inside. She is my only baby and I love her very much.

Imane at Brighton Beach having an ice cream 2007, before things went downhill (she even wore pink back then and not a spiderman in sight)

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Part Three Of My Story Of My Ex Husband and Suffering

2 weeks before I flew back to UK I sent my father a letter telling him everything that had happened and the reason why I was coming home. I never heared anything from him which did not suprise me but I at least thought he would let his only child and grandchild rest for the night in his house when I got back until I could sort something out.

Anyway around lunchtime we arrived back in the UK. I had not been back to the UK for 9 years so everything was new to me.
As I waited for our suitcases I stood there wanting to cry, I had no idea what to do or what would happen to us. Once I collected our cases I made my way to a phone box and tried to call my father (no answer). I then called my mothers sister Christine and quickly told her I had to run away from UAE and would explain later, but could I at least come straight to her and leave my cases there while I tried to work out what to do.

Imane and I got a National Express coach back to Brighton (thanks god for "O" money, we would have been destitute in Heathrow without that). Once I arrived in Brighton after a 2 hour journey my aunt came and picked us up. She told me my father had deliberatly booked a holiday so he was not in UK when we arrived home as he had no intention of putting himself out and helping us. My aunt wanted us to be with her but she had no room as all her teenage kids lived at home, so after lots of cuddles and cups of tea, we managed to find a cheap hotel for the night and my aunt looked after our cases and then drove us to the hotel. I decided that the next morning after checking out I would go straight to the local Brighton and Hove City Council homeless department and tell them my daughter and I had nowhere to sleep that night (UK is very good at looking after its people if they are in serious trouble).

Early the next morning Imane and I went to the homeless office and I had to wait to see someone. As I spilled out my story between sobs, the council told me they were going to help me and would accept me as homeless and try to house me. We had to wait for a few hours and had to fill in some forms, but later that afternoon we were given the keys to a tiny studio in a building for homeless people in the center of Brighton until they could permenantly house me.

The studio was really grotty and dirty but at least it was a roof over our heads. My aunt and one of my other aunts and my uncle all rallied round and managed to give us blankets, a secondhand cot for Imane, some old saucepans and even a tiny tv. Over the next few days someone came to help me to fill out all the forms to get wellfare benefit for my daughter and I.
I actually spent 10 weeks living on £46 a week until my tax credits were sorted out for Imane, so life was really hard during that time.

The day after I arrived back to UK, I called my ex from a phone box and told him I wanted a divorce, that no way on earth would I ever let him come and live in the UK, that he was a bad muslim, terrible husband and father and the fact he knowingly sent us to UK without even 1 dh just showed me that the marraige had to end that I served no purpose to him than to get a european citizenship. I then closed the phone on him.

As for my life after this well, 8 weeks after first being put in the homeless studio, Imane and I were given our own 1 bedroom apartment in Ajman and I became a council tenant. I suffered with very bad depression but 8 months later managed to find the job I have now, funny enough I now work for Brighton and Hove City Council in Housing haha.
I work hard, and take care of Imane myself, we now have a large 2 bedroomed apartment by the sea and it is beautifully furnished from my hard earned money. I have recently married again to Rayed who is an International Student (Palestinian but all his family live in UAE).

As for my ex husband, well 6 weeks after I left him he was in Zurich with another woman who he had met on the net while married to me. He is married to her now, they have one son aged 2 and in the past 5.5 years he has not sent one single penny of finance for Imane. She gets one present on her birthday each year and has received a few packages of clothes. He has visited her once for 2 days and in the past 2 years has called her just twice for 40 seconds each phone call.

Despite him being a looser, I have spent my own money twice flying my daughter to Zurich to visit her dad and his new wife and brother, so she at least has some contact. But the last time I took her she got so upset that he spends all his time on her brother, that it affected her so badly that she now wants to be a boy and only dresses as a boy.

If you ask Imane about her dad she tells everyone she does not like him, so refuses to talk about him and does not want to see him.

Marriage to my ex almost put me off Islam, for years I have struggles to follow it, I have not prayed for years, I no longer wear Hijab and hopefully through my new husband I can begin to love it again. But when you suffer so much at the hands of a man that prays 5 times a day and goes regular to the mosque and is always spurting off about Islam and what your doing is against it, when in reality he has commited every sin going I hope everyone understands why I lost my love for Islam and why only now I am begining to fall in love with it again.

So there is my story. I am strong yes, made lots of wrong decisions but at the end of the day I got through it all and my life now is good. I am happy with life and so glad that Morrocan looser is gone from my life and Imanes.
Funny enough I get on well with his new wife and she is even a FB friend haha, she has had many problems with him such as catching him chatting with women and she even suspects he cheated once (I have no idea why she stays with him)
He does not deserve to be Imanes father, a father is more than just being the sperm donor, dont you agree?

Part Two of My Story of My Ex Husband and Suffering

At night when I got up to make a night feed for Imane (stress had caused my milk flow to be non existant) I would walk past my ex husbands bedroom and see a light under the door and hear the tap tap tap of his keyboard. I knew damn well what he was doing but I had to prove it.

One evening he accidently forgot to close his messenger as he went to play football with his fellow Morrocan work collegues. I managed to change his settings to save all his chat conversations to a history file on the computer. Each morning I would wake up when he had left for work and check his messege history.
He was chatting to all sorts of women, and telling quite a few different stories to them. Some he was proposing marraige and declaring undying love to them claiming he was single, to others he told them his wife had ran off and left him and stolen his new born baby daughter. Apart from these pathetic stories he was also asking them really disgusting things such as how they liked sex, what he would like to do to them, what he wanted them to do to him. I used to print all these conversations out as my evidence for when I decided to make my move and leave with my baby.
I still have them all now, carefully stored in a folder, so no one can ever say I imagined all of this and when Imane is older if she really wants to know the truth, she can read for herself.

The other thing he was doing was having phone sex, although I have no real proof of this as never heared any of his conversations, the phone bill while I was in hospital was over 6,000 dhs and the numbers listed were USA, France, Morroco, Germany etc. And going from some of the chat conversations it was obvious what he was doing on the phone.

Now some may well ask why the hell I stayed. Unless your actually living this nightmare you cant imagine how life actually was. Firstly my mother had just died, my father has always been an unloving man towards me and was not interested at all in helping me if I managed to fly back to UK.
My options were to just leave and return to ZERO or stay and eventually try to make a new life for myself in UAE and do my best to keep my daughter with me as the ex constantly threatened to make problems so the courts would give Imane to him. I guess I was mentally in a very bad way and when your suffering like that you do not make the right decisions.

The next bad thing to happen was my ex's mother sent his trollop of a sister Bushra to stay with us, on the pretence of her coming to take care of me and Imane. Now Bushra claims to be a good muslim yet she dresses like a street walker, goes off alone from Casablanca to Marakesh for weekends etc etc and asks men for money by dailing a random number and then talking all sweet and innocent (my ex husband actually told me she did this).
She arrived and my husband moved her into the bedroom with him, which my bestfriend and I thought was very strange.
She took over my house and did everything for my ex, while Imane and I were basically ignored. After she had been there a few weeks something happened one night to cause a big argument with my ex and I (I cant remember what started it or what it was about to be honest). At 11pm at night my ex husband taking his sisters side pushed me and Imane into the street. I was holding the baby and walking around Mussafa in my abaya when I bumped into two of his Morrocan friends. They saw me crying and one stayed with me and the other went back to our apartment to have a go at my ex. Apparently my ex told him I could go to hell and slammed the door in his face.

I then called "O" from my mobile and he told me to flag down any police car and tell them what happened and he would if necessary drive from Dubai to get me and Imane.
I saw a police 4x4 parked and went up to the two officers sitting in it and managed to explain best I could what had happened. The put Imane and I into the back and drove us to a police station (I cant remember which one but it was not in AbuDhbai city, but just outside, nearer Mussafa).
By then Imane was crying as she needed a feed so one of the police at the station managed to get some formula for her and I was then shown in to speak to the police chief of the station. I basically sobbed my heart out to him about what had happend since I met my husband. But to be honest I felt this policeman did not really believe me as he kept asking me what I had done to make my husband treat me this way. Heck most of my marraige I was either shoved off to live with phyco relatives or laying in a hospital bed for months, what kind of wrong could I have done????.
About one hour later, a police officer knocked on the door of the office I was in and standing next to him was my ex husband and his vulgar sister (who may I add had ditched the street walker clothes and donned an abaya and shayla), she began to scream like a cat saying how bad I was and my ex husband lied through his teeth and claimed I was the cheater as I knew all these local men and still talked to them (I only ever since marraige spoke to "O" as he was like family to me and I had cut contact with just about every person I had ever known in UAE from the day I married).
He then had the cheek to even claim I was a drug addict (because once in 1991 I had smoked hash while living in the UK about 12 years before I even met my ex husband).

The chief then turned to me and basically told me to respect my husband, to be a good wife and stop making problems. I was gob smacked, really shocked. We were then all told to leave. NO ONE WAS TAKING ME SERIOUSLY, I could not believe it.
So we all got in a taxi and went home.
I refused to talk to anyone for 3 days, I just kept to myself in my bedroom with Imane.
"O" wanted to help me but he was worried his name would be dragged into all this mess as he did not trust my ex husband, he promised to always be there for me but that was about it. As he was known as a VIP in UAE he was worried about his reputation hahaha.
I felt desperate and alone and really did not know what I was going to do.

About a week later, my sister-in-law was caught by my ex talking to a local guy on the phone and arranging to meet him. When questioned it appeared she was randomly dialing numbers again and finally found someone she thought she could use. A huge fight broke out between them as he explained what the police thought about single morrocan girls out alone at night with local men and he refused to let her leave the house as she was under his visa and it would make a problem for him.
She began the cat screaming again and began to pack her bags and then started screaming abuse at me as I walked into the kitchen to make milk for Imane. I total lost the plot then, I grabbed her suitcase and threw it outside the door and screamed at her that she was nothing more than a prostitute, who dressed like a 1 dh hooker and instead of looking after me she had made my life a living hell along with he cheating ass brother.
I then went into my bedroom and was standing over Imanes cot about to pick her up when she charged into my bedroom with a large knife from the kitchen and plunged at me. Luckily my ex saw her and managed to just push her has she lunged at me and the knife sliced the edge of my arm instead of going into my back.
My husband then called the police and told them his sister had tried to stab his wife and within 10 minutes we had 6 policemen in our apartment. Bushra was throwing herself on the floor screaming like a woman possessed and I remember 3 of the policemen standing there trying hard not to laugh at how pathetic she looked.
I told the police what I had called her and why I called her that and thanks god for once they believed my story and from what they saw of Bushra and her foul mouth and phyco rages they advised my husband if he wanted to press charges they would arrest her on the spot and throw her in jail for the night or he could arrange to have her sent back to Morroco as soon as possible.

I wanted her arrested but the ex decided to move her upstairs with his Morrocan friend and his wife while he arranged to have her visit visa cancelled and to book her flight home to Casablanca.
For once my ex was on my side and as he was suddenly being nice I decided to play nice too and then plot my escape out of this marraige.
Bushra was flown home about 5 days later and of course I ended up getting the blame for everything.

My ex and I got on for about a month and during this time, while he was at work I plotted how to return to UK even though I would be going back to ZERO. I contacted charities such as SHELTER and the Womens Refuge in my home town of Brighton and got lots of advice by email on what to do to register myself and my daughter as homeless.
Once I had the confidence to put my plan into action I told my ex it was better Imane and I returned to UK and then he could join us later and eventually he would get UK citizenship.
Of course he was so desperate to not return to Morroco after his contract finished that thanks God he believed me.
He bought me a one way ticket to UK and agreed to let me leave with Imane. He knew we were going back to ZERO and it did not seem to bother him at all (just shows what kind of man he is).
The night before I flew back to UK we drove down to Ajman so I could say goodbye to my best friend Fay and her local husband Jamal. I was left at Fays house while the ex went to visit a friend of his. "O" popped round to Fays as well to say goodbye to me and to tell me once I got back and divorced the ex, if I wanted to come back to UAE he would arrange everything and find us somewhere to live. "O" then shoved £400 into my hand and told me to use it to get a hotel for the first night back in UK and things for Imane. All of them knew what I was going to do when I reached UK and everyone supported my plan.

Early the next morning with 3 suitcases packed, the ex took Imane and I to the airport. As he was about to leave us as we went through security I asked him for money. As Allah is my witness, my ex husband and the father of my child who was just 6 months old at the time, refused to give me even 1 dh to buy a bottle of water. He kissed Imane on the head and walked off. If "O" had not given me that £400 then I would have been totally destitute when I arrived in UK.
As I sat waiting for our Al Etihad flight I boiled with hate, boiled with hate because in my husbands bank account that morning was a total of 8,000 dhs yet he could not even give us money to buy milk, pampers for our child or even enough to ensure we had somewhere to sleep when we arrived back in the UK (remember he did not know about the £400 "O" had given me).
My ex calmly walked off leaving his wife and baby destitute.

When the flight finally took off I just let out a great sigh of relief, finally I was free and no matter how hard things were going to be I just knew eventually we would be ok.

Part 3 in next blog post
Tuesday 2 February 2010

The story of my ex husband and the suffering I went through

I feel to write about my daughters father tonight (my ex husband) as he annoys me so much and is such a terrible father that he deserves his own exposure post. I know airing dirty washing in public is not a good thing, but its about time I put the story into words.

It may all seem like a fairytale to those that read it but as Allah is my witness it is alllllll true.

I think one of the biggest mistakes of my life was marrying my ex husband, however despite it being a terrible marraige I did get blessed with my daughter Imane which I thank Allah for.

I met my ex husband in Feb 2003, he told me everything I wanted to hear, I married him March 2003, got pregnant with Imane 2 weeks later then realised what a slimeball he really was.
I think I first realised this just after I got a positive pregnancy test. At the time he was living in Abu Dhabi in his staff apartment and I was still living in my home in Ajman.
After a weekend with me he accidently left his hotmail email open which I noticed after he left, so for some reason I decided to just check it out.

I found tons of emails from women all over the world which were in reply to emails he had sent them most of which were sent from about 3 days after our wedding. In all of them he was proposing marraige and in some he had even sent a photograph of his Penis.
Now after reading through all those emails it suddenly dawned on me, that this guy had probably married me in the hope of eventually getting my citizenship and moving to the UK, as all the women he had contacted were European/American/Canadian etc.

I did not say anything to him but I did go to the court to see if I could get divorced, which they refused because I was pregnant. Eventually I tackled him about these emails and he swore they were sent before he met me (he was lying through his teeth) and he swore he would never do anything to hurt or cheat me (again lying through his teeth, I dont know how he dared get on his prayer mat after that.
So I decided there was nothing else I could do but do my best in the marraige and do what I had to do after my child was born.

A month into the pregnancy I began to bleed and the doctors put me on bedrest for 3 months. At the time I was running a successful online graphic business and making good money. However to make my money I had to sit at my computer up to 18 hours a day and of course I could not do this due to the bedrest. So my ex husband was totally horrified to realise he would have to financially looking after me and he HATED THAT and he hated me for not bringing money into the home.
We had a lot of fights, especially as I found he was still chatting with women on the net, emailing them and getting text messeges from strange women. One day when I confronted him yet again he actually beat me (I was almost 3 months pregnant).

My ex husband then hatched a plan with his sister who lives in Geneva Switzerland, to send me there to stay until the baby was born and he would join me later. What I was told about this situation was that I would live with his sister and her husband, that I would have my own bedroom, a computer for my own use so I could if able run my business. His sister also said she wanted me to look after her kids while she worked and she would pay me. I would have health insurance and they were buying me loads of new clothes so not to bring any of my khaleeji stuff with me.

I agreed to go, thinking that after I had saved up for a few months I could flee to the UK and give birth there and then divorce him. Just before I flew to Geneva my ex ripped apart my home in Ajman and everything was sold, him and his friends helped themselves to anything that could not be sold and believe it or not HE kept the money and said he was using it to pay my airfare and expences.

However the reality when I arrived in Geneva was horrifying.
I was shown into a tiny room that appeared to be her husbands office, inside was a very very old sofa bed (looked like an antique) with no sheets or blankets or pillows. She threw down one white sheet for me and that was all. There was a computer but I was told I could not use it.
I then found out there were no clothes for me, no job as promised looking after her kids and everything I had been told was lies.
The first night there I cried myself to sleep, I covered myself with the white sheet and used the cushions as pillows.
In the morning the nanny they employed to look after the kids gave me a proper pillow but each day it mysteriously dissapeared. Even the remote control for the tiny tv in the room dissapeared so I could not watch it.
I wont go into everything that happened but basically they said my ex husband had lied to me about the job, room etc and he forced me on them and my ex husband claims they were the liars. To be honest at that point I did not care, and it was begining to dawn on me that the entire family was not normal.

After being there 5 weeks I had a huge fight with my sister-in-law and her husband about being brought to switzerland without any health insurance and I demanded they take me to a doctor to be checked considering I had spent the past 3 months on bedrest. Khadeeja my sister-in-law finally agreed and it was when I had the scan that they found out I had complete placenta previa.

Considering this pregnancy complication was so dangerous and very life threatening they demanded I be sent back to Abu Dhabi. So a week later my ex husband bought me the cheapest flight he could lay his hands on and I flew Geneva to Istanbul and then had to sit in Istanbul airport with no money for over 5 hours on a hard chair praying I did not have a massive bleed until my flight was ready to fly back to UAE.
When I arrived I stood outside the airport for 45 minutes looking for my ex husband, he finally showed up and took me home.
Things were strained but I did my best just to cope with it. I managed to call "O" and my best friend and told them what happened and they promised to call me daily to ensure I was safe.

2 Weeks later while serving up my ex's dinner I felt like I had peed'ed my pants, I rushed to the bathroom and as I got up from the loo blood just gushed out of me with such force that it was splashing up the walls. I screamed for my ex and he almost passed out when he saw how much I was loosing. I rammed two bathsheets between my legs and his friend flagged down a taxi and we rushed from Mussafa to the Al Corniche hospital.

As soon as I walked into the hospital they could see I was in serious trouble and rushed me straight through to be seen. I remember the nurse who put me on the bed totally freaking out and screaming down the hall for a doctor to get in the room quick as the blood just would not stop. Within minutes I had an IV line in and was rushed up to the labour and delivery section and was surrounded by about 4 doctors all trying to get the bleeding to stop.
They told me that they were going to have to deliver my baby to save my life and she probably would not make it as she was a day off being 24 weeks gestation.
I remember crying and crying and begging them not to give me a C Section, to wait a little and see if the blood would stop. I dont know how I convinced them but they agreed to wait it out for an hour. The blood loss was monitored and thanks Allah it began to slow down.
My ex husband was no help at all, all he was worrying about was going home to sleep as he had work in the morning so I told him to go and I spent the rest of the night on the phone to my best friend for moral support.

In the early hours of the morning I was still bleeding but a transfusion was able to keep me stable and to prevent the section I was so desperate to avoid. One of the doctors came to see me and told me there was absolutly no way I was going to be able to go home. They had made the decision to keep me in Al Corniche hospital until I delivered my baby. Not just because of the problem I had and the likelyhood I would suffer another massive bleed but also they felt just from what they had seen of my ex husband that night that he could not be trusted to ensure I was safe and cared for and get me to the hospital in time to save the life of my baby and I in the event of another big bleed.

In the morning I was moved down to Ward B and put in a room with another women. My husband did not visit me again until about 2 days later. Just after they moved me to Ward B I received a phone call from a Bahraini friend of mine who also lives in Abudhabi, he had heared I was back in UAE and called to tell me some news.
I told him that I was in hospital and told him about the terrible trip to Switzerland and he then told me he had seen my husband in one of the shopping malls with two chinese women who he imagined to be prostitutes and he had followed them until they all went into a hotel very near my hospital. I knew Yassin was telling me the truth as the weekend he was talking about was the weekend my husband said he was going to stay in a hotel so he could use the pool etc with one of his male friends.

After the second day I was moved to Ward A and that is where I stayed until I finally delivered Imane at 36 weeks. I became such a well known patient and every single nurse and doctor who looked after me detested my ex husband with a vengance. I spent almost 4 months in Al Corniche and despite living just 30 mins away my ex visited me just once a week for 20 minutes. In all that time he left not one single dirham with me and through friends I found out his cheating ways continued.
The month before Imane was born my mother died, she had cancer and my ex did not even bother to come and visit me that day despite knowing how devistated I was. Luckily I had all the hospital staff comforting me.
On the day of my C Section (they were hoping to get me to 38 weeks but I went into labour so had to have the section early), my ex husband even failed to turn up to walk me down to the operating theatre. He finally showed up about 40 minutes late.

The day after my C Section (it was a long one as they found I also had placenta accreta and they had to literally cut my placenta out of my uterous as it started growing through), I was helped out of bed to have a shower and my ex husband jumped onto the bed and just layed there relaxing. When I got out of the bathroom I had to sit on a hard chair as he did not think to let me get back into bed. Finally a nurse came in and told him to get himself out of the bed and that she had never met such a selfish man in her life.

I came out of hospital 5 days later and just before I went home one of the doctors told me if I did not feel to go home they would arrange something so I could stay longer as they knew life was not going to be easy once I got home.

When we were leaving, my ex told me he had given the hospital my passport as security as he had not paid my hospital bill (I just could not believe this). In the end I ended up paying my own bill so I could get my passport back.
When I arrived back to his staff apartment he told me he had put Imane and I into the other bedroom. I walked in and it was a mess. He had set Imanes cot up but in a pile in one corner was weeks of dirty washing and his ironing. I was then left alone, very sore and trying to cope with a new born all alone.
I felt like I wanted to end everything, my life at that point was the lowest it had ever been and I talked a lot to Allah about how a muslim can be so bad to his wife.
Anyway to cut it short now, I was left day after day without even 1 dirham, not even to call a taxi if Imane got sick. At night when I got up to make a night feed for Imane (stress had caused my milk flow to be non existant)

Will write more tommorow insha allah, its late now.

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Louise
Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom
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