When Love Met My Wounds

“No, you first!”

“No, no, you go first!”

“Okay, let’s count to three, then we’ll do it together!” He said helplessly, not wanting to end the call.

Neither of us wanted to hang up — we were too high on oxytocin. We were in love.

“One. Two. Three —”

***

September 1990

He was sitting in the window seat in the row in front; behind, I sat with my mother. We were flying to Israel to visit her friends and spend time in Jerusalem. It was rare for Mum and me to be together since our relationship wasn’t the typical mother-daughter ice cream.

I was twenty-two, and it was my first and only time overseas with her; I was prepared to be with her for that length of time, as I knew she would be wearing her easy-going personality, the only amiable mask of the many she owns.

With a paternal line of Ashkenazi heritage, my mother was, and is, only ever at true peace with anything relating to Israel. I recall as a child, the Israeli trinkets, jewellery, and Hebrew books dotted around the home and how she’d force me to deep clean the house despite how military and unfair it felt, “…because it’s important for Sabbath!” she’d demanded. This summed up my mother’s religiosity and fascination with all things Israel.

She was fixated on my marrying a Jewish man and derisively made known her disapproval of my choices of boyfriends, even fast-forwarding to my daughter’s father. Somehow, deep inside, she was attempting to fix her self-worth, identity, and abandonment issues. All the while, fucking up mine.

During the flight, she kept throwing him conversation bits on my behalf. He was cute, to be fair. Manipulation is one of her most powerful tools of persuasion, and as we left the aircraft, she thrust a piece of paper with the address of our guesthouse right into his hands.

Still, I was curious and open to meeting up, and when he turned up to collect me for our first date, my heart flipped. We got to know each other by having fun on Tel Aviv beach, as well as chilling in each other’s company during explorative driving trips around Israel. We felt like we had known each other forever and formed a strong bond; the kind you do when you’re young, abroad, away from the complications of internal wounds; the world is your oyster, and possibilities and dreams feel infinite.

On our last date before I was due to fly home to England, so enticed with one another, we promised we’d stay in touch. We kept those promises as I ran up a hefty phone bill with my housemate’s landline as well as wrote long love letters via airmail; there was no barricade to our connection — we couldn’t get enough of each other.

At the time, I loved my job with a passion, as well as the home I lived in; my housemate owned the apartment, and I couldn’t have wished for a nicer person to live with. I was the happiest I had ever been, and I already had a boyfriend! He was kind and the most generous man I was blessed to know. He made the way for so many adventures, as well as opened up my world to different cultures and introduced me to film and music classics that evoke respect for their brilliance, even in me now.

He’d gift me beautiful items of clothing and make me feel seen, heard, and special. Yet I knew deep down, in the beginning, when I’d met him at work, we shouldn’t have been more than friends. I’d never been treated as well, yet, damaged by wounded parents and toxic adults, I had no idea how relationships worked. And I wouldn’t for a few more decades.

Despite all of his altruistic attributes, I coldly shut him out; my heart was set on my serendipitous love and the hope of a fairy tale future. I’m unable to forget the searing pain of hearing him tapping on my window late at night, desperate and calling out my name, begging and pleading for me to open the door and let him back into my life. But my mind was made up; I had no reasoning, just an unquestioned calling to be with the man from the land of milk and honey.

With continual communication, it had taken as little as a month, as we moved things forward, discussing my moving out to Israel. The weight fell off me as I lost my appetite due to the excitement and anticipation; my stomach heaved with lovesickness. I gambled the best place I’d ever been in life, and flew back out, despite it being only a few short months since I had met him. I’d trusted it would work, regardless of my broken subconscious psyche. I had no idea I was a walking car crash back then.

11th December 1990

As I settled back for a five-hour flight, I turned on the in-flight movie: Shirley Valentine had just begun. The narrative entailed a holiday romance in which the female protagonist discovers the joy of life with a handsome local native.

Whoa!

As I walked out of Ben Gurion Airport, through the sea of waiting faces, my man appears from somewhere in the middle and sprints towards me, wearing the biggest grin. We were ecstatic to be together again; it felt surreal yet wonderful. That evening, as I sat on his bed staring at my unpacked holdall, I anxiously looked around his room, trying hard to shove the unknown that now slapped me in the face, to the very back of my mind.

It didn’t take more than a day to learn his mother wasn’t happy with my being there and, as her son’s betrothed. She wore her displeasure — along with the occasional grunt far too often.

We hadn’t thought this through!

He would go off in the day to his university studies, and I would kick about Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Centre, the main shopping mall, just a few blocks from our apartment. I became familiar with the city and felt like a native in no time.

Christmas is unobserved in Israel, although it is significant for the small percentage of Christian communities dotted around the country. And so, that Christmas Day was a regular Tuesday, and as I walked around the city streets, I felt loneliness grip me. I contemplated the idea of being unaccepted by my boyfriend’s mother. I didn’t know what to do; thoughts of ‘What the hell am I doing?’ as I looked up at the clusters of people strolling past me. I imagined they were on their way home: to warmth, to families, to laughter, to love, and to feeling totally belonged.

My thoughts pondered over my siblings back home, listening to the well-played-out Christmas songs. Presents would have been opened, and they’d be stuffing themselves with succulent roast turkey with pigs in blankets; the roast potatoes, creamy in the middle and crispy on the outside: the treasures of being cooked in goose fat. They’d be glugging a flute or two of champagne or perhaps a glass or three of mulled wine.

It’s not like I had a loving parent I’d be with right now, but I had the connection of siblings: an older sister who clucked over me like a concerned mother hen, albeit a sarcastic one. I knew I had made the right choice to leave England, but clueless about what I was going to do. I couldn’t speak Hebrew, and there was only so much walking I could do to kill time.

This couldn’t last forever.

His mother’s disapproval was now at bursting point. I just wasn’t good enough for her son, and so I gathered my belongings and sofa-surfed with my mum’s friend. She was far from happy about me putting on her like this! This move also embarrassed my mother, and so I left quickly and slept on my ‘future’ brother-in-law’s lumpy, hard couch.

My boyfriend helped me source a nannying position in the hope of sorting out my housing predicament, and we found a couple — both respectable lawyers — with two beautiful, doe-eyed toddlers. I was anxious that I would be too penned in and that I wouldn’t be good enough to do the job. I bailed quickly when I came across a kibbutz volunteer office in Ben Yehuda Street, advertising for volunteers for a kibbutz located in Rehovot, an hour’s drive away.

I’m moving to Kibbutz Shiller

With the beauty of hindsight, if I’d chosen to look after the lawyers’ adorable twins, my story would have ended with a kinder and happier outcome. Instead, I launched a ticking time bomb that was set to self-destruct.

As I strolled carefree into the Kibbutz a couple of days after New Year’s Eve, all looked good. The volunteers, all young international travellers, had had a wild New Year’s Eve Toga party. Picking up the gossip quickly, I heard one of the volunteers had gotten so wasted that he had been dancing naked on top of the kitchen countertop of the volunteer’s clubhouse. It’s true, it doesn’t take long to yank off a bed sheet — but what had I walked into?

Two weeks later, the start of the Gulf War added more fireworks to the mix. Saddam Hussein sent Scud missiles to Tel Aviv. Sirens would wake us up in the early hours of the morning. I would jump out of bed, grabbing my gas mask in what felt like a surreal situation, yet I didn’t care; I was young and unfazed. England was behind me now.

When I visited my boyfriend in Tel Aviv, there were times when, under rocket attack, it felt too close to the edge of death. Yet I took it all in my stride, despite my sister’s desperate pleas for me to ‘get my arse home’. Yet to me, I was home despite a Middle East war.

Volunteers earned only small change but were subsidised with board, food, and laundry services. Still, the small amount of shekels was enough to top up on vodka, beer, and cigarettes. I eventually ran out of savings and would often bum cigarettes off volunteers and members when I ran out of the small amount from Shiller. I wasn’t thinking of my future; for me, it was party time every night!

I felt myself pull away from my dear boyfriend; his mother, not being able to validate me, triggered the wounds I had from my father’s lack of love and rejection of me. My wild and rebellious cracks from my broken psyche started to rear their ugly head. I had turned to drink and drugs at fourteen, and that hungry monster for identity and courage, emerged at an alarming rate and intensity.

I felt my descent energetically envelope me, and so as I climbed into my boyfriend’s car for the very last time, opening up the sweet present he had handed to me, I told him we were over. I sabotaged intimacy and commitment; I didn’t want to belong to anyone — I didn’t know how to. I wanted to be free to do what I liked! His head dropped down, dejected, and lost for words. That sad and deafeningly quiet moment is locked in my memory forever, and I still remember the beautiful smell of the toiletries he’d gifted me, all those years ago.

I partied harder, drank more, and got caught up in senseless predicaments. A memory is etched on my mind: a sunny afternoon in March, the war was over, and a few of us volunteers were lounging on the lush green lawn outside our living quarters. An educated English volunteer, Harvey, turned to me and asked with a worried frown: “For someone who is so pretty, why do you drink so much?” I was taken aback and didn’t fully get why he would ask something like that. Was the nightmare of me not having boundaries showing itself to others? Was I a “L’Enfant Sauvage”!

A short time after Harvey asked me this, an older male member, giving me a lift back from the fields, where we had just picked apricots, would, every once in a while, turn to look at me. Finally, in a low voice, he asked: “Why do you do what you are doing?” His eyes pierced through me, and I felt him witness the spiritual ugliness of my untamed, dysfunctional behaviour.

My destructive coping mechanisms escalated, not having the restraints of living where people knew me back home in England, I could behave in any way I invented myself. My precarious actions were getting out of hand. By then, I had hooked up with a British-Israeli soldier, who lived as a member of a kibbutz. It wasn't love, just an empty fling, which contained a sense of contempt. My free and flirtatious spirit triggered his insecurities - fuelling his jealous, venomous dialogue.

We finally bowed to the weight of the inauthenticity of the relationship, and as we drunkenly quarrelled, he stormed off and fell face forward into a bramble bush full of sharp thorns. I hadn’t remembered this as the cheap vodka was pungent; thankfully, he had filled me in, in more recent years, through a long social media conversation, and the relief of finally knowing it wasn’t anything to do with me was more than healing.

As I sat in the dining room the following morning, his friend walked up to me on purpose, anger emanated across his demeanour, demanding to know what ‘the fuck I had done’ to my boyfriend’s face. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You have scratched his face to pieces. You’re crazy!”

I had really liked Guy, and so to see him look at me as if I were an animal made me feel wretched, mad, and worthless.

Perplexed, I cried out, “That’s just crazy, I don’t even have any nails”, as I looked down at my hands to double-check my short tips. Picking fruit up ladders every day made sure of that. He refused to believe me, his face full of disgust; he turned away from me as if I were a piece of shit he wanted to spit on.

The shame rained down on me — the stench was unbearable. Paranoia descended upon me like a dark, heavy blanket. I felt branded as a hideous young girl — my bravado completely gone. With that, I booked my flight back to England.

16th July 1991

As I climbed into the back of my transport to the airport, I tearfully said goodbye to my new life. There was no one there to see me off, no one to say goodbye, or miss me. As we drove off, Scud, an Alsatian I had befriended on the Kibbutz, had seen my face peering out of the rear window and ran as fast as he could to catch me up. As the driver sped on, Scud became smaller and smaller — it was the most agonising and heart-wrenching vision I took with me.

On the flight home, I sat alone at the tail end of a humongous empty El Al Airbus. I turned on the in-flight entertainment for the long journey back to Heathrow. A new movie, Home Alone (released a few days before I flew to Israel), had just started.

You couldn’t make it up!

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