I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia

by Su Meck

  Before I knew what had happened, Samia had ordered a dozen ACE Aerobics Instructor Manuals, and put me in charge of teaching a course to interested members and instructors who wanted to become ACE-certified instructors! I had no clue what I had gotten myself into, but fortunately for me, everyone who decided to sign up and take this class, as well as Samia herself, was eager, enthusiastic, and motivated, in addition to being extremely patient with me. Little by little, week after week, my confidence increased. I did have a lot of practical experience teaching, and I became better at figuring stuff out, even if I couldn’t always read and understand the exact technicalities of everything written in the manual. Samia helped me set up a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) course to be taught at Cairo American College specifically for these twelve people, as well as an ACE examination team, which included proctors, to come to Cairo in order to administer the ACE Aerobics Instructor Exam. In the end, I think (but am not 100 percent sure) that all twelve took the exam and passed. And many of the people who started out just as interested participants began teaching at Creative Dance and Fitness soon after successfully completing the class and the exam.

  When I left Cairo, Samia threw a big party. She and other members contributed to a gift fund, and bought me a twenty-four-karat-gold cartouche with my name, Susan, in hieroglyphics. I have hardly ever taken it off since it was given to me back in the spring of 1997.

  School started up in September. Benjamin and Patrick attended Cairo American College and I enrolled Kassidy in a Montessori preschool program close by. This was the first time I had all three kids in school. And even though Kassidy was just gone for a few hours in the mornings, it gave me time to teach aerobics at Creative Dance and Fitness without experiencing the guilt that I always felt when I had to put the kids in the nursery in order to work. I volunteered in both of the boys’ classrooms once or twice a week, reading aloud, alphabetizing graded papers, or helping with bulletin boards.

  The Jewels of the Nile. I am standing next to Herb, our coach, and my friend Heather Corkin is in the first row of kneelers all the way on the left side. The Jewels are ranked first on the standings board behind us.

  The school week in Egypt went from Sunday to Thursday, with Friday and Saturday as the weekend. The majority of expats spent most of every Friday at the softball fields because almost everything else was closed, as Friday is the holy day for Muslims. I cannot remember playing softball before going to Egypt, and I have no recollection of being taught how to play, but by far the happiest memories I have of all our time in Cairo are those that occurred on those softball fields. God, it was a blast! Herb was our coach, 100 percent Texan, through and through. Alison, his Aussie girlfriend, played shortstop, and her best friend, Ruthie, also an Aussie with flaming-red hair, was either our pitcher or catcher depending on the lineup. My good friend Heather Corkin, a “Kiwi” from New Zealand, played second base or in the outfield, as did my friend Valerie, another American. Being a lefty, with long legs, I played first base exclusively. I caught nearly anything and everything that was ever thrown to or at me, while often having to stretch in order to keep my foot on the bag. I was also a particularly fast runner, nicknamed “Cheetah” by my teammates, and I was a strong power hitter, especially when Herb let me use his double-wall bat. However, I never quite got a handle on the throwing part, and I pretty much always sucked whenever I had to throw the ball to anyone.

  So much of life doesn’t always turn out the way you think it will. I always believed and trusted Jim, and I hoped that when we moved to Egypt, we would be able to live our lives together as a family of five, with two parents working equally as parents to our three children. Unfortunately, Jim was just as much of a workaholic as he had always been. And even though he didn’t have to travel, per se, he still worked absurdly long hours, as well as most weekends, so the kids and I still rarely saw him. I was just as exhausted a single parent in Cairo as I had ever been living in Maryland. Jim did hire Emiline, a Filipina maid, to help with the cleaning, as it was nearly impossible to keep up with the dust and dirt that seemed to relentlessly seep through the tiny cracks in the windows and doors to cover any and every surface. But the children, with their schoolwork, activities, meals, bedtimes, not to mention each of their individual adjustments to a new home, school, classmates, teachers, culture, food. . . . all of that fell to me.

  I wasn’t adjusting too well to the substantial changes in my life, either. I enjoyed teaching aerobics, and I loved playing softball, but there was a lot that was getting to me. As a relatively selfish American, coming from a fairly upper middle-class suburb, I was used to having electricity, water, and phone service most, if not all, the time. In Cairo, we would have one of those things, occasionally two, but never all three. The kids and I were stranded in the tiny elevator once early on when the power went out; nobody (myself included) wanted to ride that elevator ever again. That was five flights up and five flights down with a four-year-old whenever I wanted to go anywhere. The flies and mosquitoes were persistent both inside and outside the flat. I got tired of feeling dirty and dusty all of the time. I was both dependent on, and limited by, my bike and the Burley trailer to go anywhere or do anything. If I needed to go grocery shopping, for example, and I had Kassidy with me, I was limited to buying only what I could fit into the trailer alongside her. It was just an awful lot of change for me to try to understand all at once.

  Poverty surrounded us. There were tiny, very young children driving donkey carts full of garbage or, worse, canisters of kerosene. Once there was a woman screaming for seemingly the entire night in the hovel next door to our building, and the next day when I walked the boys to the bus stop for school, there were the bloody remains of a dead baby lying alongside the road. Most days, Patrick insisted I walk them to the bus. He was afraid to walk by a scruffy territorial rooster that would chase anyone who went near it. The blind man with no teeth whom we always passed on our bikes getting to Road 9 and the dozens of dirty, naked children that lived and played in the garbage at the dump got to me. And all the stray animals got to me, too. There were literally hundreds of stray dogs and cats everywhere we went. We “adopted” two cats, Amber and Alexander, but I could have adopted two thousand cats and dogs and it still would not have made any difference. I missed talking to my family, especially my parents. Phone calls to the States were extremely expensive and even though we had a computer, we didn’t have the ability to send e-mail from our flat. Everything was just so unfamiliar.

  Eventually the challenges of trying to navigate this puzzling place without the support of family and friends drove me to the breaking point. I don’t think it was anything more than Jim working yet another weekend, but I had had enough. I don’t know if I was tired, or if I was confused, or if I was just plain lonely, but when Wagdi showed up to drive Jim to work, I started shouting, crying, pleading, and threatening. I have no idea where the kids were, but if I were to speculate, I would guess that Benjamin had gathered his brother and sister into their room, closed the door, and played games or read books with them, as was his habit when Jim and I fought. I also don’t know how it all ended. Again, I would guess that Jim left me there and went to work anyway, absolutely furious with me for embarrassing him in front of Wagdi as well as messing with him when he was just trying to “do my job!” Later, I imagine everything was just “normal” and nobody would ever speak of the incident again. Jim says by the time he returned from work, I had forgotten the whole thing. In fact, this was one of those stories that I heard for the first time when Jim was recounting his own memories from Cairo for this book. He says now he never knew or really understood how hard it was for me living there. To him, that particular enormous emotional explosion of mine came out of nowhere. He wasn’t worried, because he recalls that I had a habit of being overly dramatic, and he had to get to work. What he considered my tendency to be “overly dramatic” was in fact genuine distress and considerable anxiety that he just never noticed as such.

  A
t Thanksgiving, we traveled to Luxor with another American family with whom we had become close. They were initially my “go to” people when I had questions about where I could get peanut butter, where I could find books written in English, and school supplies for the boys, and also who to call when there were rats as large as cats in our flat. They invited us to go along with them to Crocodile Island, a resort area in the southern part of Egypt near Luxor. My most vivid memory of that resort was of Kassidy getting bitten by a goat, and me wondering and worrying for the rest of the time if goats carried rabies. Jim says we played a lot of tennis, and the kids played in an enormous swimming pool. We apparently had a Thanksgiving-like dinner in the main dining room, which reminded Benjamin of camp because there were long wooden tables.

  At Christmastime, we traveled to my brother Rob’s family’s house outside of Dayton, Ohio, and later we met up with my sister Diane and her family as well as Jim’s parents in Williamsburg, Virginia. I don’t honestly remember anything at all about that Christmas, until the very end. We were back in the Holiday Inn in Gaithersburg, and Jim was on the phone with his big boss at his D.C. office. I was trying to keep the kids as quiet as I could while getting them ready for bed. When Jim got off the phone, he announced that he was going to be recalled to the States. Apparently, working twenty-plus hours a day seven days a week wasn’t good enough for Jim’s boss, who essentially said to Jim during this phone call, “If we had wanted you to have a wife and family, we would have issued you one.”

  I could see the strain and feel Jim’s panic, so I kept very quiet. I had learned a long time ago that I was utterly useless in times of crisis, even though at this moment I had so many questions I wanted to ask. Were we going to fly all the way back to Cairo now, just to fly back in another month? Where would we return to anyway? We had no house, no car, nothing we could come back to, as far as I could see. Where would the kids go to school? What about the great school where they were already enrolled in Maadi? Benjamin had never had such a great year as he was having at Cairo American College. What about my job and softball team in Cairo? I didn’t understand how all of this would fit together, or how any of it would work. So I just swallowed hard and went into supportive-and-silent-wife mode.

  As it turned out, we all flew back to Cairo without any real plans. Back in Maadi, we continued to make it up as we went along. Jim had to go back to Maryland. That much was made clear. Movers came within the month and packed us up. (Hadn’t we just done this?) Jim went back to Montgomery County and lived in the basement of our ex-next-door neighbors, Moira and Jerry LaVeck. Heather Corkin, from my softball team, and her husband, Alan, were generous enough to let the kids and me move into their flat with them and their three kids until the end of the school year in June. Jim figured he would be able to find us a place to live by then, and we could all move back to Maryland as soon as the boys finished school. Kassidy would be able to finish her year of preschool, and I would be able to tell Samia that I would be leaving come June, instead of just disappearing with no notice. It sounded like a doable plan. But once again, I was left by myself with full responsibility for the kids. Or maybe from their perspective, they were left by themselves with full responsibility for their mom.

  The Corkin family lived directly across the street from Cairo American College, so it was much more convenient for the kids to get to and from school. Their flat was also much closer to Kassidy’s preschool, and my job at Creative Dance and Fitness. Nevertheless it certainly was not the most ideal situation for anyone, with three adults and six children from ages four to eleven, all living in a single flat. We all tried to keep an upbeat attitude and I’ll be the first to admit that I certainly didn’t always succeed. Especially toward the end. Heather and I did spend a lot of our time laughing, but morning routines, homework, meals, and bedtime were sometimes absolute chaos. I had horrific headaches most of the time, and I often felt lost and confused, forgetting why we were there. The kids and I all slept in one bed during those months. On the one hand I don’t know how much sleep I ever got, and yet, on the other, I was more than thankful that we had a place to stay.

  At one point early in the spring while we were living with the Corkins, a massive sandstorm blew through Maadi. Heather and I had all six kids with us at the softball fields, where we were finishing up a practice with the Jewels. I remember feeling a sudden shift in the air and detecting an unpleasant smell. Herb swore, and he said that everyone needed to get indoors immediately. Heather and I lived pretty close by, so we gathered all the kids at once and rode our bikes back to the flat as quickly as we could. We didn’t quite make it before there was a wall of wind and dirt upon us. The storm probably didn’t last any more than half an hour—maybe even less—but it was one of the most terrifying things that I had ever experienced. The wind was howling, and sand and stones were being pelted against the windows of the flat. None of us could hear a thing except the roar of the storm, and we couldn’t see our own hands in front of our faces. By the end, nearly all the windows in the front room of the flat had been blown in. I can remember Heather and me just looking at each other and bursting out laughing. What else was there to do? The flat was an absolute disaster. There were literally inches of rocks, dirt, and dust on the floor, covering every surface, and all eight of us were completely and utterly filthy. There was broken glass everywhere and both Heather’s younger daughter, Cara, and my Kassidy were running around with bare feet because in our rush to leave the softball fields, we had inadvertently left their sandals.

  In February or early March, Heather and Alan decided to take some time to go away together. I had recently been chosen to play first base for the women’s all-star softball team, the Cairo Cruisers, who would be traveling to the United Arab Emirates to play in a big tournament during the first week of April. Heather and Alan agreed to look after Benjamin, Patrick, and Kassidy while I was away if I agreed to care for Tracy, Alex, and Cara while they went away for their holiday. It seemed to me like a fair trade. I knew that my boys were much more difficult to handle than the Corkin kids, and if this deal meant that I could travel unencumbered to the UAE just by taking care of all six for a few days, I thought, Great! It’s a deal!

  The funny thing is, I can remember sitting down with Heather and Alan and hammering out all the details of, and making preparations for, our kid trade arrangement, but I have next to no recollections of the actual time I stayed by myself with all six children. I don’t know if this means that everything went beautifully, with no problems whatsoever, or if I just think it did because I don’t recall anything especially horrible. I can’t imagine what it must have been like getting everyone ready for school each morning. Tracy, Alex, Benjamin, and Patrick all could easily walk across the street to CAC. But what about getting everyone up, dressed, fed, and out the door? Cara and Kassidy attended different preschools, so each morning they must have ridden in the bike trailer together, and I must have dropped them off separately. CAC didn’t have a cafeteria, so I must have made six different lunches each morning. Did anyone do homework that week? Take baths? Bedtime must have been chaotic as well. As I write this, I do have a vague recollection of Cara howling as I tried to brush out her hair. I think Tracy was most likely my biggest source of help and support that week.

  Jim flew to Cairo that spring, and came with me to the softball tournament in UAE. All the travel arrangements, like flights, a bus and driver, hotel rooms, and I think even meals, were organized for us ahead of time. From a post-9/11 perspective, I can’t imagine all of us just waltzing into the airport and onto the airplane with our gear bags, complete with mitts and softball bats, but I’m certain that is what we all did, and we probably didn’t think anything of it.

  I have never been back, but I do remember that in 1997 the United Arab Emirates was the most sparkling and gorgeous country that I had ever visited. The beaches of Abu Dhabi along the Persian Gulf were absolutely pristine. Everything in Dubai, from the buildings, to the shopping areas, to the road
s, to cars, and even the people themselves seemed to be clean, shiny, and brand-new. The softball fields where we played were spectacular, with actual grass in the outfields, and the stands for spectators were comfortable and shaded, a far cry from those in Maadi. I am thinking that the Cairo Cruisers as a team didn’t do very well during this particular tournament, but we all had a great time together, getting to play against, as well as watch, some really impressive teams. Jim and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly as well. This was the first time since Kathy and Randy’s wedding almost five years before that we had gone away together. Just the two of us, with no kids.

  Back in Cairo, the kids and I were keeping track of the days on a calendar in our bathroom at the Corkins’. Each evening, one of us would cross off another day as we counted down to the end of the school year when we would be heading back to Montgomery County, Maryland. The Corkin family was generous with their computer, and the four of us together e-mailed back and forth almost every day with Jim and also with my parents. Jim sent us e-mails about the neighborhoods and houses he was looking at. Kassidy kept asking if we could get a dog when we got back. Patrick wanted to know if he could have his own room. Benjamin was lobbying hard for a Game Boy system for the long plane ride home. I think somewhere deep down, I knew that I was going to have to get the kids and myself back to Maryland from Cairo without Jim come June. But because I had no concept of how I would actually do that, I never came up with any kind of a plan. Here again was another example of the whole concept of time and planning that I sucked at so badly! It’s not like we had a lot of stuff to pack up. The moving van in January had taken everything except the clothes we wore, some books, and a few personal items. I am not sure what happened to our bikes and the trailer, but other than these, everything we had fit into a few suitcases.