When I was a child, I spent my early years with my grandmother because my mother was so busy with her work. I also used to spend the summer at my grandmother’s house when I was a teenager. From my mother and maternal uncles, I got to know the true story of my grandmother and how she lived and what kinds of challenges she faced.
The story I have been told is simply that my grandmother was my grandfather’s second wife and they were blood relatives. Being a second wife, she had an unhappy life as there was always conflict and jealousy between the wives to control and possess the man. As a child and adolescent, I just took the superficial story for what it was, and as a result, I felt a deep sympathy for my grandmother. As I grew up and had my own difficult experiences, I began to form a different opinion of my grandmother, not in the same way that my mother and maternal uncles portrayed her.
My grandmother was born in a town in the Diyala governorate, in eastern Iraq, in the 1920s. My grandmother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman who deserved to be a beauty queen, with her fair skin, unique gray eyes, and long blonde hair. Although she was affiliated with a known Arab tribe, many wondered about her Arab origins because it was so obvious that her features were not Arab with dark skin and dark eyes. Many guessed that he might have Turkish ancestors, which personally, I thought, might be true.
My grandmother was born in a town into an extremely conservative family that always lived a solitary, not sociable lifestyle. The eldest of her sisters, she faced restrictions on her freedom typical of Middle Eastern women, more severe at that time, a century ago. Due to the restrictions, her siblings were able to finish school while it was my grandmother’s destiny to be illiterate for the rest of her life.
My grandmother had no idea what education was except for her brothers, but she could feel that it is something very powerful and superior that she could not achieve because she was a woman. In this environment and atmosphere, my grandmother had grown up without a social life, without education, without a way of learning, with little personal development and personal growth. I’m sure that when my grandmother became a teenager, she didn’t have the slightest perception of herself, life, the world, or people. She had no learning resources to help her or develop her mindset to form some concept about herself, life, and the world.
My grandmother spent all her years alone in a lonely life in her village, and in her late teens, her father informed her that there was a relative who had asked him to marry her. His father and family approved of this marriage, so he had to immediately prepare to get married soon. She could have learned that he was married and had a son. He lived in Baghdad. She was to be a second wife. Later, she found out that my grandfather was almost twenty years or more older than her, but he was wealthy and wanted more children. His first wife, older than him, was unable to bear children, so that was the reason for this marriage.
My grandmother had no idea of marriage, of a man, of anything. She was naive, innocent with a childlike spirit, completely unaware of anything cruel in this life. She has just married a strange man from her relatives who took her to Baghdad. At first, my grandfather brought my grandmother to live with his first wife in the same house. My grandmother found out that my grandfather loved his first wife but wanted to have more children since he only had one child from his first wife.
My grandfather liked my grandmother’s youth and beauty, but my grandfather was oblivious to the jealousy between these two women and the consequences of that.
The first wife, who was in her forties like my grandfather, was born and raised in Baghdad. Although she was illiterate, she was a very sociable and sophisticated woman, and for her advanced age she had many life experiences and was very knowledgeable about human nature. He knew how to deal with any situation or any type of person.
Since the first wife loved her husband (my grandfather). She felt threatened by my grandmother, the beautiful younger woman, and she had already made the decision to destroy my grandmother’s marriage in every possible way. The first wife achieved her goal and used all her intelligence, experience and tricks to do so with my grandmother’s inexperience of anything in this life, the natural result of any conflict or clash between her and the first wife was going to make her lose the war. There was no comparison between the sophisticated old woman’s skill and her naive skill.
After a year of marriage, my grandmother gave birth to her first child, but during that year the first wife destroyed the marriage and separated my grandfather from my grandmother. It was very easy for that woman to make my grandfather turn against my grandmother.
My grandmother couldn’t understand everything that had happened or what happened to her, all the trauma. When she was a broken young woman with a child, she was unable to understand and articulate her emotions. They had rejected her and treated her very badly. A war had been fought against her, but hadn’t she understood what was happening? All this conflict, life and situation was beyond his comprehension and all he felt at that moment was rejection and injustice. The first wife used my grandmother’s innocence and used all her evil and all her experiences in life to win the war. She had been abandoned and she was living with her well-educated, single brother in Baghdad.
My grandfather meant the whole world and life to my grandmother. He was the first man she met. For her and all women of that time in the forties and fifties of the last century, the man and successful marriage were her world at that time and even now for some women in the Middle East. Marriage and the status derived from it meant everything to my grandmother, meant to her dignity and the need for approval. He realized that he had to fight tooth and nail to win in this conflict with the first wife. This war was the war of his life. I needed my grandfather financially, socially and in any other way. She was very dependent on him, like all women dependent on men at that time. My grandmother had no education to follow or finish or any career. She was simply an innocent, illiterate housewife, desperately trying to make her husband want her.
After many years of separation, my grandmother was still trying to solve a puzzle. Why had my grandfather preferred his first wife to her? It hurt a lot and she wanted to point out the problem, so she made the troubled marriage work. He wondered, what did this woman have that she didn’t? She was young, very beautiful and capable of having children, why? It’s wrong? What was it? She learned from some women around here that at that time women worked in black magic, so it could be that the first wife was doing all these spells to make my grandfather hate her and abandon her; Since receiving this advice, my grandmother has been involved in magic work. I might have thought that it would help her get my grandfather back and that it was an attempt to revive a hope in her soul that had been tortured by frustration, rejection, and despair.
My grandmother managed to reunite with my grandfather and gave birth to two children, but the marriage did not work out again. My grandmother had been deeply disappointed and bitter, having faced the bitterness of rejection, humiliated defeat, and continued control, power, and triumph from the first wife. I am sure that after the second separation my grandmother spent years crying with bitterness. All these years my grandmother wondered why. Why was this happening to her? Why had he experienced all this? Why wasn’t he living a quiet and easy life? Why all this pain, emotional and psychological scars and brutality? He wondered what his mistakes were. What she did? Why had he failed while the first wife was successful? How to save your troubled marriage? And to be a lovely wife, what should I do? She felt trapped and didn’t know how to save herself and her family. These unanswered questions were only about killing her.
My grandmother desperately wanted to succeed and win, but didn’t know what to do? He lacked all the resources; no one guided her. All her guilt and sin was that she was an innocent and naive woman. The other woman knew how to manipulate my grandfather and my innocent grandmother. The other woman knew how to separate my grandfather from my grandmother either with magic or in other ways.
He was unable to keep my grandfather in a stable relationship and a secure marriage. For most of her life, she did not feel safe. She was always afraid of being rejected and was forced to live alone with all her emotional and psychological pain. I was weak and lost. She was unable to face the world alone. My grandfather (the man) represented the whole world to her. There was no way she could live without him or accept being the loser, and the first wife won the war.
After six years of the second separation, my grandfather was reunited with my grandmother. This time my grandmother took the opportunity to make the shaky and troubled marriage work. She was just trying to please my grandfather. Everything that had happened, including the experience of marriage, taught her hatred and disappointment. The troubled marriage continued and the jealousy was always there. My grandmother had always felt insecure; such a marriage had no security. The marriage of my grandfather and my grandmother lasted this time; there was no separation. Twenty years later, the first wife passed away, and after eight years my grandfather also passed away.
Now my grandmother was left alone. My grandmother had six sons and two daughters; the youngest daughter was my mother. Whenever the children were controlled by their wives and did not obey my grandmother, I remembered the trauma of my grandfather and his first wife.
The only man my grandmother ever knew, my grandfather, did not make her feel love, care, and security. Everyone deserves love, but sadly not everyone is lucky enough to feel or get it in this life. She was simply living in an ongoing war.
The brutality and cruelty of life made her a cruel woman who treated everyone around her the same way she had been treated. I wanted everyone to feel what she felt. All of her children blamed her for any failure they might have in their lives. She might have been responsible in one way or another due to her ignorance, but it was definitely not her intention to hurt anyone. She lived alone the last years of her life. I was living outside my country at the end of 2010 when I called my mother and told her to contact my grandmother as soon as possible and to be close to her because I had a feeling that she would die soon. A few months later, my grandmother became seriously ill and it was obvious that she was dying.
She was alone when she was dying and everyone around her was doing their duty. While on his deathbed, he was saying many things and was not fully aware of what he was saying. She asked my mother, who was close to her in her last days, to call me because she wanted to talk to me. Regardless of all the people who had been in his life, he only remembered when he was dying to talk to me. She could feel my deep royal love.
That’s why I want to answer you this way: I love you my grandmother. You raised me when I was a child and I spent many times with you. You were so beautiful and smart and special. You deserved to feel loved, safe, and wanted. In my mind and in my heart, I will always remember you as a wonderful woman. May your soul rest in peace. I miss you deeply.
Your granddaughter,
Sarah