Loving Her Mind: Piecing Together the Shards of Hope

By Cecile Bibawy and Yousry Armanios

Shatter the Walls of Secrets and Shame

At thirteen, Cecile Bibawy is told that her best friend is part of a committee of evil psychiatrists who watches the family around the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author Academy Elite
• Release date: Nov 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647465001

Cecile Bibawy

Cecile Bibawy has a never-ending desire to spread the truth about mental illness, inspire people to tell their story, work toward ending the stigma that keeps people sick, and promote the health of mind, body, and spirit. After sunrises and coffee, that is, when she's not writing, she's exploring the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty with her children as she and her husband classically homeschool them. She teaches Zumba classes and tells her stories and struggles to anyone who will listen. Bibawy was a public relations practitioner for Faith Mission Homeless Shelters in Columbus, Ohio and also promoted Job Corps for a while in Upstate New York. She is available for key-note speaking about her story to your people. Find Cecile at cecilebibawy.com, Facebook, Instagram (@sincerelycecile), on her front porch, and at her favorite coffee shops.

Book preview

It’s Time to Talk About It

When I was a student at The Ohio State University, I joined Makio, a student organization that annually published a yearbook to reflect undergraduate life. For three years, and even as production manager junior year, I enthusiastically delved into the stories of thousands of students, wrote them down, edited them, and remembered a few of them for a long time. I recorded the background, events, and rewarding moments that culminated in a volume of memories they wanted to keep. In their interviews, I learned their challenges, achievements, and dreams and scribbled them down on paper. I kept the notes for a while. I must have eventually thrown them away.

As a young journalism graduate, I continued to write people’s stories for employers — testimonies of oral health patients, homeless people, and at-risk youth. Time passed, and I wrote about my husband, our kids, and the saints.

Then one day, I realized how little of my own life I had ever told. When the idea entered my mind to do so, I quickly pushed it away. Never had I written about my mother—my secret. I had been telling everyone’s story except for the one I knew best and the one I had hidden the most.

Here’s where this little tale takes a sharp turn, for I will now tell you mine.

Part 1

Symptoms

Chapter 1

Sheila

My First Lost Friend

1984

What a pretty smile you have! Mom sings as she opens the door for my friend to enter the house. My heart is beating fast. In my thirteen years, I don’t remember having a friend spend the night. It’s our first sleepover, and Sheila and I are best friends. At least that’s what I tell myself. I love her to death. She is cute and fun and sweet. She is short like me, but most of all, we are friends. I am beyond excited as we watch a movie and share secrets. I tell her my secret crush, Joey Brickshaw. Somehow, I know she won’t say anything. Sheila laughs easily and is shy like me. I know we will always be best friends.

A few days later, I waltz in the door from school and chatter about my day to Mom as she chops the onions for the string beans cooked in tomato sauce. She begins to fry them in Crisco shortening, and the house is about to fill with an aroma intoxicating to an empty stomach. Mom and I talk about this and that, then Sheila comes up. I mention our chats and plans for another sleepover.

Oh, no, she’s never coming here again, she states, eyes widening and grave. I am confused. The sinking of my heart begins now.

What? Why not?

Didn’t you see how she looked at me? She revealed herself to me. She knows me. We understand each other.

What are you saying? I ask with emotion. It feels like someone dropped a bowling ball on my stomach.

What do you mean she revealed herself to you? It was a sleepover. She’s my friend. You were laughing with us! I don’t understand. This doesn’t make any sense.

She and her mother are evil, ya rohy (sweetheart). You can’t speak to her ever again. She is not really your friend. She is my enemy. She was just using you to get to me.

No ... Sheila—using me?

Then, why is she so nice to me? Why were you so nice to her?

I had to be! Her voice rises a little.

I don’t want her to know that I know her. The less she knows, the better. The less dangerous she is. You must outsmart evil, but it’s impossible to do that. Even for me, I can’t do it because I am good. They are evil. Everything is an act. I know this is hard for you, but in school, you are to avoid her. Never speak to her. And, of course, she can never come to this house again.

Dangerous? Evil? What? This is not real.

She is my best friend! She’s not any of those things. She can’t be! Please. My heart sinks deep. I finally have a best friend of my own, and she turns out to be evil? Is she just acting?

She is so happy and nice. We shared secrets. I thought—

Don’t share any more secrets with her, Mom interjects. She will use them against you and me. Don’t you care about me? I am your mother. You must trust me; I would not lie to you, you know. And since they are doing this to your mother, you must stay away from her and her family.

My brain is at war with my heart, which does not foresee its future hunger of longing for friendships that I can never have. Though this doesn’t seem exactly right, it must be true. Mom wouldn’t lie to me. It sounds bad. There is a sharp edge of urgency in her voice. I can’t figure it out. She keeps talking about danger and evil. I don’t feel unsafe around my friend and her mother.

I must do what Mom says. There are no other options. I must keep Mom and me and my little siblings safe. Sheila and I have one more conversation. The one in which I tell her that we are not friends anymore. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember there is yelling. Then, though we attend the same high school, I avoid her everywhere. I’m not going to let anyone use my mother or me. My loyalty is with my mother. I must be a good daughter.

Sheila and I never speak to each other again.

Chapter 2

On The Inside Looking Out

Lily’s Early Life

I know little about my Mom’s childhood. I wish I knew more. I wish there were more stories and more pictures. She was born Lily Makar in the 1940s in Cairo, Egypt, to Makar Tayeb Solimon and Therese Labib Mounir. She is the fourth in a line of eight children plus one who died before the age of three. Lily has two younger sisters and five brothers.

At seven or eight years, she saw her mother crying in the living room while nursing her little brother. No one was telling her the reason for the sadness and confusion in the house. She ran up to little Elham’s room and found her lying flat in her crib, and her face covered with her blanket. She uncovered her face, and found a shell of the baby sister she had carried, and helped care for her entire sprouting life.

Seeing the tiny body, young Lily ran to her room, crying. Hearing her crying, her father followed his daughter to her room and asked her softly, why are you crying? and walked out—as nothing had happened. Mom said "hush" was the word. She said, we did not speak about such things. No one spoke about Elham again. You just didn’t talk about it, she said.

Growing up, Mom and her family moved frequently. Wherever they landed, Mom attended the private school in the area. However, one town they lived in did not have a French school nearby. Public school was not feasible because she would not have understood Arabic. Mom stayed home for four years and helped her mother take care of the younger siblings.

Mom called it miserable. She hated staying home while her siblings went to school. When they finally moved again, they took up residence near a Catholic French immersion in Shoubra, a suburb of Cairo. Notre Dame Des Aportres largely influenced her cultural values. She adopted a Western mindset and a distinct affinity for the Catholic Church. Unlike her public-school counterparts, which included her siblings, she did not have to learn the Koran teachings. For her, Arabic was more of a second language than a first.

After immigration and marriage, she enrolled in the community college in New Jersey, where I was born. Her middle school diploma, written in French, passed as a high school diploma because they couldn’t read it, procuring her entry. The college admissions people never knew the better, and Mom became a college student. The associate degree was the needed steppingstone on her path to university, which was her ultimate goal.

To her core, Mom is a fiercely independent woman. What was to happen to her would drastically deflate the fierceness and diffuse the potential power of any dreams she ever had.

Chapter 3

Trapped

Being Married

My parents immigrated separately to Canada, Dad alone, Mom with her family. By the late 1960s, very few Copts had immigrated to North America. The pool of Christian Egyptians was small, so pickings were slim. Introduced by the priest of St. Mark’s Church in Toronto, Edward met Lily and asked the priest for her hand. Lily, who was not interested and told her father as much, was told by the priest and her parents that she should say yes. He is a good man, said the priest. They were married in 1968.

My parents first lived in New Jersey, and from Mom’s talk, the only thing she really liked about Camden, New Jersey, was her supersized kitchen. There was no family around, and she was a new immigrant, only having lived a few years in Canada prior to this stage. During that time in Camden, Mom told a story of a man with a camera, who snapped a picture of me while carrying me on a street corner. He took off without a word to her. She always said my photo must have been worth a lot of money and that she was cheated. By 1974, they landed in the friendly American Midwest. Ohio became their life.

Before she had children, Mom painted on canvas with oils. Her deft, slim hands sketched Nefertiti, Virgin Mary, and impressionistic landscapes. They charmed the viewer with deep shades and layers of color, texture, and feeling. She never took art lessons.

The depiction of the Virgin sparkled with a gold halo of glitter around her head. Her large, sad eyes, clear blue like the sky in May’s morning, reminded you of her future sorrow over the Child Jesus, who sat on her lap. Mary wore a deep red gown with an ivory-toned robe draped around her. Her delicate head covering was white with lace trim. Her hair was chocolate brown, and her flawless face was white, tinted with a faint rose hue. Her red lips were closed. She was neither smiling nor frowning, only pondering. Her heart swelled with love. How did my mother draw love in only a face—all the love of the world’s people in St. Mary’s face.

The Child, with the same eyes as His mother, was one or two years old. His hair was light brown with short, tight curls. He was wearing a light blue tunic. He was smiling softly and peered at the viewer before Him. One hand was over the Virgin’s, and the other, His right hand, was held up in the traditional iconic way with the thumb, index, and middle fingers upright and leaning toward each other. Small white flowers with red centers surrounded them as they eagerly huddled close. They looked like the blooms of the Red Heart hibiscus.

She painted because she was bored out of her mind in New Jersey. When children arrived, there was no time to paint. Her works ornamented the walls of our house until we all moved out. Sometime after Dad died, she removed the painting of the Virgin off the wall of the upstairs hallway. She repeatedly scoffed when I swooned over her work. They were not very good, she said. Years later, I found the piece in a plastic bag on the cement floor of the cobweb-laced, unfinished portion of the basement.

What was more tragic—that she was pressured into marrying a man against her will or stopped painting after I was born in 1971 and never picked up a paintbrush again?

She was a gifted artist. The fact that she passed it on to my sister Dalya and my daughter Anastasia was a redeeming relief and joy.

Art is a reflective expression of the mind and therapy. It heals the artist and the audience at once. It is a salve for the soul. I wished she had dusted off her palette and sketched even just a few more exquisite pieces for all our sakes.

Instead, she dove into motherhood with every ounce of her energy, effort, and wit. I, the first and only child for five years, came three years after marriage. Mom adorned me with black curls kept at chin length, pretty 70s-style dresses, and the traditional gold cross on a chain and gold studs for Sears portraits.

Dad was a professor in a podiatry school across the state border at the University of Pennsylvania. He loved to teach, and his students loved him. When he was offered a job at Chemical Abstracts Service in Columbus, his teaching career ended, but he always said it was teaching that he enjoyed the most.

He was very serious about his work, and his ethic was loftier than a giant redwood and stronger than a medieval keep. He had great respect for diligent people. His frequent migraines never tarnished his perfect attendance record. Somehow, he made it work, and he got to work. Once, when he received an award for perfect attendance, a co-worker queried, What vitamins do you take? I don’t think he ever took vitamins.

My parents each stood five feet two inches tall, so Mom rarely wore high heels. She hated the fact that her husband was not taller than her. She fluctuated between compliance and defiance in the wearing of lipstick. He strongly disapproved of her wearing any loud makeup, especially bright or dark lip colors. Most of the time, when she went out, she wore a muted red, not too bold. He disallowed sleeveless tops, regarding them as immodest for Christian girls and women, even outside of church.

Because Dad never drank, alcoholic beverages were not to be found in our house. He occasionally consumed coffee and tea, avoided caffeine addiction, and on some evenings watched TV for entertainment. Dallas and Falcon Crest were their favorite evening diversions for a while.

Dad rarely deviated from his daily and weekly routines, including work, prayer, Bible reading, and other spiritual reading, followed by a short nap, then world news at 6:30 p.m. The weekend continued with Sunday morning liturgy, 60 Minutes on Sunday evenings, and Billy Graham when his message was televised.

Over time, he mastered the art of saving money with coupons and frequented garage sales. He was an alien at the mall. Mom was its poster child. To describe him as frugal would understate it.

He didn’t cook, clean, change diapers, dress children, or do yard work. As for Mom, a young immigrant, and a new mother, far away from her family, this was a devastating shock.

I couldn’t believe this was going to be my life. He wasn’t going to do anything or say much of anything. I was overwhelmed with how alone I felt. I was completely miserable. she said.

He did