This decision to seek my freedom is at least several months in the making. About four months ago, grandma threatened to throw me out of the house if I dared to speak to Arabs and Muslims. I'm a Jew and also a proud religious Zionist, but in her narrow-minded worldview, grandma thinks that all Arabs and Muslims are Nazis. Therefore she thinks that if I have Arab and Muslim friends, I must be a self-hating Jew and an enemy of Israel and the Jews. Of course she doesn't understand that I have both Shi'ite and Sunni friends from Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the USA who support Israel and the Jews.
She doesn't grasp the fact that I spoke with a pro-Israel Syrian Muslim opposition leader in exile and asked him to consider speaking up for compensation for the Syrian Jews who were forcibly expelled and murdered primarily in 1947. She doesn't understand that my Iranian friend just fled Iran because she is a follower of Ayatollah Boroujerdi, an unusual cleric who supports separation of religion and state, peace, democracy, and gender equality and doesn't hate the Jews. She doesn't understand that my friend was tortured and imprisoned by the Iranian regime for having contact with me as an open Zionist Jew. She also doesn't realize that I am only in contact with the tiny minority of Arabs and Muslims who are pro-Israel and pro-Jewish in the first place.
When grandma threatened to throw me out of the house, I threatened to move to Boston to stay with my best friend and her husband and new baby. My amazing friend offered to take me in even though she and her husband had just adopted a new baby. I knew by then that it was only a matter of time before I left my grandmother's house. My parents responded to my threat to move to Boston with a promise to buy me an apartment. For a few months, they also stopped terrorizing me psychologically for the first time in my life. The fact that my parents had the capacity to stop terrorizing me psychologically shows that they knew exactly what they were doing when they subjected me to so many years of horrendous emotional and verbal abuse. It shows that they worked in a very cold, calculated, and cruel fashion to harm me in body, mind, and soul with their verbal abuse.
Once they thought they had lured me into complacency, all of a sudden my parents broke their promise to buy me an apartment on the bogus grounds that they could not afford it. This is simply bullshit because my dad is a physician, and he just bought my brother a dental practice and an apartment. My brother will pay my parents back for the apartment with his earnings from his dental practice. My parents' calculated deception in this case was another painful reminder that I could not trust them.
And when grandma subjected me to seven vicious verbal assaults in a matter of 9 days, I simply responded by making immediate plans to leave this abuse. And indeed once I actually fled the abuse and moved into the transition house at Heaven on Earth Foundation, my mom was suddenly promising me this apartment all over again. My parents must think I am a complete idiot if they honestly think they can lure me back to a lifetime of captivity with such a blatantly false promise. I know that they have no intention of ever buying me an apartment and that they are dangling this offer before me as a ruse.
In addition I have begun to taste freedom - and I like freedom better than slavery, captivity, and deliberate and planned emotional abuse from parents and grandmother who reject me as a daughter and a human being. I know that I am better off without them because in my parents' case, they clearly do not love me and cannot accept me for who I am as a human being. Throughout my life, rather than embracing me for who I am, they have been trying to force me to conform to their own image of me.
In my grandmother's case, she loves me dearly but she does not and cannot understand me. She raised her two daughters to believe that women exist to serve men and that men can and should verbally abuse the women under their control. I reject the starkly horrendous implications of grandma's patriarchical ideology, in which women are objects of male control with no right to be treated with love, dignity, and respect by their husbands and sons. Grandma continually tried to socialize me to accept this barbaric worldview, and I reject it thoroughly. At least though I can say that in her own imperfect way, grandma does love me. She does love me although she can never understand me or my worldview.
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