Hidden Girl: The True Story of a Modern-Day Child Slave (21 page)

During the coming weeks and months I thought a lot about the phone conversation with my mother and sisters, and I knew that if I truly wanted to go to Egypt to see my family, I could probably find a way. I realized, however, that I didn’t want to go. Not then. I was not ready. I had let a lot of my anger go, but there was enough left that was still simmering inside me that I did not feel a meeting would be a good thing right then.

The main reason for my decision was that even though these people were my biological family, they were no longer my real family. I had made a new family with my friends Amber, Teresa, and Karla, and even with Mark and my adoptive dad. These were the people who had loved and supported me for years, and through their actions they had earned the right to be called family. That was not the case with my biological parents and siblings.

Another factor was that I did not know my biological family anymore. Because of the circumstances of my life, my family in Egypt and I no longer had the same points of reference, the same religion, or the same viewpoints. We had nothing in common, and if truth be told, I didn’t even remember most of them.

I didn’t rule out going to Egypt at some point in the future, though. I wasn’t sure if my mother’s claim of poor health was real or not, and I knew that if it was, I might miss my opportunity to see her again. If that happened, I’d just have to accept it. I knew that I had gathered together all the facts, feelings, and emotions, and I made the best choice for me.

I do think about my family whenever I hear of all the unrest that is happening in Egypt now. I do know that someday I would like to show my brothers and sisters that there is more to the world than what they have experienced. I’d like to show them that a better life awaits them, even if it is in another country. But the reality is that some days I am more open to this idea than others. What I can say for sure is that if the opportunity for us to meet presents itself in the future, I will think about it.

I was glad the woman I had met had taken the time to track down my family, and I was even okay with the fact that it ended up as a story that was broadcast across the Internet. I was grateful for the chance to speak with them. But I knew too that I needed time before I took another step toward my biological family. Actually, I might need a long, long time.

One of the lingering effects
from my time in captivity was my lack of trust—of both people and situations. It takes me a long time to warm up to someone, even on a casual level. Mark was patient with me in the early days after my rescue. Even before we could communicate directly, when we were talking through a translator, Mark kept on trying to let me know that he was safe, that he was someone I could always trust and count on. He did that by speaking to me not as a victim but as a person. He asked over and over how I was doing, how I liked to spend my time, what I would like for myself for the future.

I didn’t realize it then, but these are questions that friends ask each other. Since that time, any new person I meet has to take it almost as slowly as Mark did with me ten years ago. Because my world was upside down then, and because my childhood was not a childhood, I relate to new people in my life differently than many other people do.

I have realized that I must gain trust in people through situations before I can trust them as people. For example, if the situation is that it is busy at a store where I work and an employee is having a meltdown, that employee is not someone I will be able to trust in the future. In another situation, if I am riding in a car with someone and we have a flat, if that person wants my trust, he or she had better act with calm action rather than with angry words.

Once I have seen people act honorably in trying situations, I might then let them in on a more personal level. But if my new friend has told me she is going to meet me at eight o’clock, she had better be there at eight. If she isn’t, I will lose trust in her. If an employee at my store is responsible for ordering supplies, he had better do his job and order the supplies. If not, I will not feel that I can trust him.

I do not mean to sound rigid, but to some extent we are a product of our environment. My lack of trust is only one thing that being held in captivity did to me. However, if I find I can trust you to do what you say you are going to, then we might even become friends. This way of thinking was helpful to me in all areas of my life, but especially when it came to dating.

When I first started going out with boys, if my date slipped up even once, that was it for him. Good-bye, you’re gone. I feel sorry for some of those boys now, for they were kids, and kids make mistakes. I feel bad for me, too, because I probably pushed some good people out of my life way too soon. But I could not take the chance. I had been beaten up, threatened, ordered around, and given so many broken promises by the men in my life that if the boy I dated wasn’t rock solid, I wanted nothing to do with him.

Of course, many of the women in my life had not treated me well either. My mother had sold me into slavery, and my two foster moms and my adoptive mother had each been difficult in their own ways. I still believe in the goodness of people. I think it was bad luck that in my early years I was surrounded by adults who were quite into themselves. The unfortunate result was that there was nothing left over for them to give to others.

It took me a long time to learn how to separate the good people around me from the bad. Was a male teacher abusive like my biological dad? Or was he a stand-up, honest guy? I’d had much of the former and little of the latter, and it was not easy for me to figure out which was which. But I had to.

For someone else, someone who has had long-standing relationships with people they have known, loved, and trusted all their life, surrounding themselves with honorable, trustworthy people might not be such a big deal. But I’d had none of those kinds of relationships, which is why letting only the right kind of people into my life was much more of a survival tactic for me than for others.

I look back to my time in captivity, and to the times when I took the twins to the park across the street and to the nearby pool. Those visits offered me the chance to observe many different kinds of people, to see how the way they walked affected their tone of voice, to view how they positioned their body next to other people and what that did to their facial expressions. I studied people so intently then that I probably got the equivalent of a college degree in body language. Those visits provided me with a foundation on which to base my current relationships.

Eventually I got to where I could tell pretty quickly if a girlfriend was in my life because we had a lot in common or if she wanted to be around me because my picture had been in the newspaper. I knew right away if a boy thought I was a pushover because my English was not perfect, or if he wanted to take advantage of my generosity. I figured a lot of that out when I was in high school, and have refined the process since.

After dating a boy for a number of months, I was proud of myself when I broke up with him because I didn’t like us together. I liked him fine, and I liked me. But together we were not a good fit. That was a huge revelation for me. That was the first time I stopped being around a boy because of how
he
was, rather than for how he compared to the men in my past.

Now I can pick up a vibe from a person that lets me know right away whether this is a good person or someone who might hurt me in the end. This ability came in especially handy when I saw a man who worked at a store in the same mall where I worked. This guy was independent, cute, smart, and sexy, and he had a great vibe about him. Even without knowing him I felt he was safe. He looked to be several years older than I was and was a store manager, which let me know that his bosses thought he was a responsible person.

Through an odd coincidence I realized the man’s name was Daniel Uquidez and that I knew his brother, who worked at the mall too. The mall was large, but many of the employees of the different stores were friendly with one another, so it was fairly easy for me to meet Daniel. After that I regularly found excuses to walk by his store and wave, or to stop in with a friend who wanted to buy something. When I’d see him in the courtyard, or on the way to or from the parking lot, we’d talk. I loved making him smile.

I liked the fact that I had been introduced to Daniel in a professional setting. To him, I was the girl who worked in a nearby store. This was not the way most other people met or knew of me. Usually I was “the girl who used to be a slave” or “the girl who is always in the newspaper.” I was much more than that, and those old identities rubbed me the wrong way. I was glad that Daniel knew me first as someone else, before he discovered that older part of me.

Our friendship developed slowly, and I liked that, too. The slow pace gave me time to think whether or not this was someone I wanted to spend more time with, or if I should keep our relationship light, friendly, and professional.

After I met Daniel, I switched jobs and began working again at Godiva. This was late in 2010. I worked there only for a few months before that store closed and I found myself as a sales associate at Versace. This was during a time when jobs were hard to come by, and I felt fortunate to get the job, but I especially liked that I was still working at the mall where I could see Daniel regularly during the day. Additionally, after I learned the Versace product line, I found that I believed fully in it, which made it easy for me to generate sales.

The days and weeks went by during which I learned more about Daniel. He was from a large, close Catholic family, and from casual conversation we seemed to have a lot of the same thoughts and feelings about the important things in life. We even both have asthma.

But even with that, if Daniel had pushed me and asked me out right away, I might have felt too uncomfortable to agree. But he waited until we had known each other for a number of months, and when he did ask, I gave him a resounding yes.

Daniel later told me he had been working up the courage to ask me out for some time. He saw me as a strong, independent woman, and he had grown up with many of those in his family. I am glad that he asked me out because he respected me. I think if more relationships began this way, there would be much less fighting and fewer divorces.

Daniel knew how much I loved baseball, and in particular the Anaheim Angels, so he took me to a home game for our first date. Later I learned that he didn’t even like baseball that much, but it was important to him that we do something I liked. That was when I knew he was a keeper.

In the days following the game, we went to three movies in three days. After that we were pretty much inseparable. He knows how peaceful and healing I find the beach, and we went there a lot, even though we do not have a beach anywhere close to where we live. Huntington Beach is several hours away in good traffic, but we like it because it is clean and nice, and not too crowded. Also, the stores and restaurants near there stay open later than at some of the other beaches. We also went to Santa Monica some nights to hear the bands play along the water. Dancing and eating at restaurants that were new to us were activities we often did closer to home. We even went to Disneyland.

Since the day when I’d gone to Disneyland with The Mom and The Dad and the twins, I had been there several times. I had gone with my foster families, and the first time I went after being rescued, it was weird. I had flashes of standing to the side with the boys’ backpacks while they enjoyed the rides. But I had no thoughts like that with Daniel. In a reminder of how far I had come, life felt so natural with Daniel that I was able to let the bad things that had happened to me stay in my past.

There was another way that Daniel was different from other boys I had dated—in how we fought. Like many other couples we had several stupid fights. The fights were so stupid, in fact, that I have forgotten what they were about. When we argued the first time, my initial reaction was to think,
He’s just another of those guys. Good-bye!
But I thought that for only a fleeting instant with Daniel, because my second reaction was to think,
He’s not like the Muslim men who mistreated me.
And he wasn’t.

Through those fights I realized that I not only liked Daniel, but I liked him with me, and I liked me with him. We were a good fit.

•    •    •

From Daniel, to Amber, Teresa, Karla, and PaNou Thao (another amazing woman I met at work who became a dear friend), by the time I was twenty-one, I had surrounded myself with strong, reliable, responsible, caring, fun friends. These people had become my inner circle, and I felt like a treasured member of each of their families when I spent Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter holidays with them. Some holidays I had a great many invitations and had to split the day into three or four parts just so I could see everyone. I have come to feel that I am the luckiest girl in the world to have each of these people in my life. Together my friends are far better than a biological family because my friends are here because they want to be. With some bio families they are family only because they have to be.