Unlike most Saudi families, who have so many kids there are not enough seats for all of them in one car, which leaves smaller children sitting on the laps of their siblings, I had only Aboudi. I could always buckle him in a child seat with a seat belt. When Aboudi was old enough, I enrolled him in a more formal preschool that was run by an American, Miss Janet, who was married to an American Aramco employee. All the teachers were Americans and there were American kids enrolled there as well. The classes were mixed, boys and girls. Even in Saudi private schools, there are no mixed classes and female teachers are not allowed to teach boys, except perhaps for one year of preschool.
Living in the compound, Aboudi and I tasted an American expatriate life. There were two huge swimming pools nearby, so I signed Aboudi up for swimming lessons and tried to learn myself. Swimming is a sport that has always been forbidden to Saudi women and girls. Even in college, there was no swimming pool, only a court for basketball and volleyball. But Aboudi and I could swim and we could walk on the jogging path. Aboudi would ride his little bicycle or his scooter. Next to my small town house was a park, and I could take my son there to play. With him, I became another child. I rode with him on the swings, went down the slide with him in my lap, and then we would run around, climb up the stairs, and do it all over again. I could sit down on the warm ground and dig with him in the sand. I could watch him play with little girls. None of it was forbidden. Growing up, I had known none of these things. Outside the compound, women, even non-Saudi women, cannot swim, or ride the swings, or go down the slide, or play soccer with their sons.
We celebrated holidays like Halloween, where we dressed up in costumes and went trick-or-treating. We had barbecues and potluck dinners. I was surrounded by people of so many nationalities: American, Scottish, Indian, Filipino, Malaysian. After all my years living amid two volatile families, to see all these people living together in peace was beautiful.
But I never went to the expatriate parties, the ones with drinking and dancing. Saudi men would go and drink a lot, but if a Saudi woman were to attend, everyone would be gossiping about her the next day, “That Saudi girl was there, she mingled with the men, and they were drinking.” It would become a stain that you could not wash off. I would only go to small gatherings held by my close friends, a cookout or something like that. Even if those were mixed, men and women, it was considered okay, because I already knew everyone who was there.
And yet still I lived a very different life from many Saudi women in the compound. Those who were married and lived in family housing would often cover up in their abayas and would not leave the house. There were men whose wives I never saw, men who never spoke about their wives, who never uttered their names. But I knew the wives of my non-Saudi friends. I would be invited to their homes and they would come to my place. We would all cook together. For most Saudis, life was different. They were still following tradition.
Everything about the compound was convenient. We had a supermarket, open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and we had many American-style establishments, like beauty salons and car shops. We had a beautiful eighteen-hole golf course with a nice restaurant, and baseball and soccer fields. Aboudi played both. I would take him to his games and sit there and cheer for him; I just loved it. There was even a theater that would show films and host dance performances, concerts, and musicals. Once I stepped outside the compound, I became aware of how silent the Saudi world is. There’s no music, even at the mall, no other sounds filtering through the background. There were no movies or performances. There was only street noise: tires on the roadway, brakes, engines, the scattered honking of horns. As he grew older, I took Aboudi to many performances, hoping that he would come to love singing and music as I did.
Scattered around the compound were restaurants and cafés, without partitions to separate men and women. Outside the compound, men and women have to sit in different, walled-off sections, and restaurants and cafés have to close at prayer time. But none of those rules applied inside Aramco. Once he had learned to sit in his seat and eat with utensils, I would take Aboudi many nights to the Dhahran dining hall. For twelve riyals, about $3.00, we could have a five-course meal. Families could sit together, men and women, in the dining halls and at the parks. It was a normal life, which made it truly another world.
But Aboudi would not be able to go to school in the compound. The official reason was that the school didn’t teach Arabic, but I didn’t believe that. The school was an American school, with mixed classes, and mixed education was one taboo the Saudis government would not let its citizens break.
At night, Aboudi and I would return to our home. We would pass through the wooden gate into the tiny yard, and then through the door to the house. The floor was covered in white tile and I had a white, L-shaped sofa in the living room. Our kitchen opened right onto the living room, American-style. Upstairs, off our bedroom, was a small balcony. Sometimes, Aboudi and I would sit out on the balcony, look up, and count the stars. He would give each of them names. He would say this star is Reemah, the name of one of his cousins, and that star is Leenah. Sometimes I would ask him which star is Mommy, and he would say, “Mommy is the yellow star with the laptop and the purse.” We kept looking for the yellow star with the purse, but we could never quite find it. Of all the spaces in my little town house, I loved that balcony the most.
But in January 2009, I found myself sitting under a different constellation of stars, a very long way from Aboudi and from my home.
Aramco has an extensive professional exchange program. If you are accepted, you go to work for another company in another country for a year or more in order to gain experience and technical expertise that you could not learn at Aramco. The company pays the employee’s salary and more or less all expenses, so he or she is working for the foreign company for free. But it isn’t a traditional exchange program, because no one from the foreign company arrives to work at Aramco in return. I applied for the program and interviewed in 2008 to work at IBM in data management and cybersecurity. Then the global financial crisis hit. IBM had no openings. But EMC2, a data storage company based in New England, did. In January 2009, I boarded a plane to Logan International Airport, bound ultimately for Nashua, New Hampshire. And I was alone. My ex-husband had forbidden me from taking Aboudi with me. We would be apart for twelve months, communicating only over Skype. Professionally, it was an incredible experience. Personally, it was a disaster to be separated from my son.