Southern Pakistani

Have I told you guys yet that my husband harbors some secret dream to become a good ol' Southern boy? It's not just the Monster Trucks, though it may have started there. He wants to go hunting, he wants to go fishing. He was looking through sale circulars in the mail and told me he wants to buy one of those ubiquitous country boy plaid jackets. He goes to Tennessee to attend woodworking classes. He reads magazines about whittling and takes his carving knives on vacations. He said he wants to retire to a farm one day and wake up at the crack of dawn to milk his cows and/or goats. He is obsessed with trucks and wants to own the biggest one he can find, as well as fix up some old truck too one day. Though he gave up smoking a long time ago, he still wants to smoke a pipe. A pipe! Like he's some old man!

I come from The South but my Pakistani born and bred husband seems to be working harder on embodying the typical redneck persona. I sometimes joke that it's because he's SOUTHERN Pakistani!

Oh, I forgot to tell you what I got for my Mian for our anniversary. It was my mother's idea. And by idea, I mean fault. She suggested a concert or something, which took me to the ticketmaster website, where I saw a listing for something truly dreadful. Something M went to once during his grad school days and loved. Something he'd recently mentioned wanting to take his son to one day. Something I would never, ever want to have to endure. But because it's our seventh wedding anniversary, and because I know how much he would love it, I purchased it anyway. And at great personal sacrifice (to my dignity, at least) in mid-January I will be accompanying my two boys to a Monster Truck Rally.

(Of course later I told him I was going to COMBINE this present with his birthday next month and he's not getting a birthday present, which he was fine with.)

Various December Festivities

December is a month of a lot of festivity around here. Not only does it include Chachoo & Dulhan's wedding anniversary, but it's also the month of my birthday and M & my wedding anniversary as well. They're only two days apart. Which kind of sucks. I grew up with a birthday two weeks before Christmas. Usually that's a huge downer and people with birthdays near Christmas end up getting ripped off on the presents front. July birthdays bring huge parties and lots of gifts, but everyone's too busy with Christmas-related events to throw you a party and your relatives and friends already bought a present for you for Christmas that's waiting in their closet, so they don't go all-out on the gift they get you for your birthday.

I didn't actually have this kind of birthday experience growing up though, because my parents were really careful to make sure my birthday was as big a deal as it would have been if it didn't fall in December, so I had nice parties and far too many presents. No combining at all. So perhaps that's why I was lulled into the false idea that it would be no big deal to get married just 48 hours after my birthday. And my Mian has been trying to do the big combo move ever since. Which I adamantly (and angrily) refuse. He gets a big birthday fuss AND a wedding anniversary fuss, yet he tries to slyly COMBO on me. No sir!

This year, he took us all out for breakfast - eating breakfast at a restaurant is something he doesn't like much and I love. Then he'd made a surprise appointment for a manicure and pedicure for me, and he'd scheduled us to go for a movie afterwards. But he had NADA planned for our wedding anniversary so after I got done throwing a fit, we moved the movie plan over two nights and just did a low-key dinner & movie (The Tourist, which despite the bad reviews, I really enjoyed) on our wedding anniversary, which was a Monday night, and Chachoo and Dulhan took care of the baby for us.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that M said we should buy Chachoo & Dulhan a wedding anniversary present "but just this once." So we decided on a gift certificate so they could go to a fancy dinner and since they're limited to what they'll eat out we picked Red Lobster. They said they liked it and it was the best seafood they've had since being in the US. Then they went to a movie, but I don't remember which one. Our local theatres play a few new desi films, so it was one of those. They also bought us presents. For my birthday, despite me forcing M to tell them NOT to buy anything for me, they got me a nice leather wallet that I actually really love and I'm very happy they didn't listen to M! For our anniversary, they bought us blue shirts - also very nice! Then, afterwards, we all agreed no more presents on anniversarys!

Next up is Christmas. Usually the baby and I (and M, if he's available) go back to my parent's home during the years we're not in Pakistan to partake in their Christmas celebrations. This year, I'd hoped to be working and have enough money to go but my upcoming work project just keeps getting it's start date pushed back again and again (and again, unfortunately), so we won't be going. The baby has a Christmas gift on the way from his grandparents though, and he bought them each something too but it's yet to be packed and shipped. I wonder, if I remember to go to the post office tomorrow, how long will I have to wait in line and will it get there in time to be actual Christmas gifts rather than belated ones? We shall see.

Next up - January and all its boringness!

One Year Down

This weekend saw Chachoo and his Dulhan's one year wedding anniversary. Can you believe it's already been a year since we last traveled to Pakistan to attend their wedding?

Here's a cute tidbit about Chachoo and his wife - they truly believe they will never have an argument. Never! I tell everyone this, and Dulhan says that you can tell how long people have been married by how loudly they laugh. Can you imagine - never arguing with your spouse! This whole topic started soon after Chachoo moved into our house last January. He and I were talking about something, I think I was telling him that he would probably be the silent treatment type during a fight just like his brother. He replied that he and Dulhan would never have a fight. Fine, I said, during an "argument" then. He said they wouldn't have an argument either. Yeah sure, I said, during a disagreement then. He said they weren't even going to have a disagreement! Then we discussed the exact definitions of disagreement/argument/fight and he begrudgingly admitted that they might occasionally disagree about something, but it would never become an argument. He just thinks they're both so agreeable and mild mannered that they'll never argue.

The kicker is that later, when Dulhan came here, I asked her if she also thought that and she said YES! Dulhan also believes they will never have an argument. That when I started saying that I'm going to have to get them to write it down on a piece of paper and sign it so I can present it to them one day in the future. Occasionally I will  ask them if they're still argument free and they both say yes - so far.

Join me in wishing the happy couple Happy Anniversary. Do you have any fantastic marriage advice - especially if it's about avoiding disagreements, arguments, or fights?

Tools to Battle Awkwardness

There are so many wonderful things that come from living in a multi-family system. People keep pulling me aside and whispering "How is it REALLY?" and I just can't stop raving about it. Maybe tomorrow I can make a bullet point listing of all the plusses from our arrangement with my husband's brother Chachoo and Chachoo's wife living downstairs in our basement. But it's not without its hiccups either, though they may be minor in comparison. One of those hiccups is our television. We can't just watch whatever we want anymore. And I think it's only half because of the Pakisani part of my life. The other half of the problem comes from my own upbringing.

The Pakistani part is that there's this "levels of respect" thing where Chachoo - being younger than my husband Mian - has to act in a certain way. He has to be spotless. And Mian, my husband, also has to behave in a certain way - he has to act the part of respected elder. So if there's some lewd joke or nudity on screen, both have to act their prescribed roles - my Mian has to act like it's terrible and Chachoo has to act like he doesn't understand the joke, would be my guess.

The part that comes from my own upbringing is that while I don't think I grew up with very strict parents, I remember not being allowed to watch a lot of movies. I think I was in 3rd grade when Dirty Dancing came out and all my classmates raved about it but I wasn't allowed to watch it. I don't think I was allowed to watch it until high school actually, and only then because it was on TV and they'd cut out the controversial parts. I didn't know that though. I thought the controversial part was the dancing. Surprise surprise for me when I became an adult, bought a copy in the clearance bin at Best Buy and saw for the first time in my life the substantial portion of the plot that gets cut out of the TV version where a main character seeks and procures a back alley abortion! Besides that one example, my mother also had a profanity limit to any movies we watched as kids. If there were more than (I think it was three?) curse words in a movie it got turned off. And there was a lot of fast forwarding too, sometimes it was kids-leave-the-room-and-then-fast-forward, like in Top Gun. I didn't see the love scene in Top Gun until I was 22, and only then I was watching it to help with M's Ph.D. dissertation (which has something to do with movies and computers.)

So that's where my awkwardness stems from - it has roots in both branches of my half American, half Pakistani life. If something untoward comes on screen, I can't just cringe and bear it. It's too awkward. It's not just around my Pakistani inlaws either, I would feel the same way around my own parents. In fact, my parents used to tease us growing up about how awkward it was to see loves scenes with them in the room by telling us "I see romance!" in a sing-song voice. It still gets to me today.

Ever since Chachoo came to live with us almost a year ago, there's been a lot of fast forwarding. When his wife, Dulhan arrived a few months later, it was worse. Maybe because Chachoo and Mian - even though they had that age gap Pakistani respect awkwardness, were able to just cringe and bear it and I was the only one really uncomfortable. But when Dulhan arrived, she felt it at least as bad as I did, I guess. She's the lowest on the totem pole in our house in terms of Pakistani respect, so she has to be the chaste-est and she is the most embarrassed by these kind of not family friendly scenes in movies. Or, she would be if it wasn't for my own weirdness, because it turns out that I usually am the most uncomfortable all the time.

And lest you think we are watching some really terrible movies, let me tell you that this all started with The Big Bang Theory. Do you know that sitcom? It is an entirely nudity-free, perfectly normal prime time comedy show. Thirty minutes of pure hilariousness. We all loved that show, especially living with these current and former graduate student science nerds.  Only it was also thirty minutes of agony unless Chachoo and his wife were not home that evening. I tried to find a clip of what I was talking about and I couldn't figure out which one was more cringeworthy: one, two, three, four, or five. We joked for some time about putting up a curtain across the room so that we could all enjoy the show and try to forget about the others in the room. Eventually we just stopped watching it entirely - yes, that's how far this insanity runs, we actually changed our behavior because of it. Even though all four of us are adults, and even though we all individually like the show!

There's nothing I can do to bring back The Big Bang Theory in our house, I'll just have to watch them in my room alone I guess. But movies were still a big problem, especially for movies I hadn't seen yet. Some of the movies we watch are old classics I like to foist upon the rest of the group, but we watch new movies sometimes too. I really didn't want to get caught offguard by one of these uncomfortable situations so I began to google the movie titles in advance to see if there were any scenes I should anticipate. It was then that I found a great resource - movie reviews directed at parents! Now I look up movie titles on http://www.kids-in-mind.com/ or http://www.parentpreviews.com/ or http://www.commonsensemedia.org/ all three of which are really great resources if you find yourself in a situation like me where you want to be able to fast forward through every difficult scene, or, in the case of some movies, avoid them all together. I only wish I'd known about this before our family screening of The Red Violin!

Thanksgiving, Extended Relatives Edition

Last week, my family and I packed up and drove 16 hours one way to visit my relatives for Thanksgiving. Our first problem was logistics. We had to get me, my husband and our son as well as my brother- and sister-in-law into one car, comfortably, and with enough room to sleep. Because we always do this journey in the middle of the night.

We do it at night for a few reasons. First, Mian doesn't want to take much time off from work and if we leave after work on Tuesday night, he only has to take off Wednesday and Friday - and up until last year his company gave everyone a half day on Wednesday, too. Second, we've never wanted to spend money on a hotel room along the way unless we really had to because everyone was too sleepy to drive. In the first three years after we were married, I was really scared of the driver falling asleep at the wheel and M and I had a pact that we would either both stay awake all night long or stop for the night. Usually I would try to sleep during the day and he would do the entire 14 to 16 hour drive by himself with me keeping him company or talking or dialing his phone for him (because he uses long overnight trips as opportunities to do Pakistan extended family calling.) Another reason we do it overnight came after the birth of our son - it's just so much easier to drive during the hours he would be sleeping anyway. And our pact about both staying up pretty much ended when the baby was born too.

This year I slept as much as I could the day of arrival, then M drove the first two hours and I took over while everyone else slept through the night. The plan was that I would drive until morning prayers and then M would take over and I would sleep the rest of the way. I wasn't able to sleep as much as I'd wanted though, because I'd procrastinated on getting a special turkey from a Muslim butcher shop. My parents had insisted that Chachoo and Dulhan (my brother- and sister-in-law) should be able to experience all of the traditional Thanksgiving foods, so I'd tried to help them by taking care of the turkey part. As usual, I put it off until the 11th hour and had to spend a bit of my supposed-to-be-sleeping time buying and then speed-defrosting a turkey.

Next, after a three hour nap, M and I went to pick up a rental car. We'd decided that in order to make it down south in one go, we'd need a rental car. Our little Toyota Corolla just wouldn't accomodate Chachoo, Dulhan and the baby in the backseat with enough room to sleep. I'd tried to find a way to rent a minivan but it was a very expensive prospect. We ended up doing priceline.com and getting a "premium" car for $25 a day - which after taxes, fees, insurance and a $10/day extra driver fee turned into $50/day. But this was still by far the cheapest option and I can say with authority now that a Chrysler 300 does allow enough room for two adults and a big-car-seated-baby to sleep fairly comfortably on a 14-16 hour trip.

Our plan worked almost seamlessly except for the little hiccup of leaving the baby locked in the car at at rest stop. I'd finished my driving shift and we'd all gotten out of the car for bathroom & washup runs, and we were all going to come back to the car for morning prayers and then be on our way. We were about 3 hours from our destination, and someone - I won't point fingers except to say that it wasn't me but I wans't entirely blameless either - left the keys on the passenger seat while all the bodies were outside of the car and all the doors automatically locked. We wasted almost an hour at the rest stop waiting for the local police (who wouldn't do anything about it) and then a local locksmith who came and then unlocked the car door (for FREE!) After than I was so juiced up on adrenaline, fear and anger than I found it difficult to sleep.

Wednesday was spent helping set up at my Grandmother's house followed by my family's traditional Thanksgiving Eve dinner of delivery pizza. Thursday was Thanksgiving. It was okay this year - not the best it's ever been. A few of our family & close friends were unable to come this year so it was a little sparse. We're used to having a really big gathering and it's always loud and goes too quickly, but it was quieter this year. Chachoo and Dulhan seemed to enjoy themselves, and I heard them discuss it with family members in the car the next night (during the late-night-driving-international-phone-call-session) and they described it glowingly.

The next day was our usual Friday religious services at Mian's old school mosque. Remember when we tried to branch out last year and it went terribly? This year we knew the imam at the old mosque was different because we'd seen the old imam in the news during that burn-a-quran fiasco and he was listed as the leader of a new mosque, so we thought we'd go back and see if it was any better. It was allright - the speech was not about how terrible Thanksgiving was, so that's a plus. But the women are still siphoned off into a separate but unequal building and instead of a fuzzy TV and crackly audio transmission of the speech from the main building, they'd gotten rid of the TV and the audio was so loud I could barely understand any of it. So that's a minus and it basically evened out, I guess. I'm still in the market for a good mosque near my parent's, is what I'm saying.

Because we're getting old and homebody-ish, we actually starting driving home right after Friday prayers. In our advanced age, it is so important to get home with enough time to decompress before having to start the workweek again. The only other thing on M's wish list was a stop at his favorite place in the whole world. It's surplus (i.e. JUNK) shop on our way home. I made him promise we wouldn't stop for more than 30 minutes and he was done after 20, thank God. And he didn't even buy anything. He just wants to look. He loves that place so much that a few years ago he talked it up enough to convince my grandfather, father, and uncle to go there with him even though it's close to 2 hours away from where they live!

The trip back was successful. Not only did we make good time and have Sunday at home - no babies were locked in the car on the way back! Our definition of successful road trip has really sunk, it seems!

Hope those of you who celebrate it had a happy Thanksgiving! A few pictures:


Setting up the tables, chairs, and place settings on my grandparent's driveway.



M and the baby taking a walk before the dinner begins, and Dulhan starting down the line of food choices.



Chachoo also filling his plate. We set the food tables up on the back porch.

 

Mian showing you his plate full of Thanksgiving food - turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, brocolli casserole, squach casserole, carrot soufle, green beans (and yeast rolls, but those were on the table.)



The dessert table - there are always at least half a dozen dessert options!



The morning of Thanksgiving, we always watch the annual Macy's parade on TV and this year we were greated with bollywood style dancing - a perfect parable of merging my two lives together this year with Chachoo and Dulhan tagging along for Thanksgiving, I thought.

Junk or heaven, depending on who you ask...





Mian, showing you all his paradise.



I was happily waving goodbye.