Eight Years Ago

Eight years ago today, I married Mian after a whirlwind seven week engagement and only have known him for fourteen months. I once wrote about our wedding day which involved two different wedding functions in two different cities. Today I will tell you about our honeymoon.

It's a short story. We didn't have a honeymoon. The End.

Of course that's not the end - it never is with me, is it? I am nothing if not long winded. My honeymoon was living intimately with my Pakistani mother- and father-in-law for fifty two days. People laugh at me when I say that, like "oh ha ha, you counted all the days?" but believe-you-me, if your honeymoon had been 52 days with your in-laws, you'd have been keeping count too.

M's parents had originally organized a trip to the US to attend their precious eldest son's graduation ceremony and see him hooded with the big D R. Two weeks after they got their visas, they got the "surprise, I'm planning to marry a white girl while you're here' phone call. They had planned to stay two months and our wedding was to be at the beginning of their trip, so really, a honeymoon was never even really discussed. We were all going to be in Florida for the wedding and graduation, and then we'd go back to the DC area where M lived. Since we'd be in Florida, we decided we'd take Ammi and Abbu, (Mian's parents) to Disney World and Sea World. We ended up getting married on a Saturday, holding our Valima on Sunday, attending M's graduation on Monday, going to Disney World on Tuesday, going to Sea World on Wednesday, and flying to DC Wednesday evening.

It was very hectic.

After getting to M's apartment, there was a scuffle about where everyone would sleep. M only had a tiny one bedroom apartment, and his parents didn't want to force the newlyweds to sleep on the couch or something, but we in turn didn't want to make the elderly sleep on the couch. In the end we got an air mattress and M and I slept on the floor of the living room. Ammi and Abbu would wake up early and pass by us on their way into the kitchen for morning tea, where Ammi would try very hard to keep Abbu quiet as long as possible so we could continue sleeping. Sometimes she was almost successful, too.

I actually didn't stay for the whole 52 days, though. I was on winter break in the last year of my undergraduate studies and I had to return to Florida the second week of January. I was scheduled to return to Virginia two weeks later to visit, but by that time Ammi and Abbu would be on their way back to Pakistan. We said our goodbyes at the airport and I awkwardly hugged them both. (Oh, also, while they were here during the first three weeks of our marriage, there were two deaths in their family. Luckily no one ever mentioned that perhaps M marrying me had brought bad luck to the family.)

After Ammi and Abbu were gone our real married life started. Unfortunately I was absent from it for most of the next six months because of school. I flew back to Virginia SIXTEEN times between January and July, but only for weekends and Spring Break. Then in July, finally finished with school, M flew back, we rented a big SUV and we carted me and all my possessions to Virginia for good.

Over the course of two years following our wedding, we would take a few trips and call them our make-up honeymoon. First we went camping over spring break a few months after we were married and called that our honeymoon. Then we went to Niagara Falls and that became our make-up honeymoon, usurping camping because Niagara Falls is such a traditional honeymoon location. Then we got to go to Italy because M's company paid for him to go to a conference there and I got the tag along for only the price of airfare. Well, Italy by far beats out camping and even Niagara Falls, so that got top billing from then on for the slot of make-up honeymoon. After that we stopped and future trips could just be self-justified rather than having to fill the honeymoon gap.

Now, whenever we travel anywhere, we talk about our son's honeymoon instead. M is always insistent that he will pay for our son's honeymoon and send him to all the places we've been. I'm pretty sure our future daughter-in-law will want to choose her own destinations. We'll see though.

Here's to a happy and healthy year number nine!

Passing Up Fame (But Not a Refrigerator)

Back in 2009, I was interviewed for a magazine. One of the bloggers I'd read for a long time had been writing for a magazine for awhile and she mentioned on her blog that her next story was about people living together in non-traditional living arrangements. She was asking anyone interested to contact her. I thought to myself 'well heck, my living arrangement is certainly non-traditional for Americans,' and I contacted her.

I was interviewed over email back and forth a few times, then several months went by and I assumed the story had died or I'd been cut from it. It had seemed that the magazine wanted an economic downturn spin to the story, kind of like 'we moved in with my parents when I lost my job.' The writer had said she liked my story and wanted to include it to illustrate that larger, multi-generational family living situations are the norm through much of the world, but after waiting most of a year, I figured I just hadn't fit into the kind of story they'd been looking for.

Then finally I heard from her again. The story hadn't been published without me, it'd just been delayed during an editorial shakeup, and now it was back on. They wanted a picture of my family, as well as all of our real names - (which was when I decided NOT to tie it back to this still-trying-to-remain-anonymous blog.) Then a few tweaks with the photo editor and confirmation from a fact checker and the next month, the article came out. I was famous.

I told my family about it, and my close inlaws. I didn't really want all of M's cousins reading it, but Chachoo and Dhulhan read it. I posted it on Facebook. Then I figured my fifteen minutes of fame were up. Then one day I got a phone call. It was an associate producer for the Nate Berkus Show. She'd read my story in the magazine and she wanted to talk more about my life and see if she couldn't include my story as a possible pitch for a future Nate Berkus Show.

I freaked out. I don't have cable, so I'd never seen his show, but I knew him and liked him from his time on Oprah. I also knew his was the kind of show where participants sometimes end up getting free stuff and/or home renovations. People, let me tell you that my tiny house is too darn small for all these people we have stuffed inside it, and our kitchen and bathrooms have never been changed since the house was built in 1975. I have harvest gold toilets. Our kitchen is a postage stamp and we REGULARLY have 5 people in it at once. There may or may not have been some uncomfortable brushing-ups. So when I got to thinking about being featured on the Nate Berkus Show, and the possibility of him helping redo my basement or oh-god-please-my-kitchen, I started to consider that possibly I would kinda maybe want to do that. Now I'm pretty sure television ruins marriages. That's clear by now, isn't it? I have no desire for fame, and the kind of fame reality television shows bring seems to be of the destructive-only variety.

But who can pass up a possible free kitchen!!?!? Not me, I tell you.

So I talked, I answered questions, I tried to really push the one-big-happy-family-in-a-too-small-house theme, and oh, did I mention how tiny our kitchen is? The producer was really nice, and we chatted a bit. I carted out all my witty banter and funny stories. Then later I told my whole family about it and we instantly became huge Nate Berkus fans.

Unfortunately, I never did hear anything back. But then, weeks later, I got another phone call, this time from a producer at the Rachey Ray Show.

I never called that one back though. Rachel Ray doesn't renovate basements as far as I know, nor does she give away kitchen appliances. And I already have some time in my life where I sit in someone's house and overtake the conversation by going on and on about how differently my life turned out from how I was expecting and no one gives me a new refrigerator at the end of it - that's my monthly bookclub meeting.