Planning: Journeys

Dec 2012

This morning we have the last of our 2012 intern Reclaiming Wife posts, this time from Elisabeth (who converted to Islam and then planned what may have been the world’s longest long-distance wedding ever). I’ve found Elisabeth’s posts this year to be particularly interesting because of the ways she’s had to grapple with her feminist identity in a mostly traditional marriage (traditional, of course, depending on who you ask). And today she’s back, talking about gender roles, choice feminism, and the division of household labor. It’s a perfect complement to the first post she wrote for us, and an excellent musing on the ways that institutional sexism can force us into boxes we’re not comfortable living in.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

I am writing this on the airplane that is taking me to Pakistan for the last of my multiple wedding-related parties and my first visit to my husband’s country of origin. Our immigration issues are finally over (for the time being), and as soon as we leave Pakistan, we are headed on our honeymoon. After that, I think I may finally feel like I am married and like my marriage is really, honest-to-god, starting. Yesterday we calculated that our five-month anniversary will also happily mark the moment since the wedding when we have spent more time together than apart, and we’re already looking forward to that.

But none of that is what I want to write about. Last week we went to apply for my Pakistan visa, my husband and I, and when they asked me my occupation I said both “unemployed” (accurate) and “writer” (slightly more aspirational but also accurate). What got written down was “housewife.” It was the first time I had ever been described that way by myself or anyone else.

I was viscerally uncomfortable with the description. I am still uncomfortable reporting it to you now.

I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out what it is exactly that makes me so unhappy about the label because, you see, I was raised by a housewife. My mother dedicated all of her time and energy to me and my sisters, and I would (and have often been) the first to say that we benefited enormously from her decision. So I don’t think I’m troubled by the idea of me, or anyone else, making the decision not to work outside the home.

On the other hand, it has been clear to me for a while that my mother is not entirely comfortable with her decision to stay home. Now that my sisters and I are grown up and out of the house, she sometimes feels unneeded and at loose ends, and I think occasionally she regrets not pursuing a career more seriously. For that reason, I’m very ambivalent about the idea of staying home myself, and I think ultimately the decision will be dependent upon where Amin and I are in our careers and how we feel at the time we have to make the decision.

And again, I guess we tend to refer to my mother more as a stay-at-home mom than a housewife—has the latter term gone out of style? Is that why I don’t like it? Is it the implication that a housewife is cooking and cleaning and keeping the house to serve her husband that annoys me? Well, I have been cooking and cleaning (and unpacking and knitting) for my husband—isn’t that what a team does, when one of them is stuck at home by choice or circumstances? Continue reading Elisabeth: Occupation, Housewife

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Reclaiming Wife | 88 Comments »

Dec 2012

Zen: Go Big and Go Home

Well guys, it’s here. It’s the second week of December. I’m not sure when that happened, or how it happened so quickly, but it feels like the year flew by (I know, everyone says that every year, but 2012 went like it had rocket boosters attached to its back). Next week is going to be a shortened week at APW as the staff takes some time off to spend the holidays with family (cross your fingers for me. Michael and I will be on a redeye when Armageddon happens) so this week we’re going to take some time to explore endings and beginnings (and we promise not to use the word “resolution” if you don’t).

To kick things off we have the second of our year-end intern Reclaiming Wife posts, this time from Zen (who, by the way, also writes a personal blog over here if you’d like to continue following her writing). What Zen has to say about life after a wedding is so much of how I felt after Michael and I got married, but couldn’t articulate at the time. We’ve spent a decent amount of time on APW talking about how nothing changes or lots of things change after you get married, but what Zen articulates so well is that often it’s a little of both. Sometimes thing are exactly as they were, but still a shift is felt.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

I’d kind of thought things would calm down after the wedding. No more last-minute guest list upheavals. No need to worry about hauling things, and people, around. (You might think a wedding is all lace and flowers and smooches and cupcakes, but actually it’s mostly hauling. I would say at least 85%.) No more planning!

I hadn’t pictured what married life was going to be like in too much detail, but I figured it would be pretty much the same as life had been before I got engaged. Quieter. I figured I’d have more time to focus on my stories and try new recipes and meet up with my friends.

Except now I have a to-do list as long as my arm, at least as long as the list I had before the weddings: give notice of marriage at the Malaysian High Commission, consider impact of marriage on visa status, amend workplace benefits so Cephas can benefit from them, figure out what to do about finances…

And what I hadn’t quite clocked was that marriage is a start, not just in the sense that it is the “beginning of the rest of your life” (a phrase that has always puzzled me: surely every day is the beginning of the rest of your life), but in that it’s a jolt to the system. Things are different now—outside me, but also inside me.

The first week I was back at work after the wedding, an email went round my office seeking to gauge interest in an opportunity to work abroad for an undefined period of time.

Me! I wanted to go! It was the kind of work I was interested in, in a geographical region I passionately want to return to, and I was at about the level of seniority (well, juniority) they were looking for. Pre-wedding me would’ve drafted the email and only held off on hitting “send” to check that Cephas didn’t mind too much. (Probably by text: “Hey, gonna sign up for international secondment, k? See you on Sat!”) Continue reading Zen: Go Big and Go Home

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Reclaiming Wife | 17 Comments »

Dec 2012

Madeline: The End Is Just The Beginning

Me [via gchat, on writing my last APW post]: eek argh blegh, I’m stuck!

Brandon: You aren’t stuck for short meaningless guttural words

Here’s why this was hard for me to write. As you might expect from someone who’s just spent a year writing for APW (*sniff* can’t believe it’s December), my wedding to Brandon was more than one event, and not just because we staged it several times. Getting married was the two of us setting our sights on a place we wanted to be, then holding hands, closing our eyes, and jumping. The posts I’ve written along the way let me share the terrifying, exhilarating part from when our feet left the floor to the landing. I couldn’t be more grateful for the support, the solidarity, and the Exactlys I’d had from the APW community. But back on the ground again, I’m learning that it’s time to identify the next place I want to be, close my eyes and jump into the unknown once again. It helps—it really helps—to have a husband on my side for this. But it’s not a magic fix. It’s still down to me.

Back to the guttural noises. I promised myself I’d use this final post to check in on a couple of projects I mentioned in my bio, i.e. my first novel and the various Etsy stores that I would one day launch. That was the first step. The second, petrifying step comes now, when, without adding ironic air quotes around any of the words, I tell you that I took my manuscript to a writing conference, and an editor has asked to see it; and that I have recently launched my Etsy store, Modern Mala, selling beaded accessories inspired by Tibetan prayer malas. Did you see what I did there? I went from “manuscript” to manuscript, from “business owner” to business owner. It wasn’t so bad. Continue reading Madeline: The End Is Just The Beginning

Posted in: Planning: Journeys | 11 Comments »

Nov 2012

Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

I know we said a few weeks ago that Elisabeth’s Wedding Grad post would be our last intern grad post for the year, but, well, we lied. Because this week Zen surprised us with a second grad post—this time on her and Cephas’ Malaysian wedding. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. Because secretly, this was the post I’ve been waiting for. (I don’t know about you, but all of Zen’s posts chronicling the mayhem of planning her Malaysian wedding have left me in stitches.) We talk about this a lot here on APW, but Zen’s post reminded me that no two weddings—not even for the same couple—are ever the same. And in the end, this is a very good thing. Because it means that there is no right way to have your wedding, no magical formula to making it the best day ever. So today, as you read Zen’s post, take solace in the fact that the path you’ve chosen is going to be the right one, if only because it’s the one you chose.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

The pictures we got from our Malaysian wedding are kind of a mess. They’re not carefully composed. The lighting is all over the place. Some of them are blurry. They’re of people moving, milling, talking, eating, drinking, yelling, dancing, running around trying to restrain their tiny offspring. The pictures are like those old Chinese and Indian scroll paintings where everything is happening at once and you don’t know where to look. There is no one focal point.

The way they look is how the wedding felt: chaotic, leisurely, expansive, and warm. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the Western wedding was about us as a couple and the Asian wedding was about our—well, mostly my—family, but that’s what it felt like. The Malaysian wedding wasn’t terribly romantic—it didn’t particularly feel like a celebration of us and our deathless love. But it felt like coming home. The English wedding had been marvellously, sweetly out of the ordinary course of things; our brief honeymoon in Italy had sustained that sense of being taken out of our everyday lives. The Malaysian wedding was something else.

Cephas, of course, will have felt differently—but for me, getting married at home was what I needed to take me back to reality. It made our marriage real, because it embedded it in the context of my—now our—family.

If the English wedding was a process of focusing in, of centering us and placing us before the altar and enclosing us in a promise between the two of us, the Malaysian wedding was about us stepping out of the focus, pulling back, and seeing where we stood in the pattern made by our family.

So I don’t remember tender moments between me and Cephas at the Malaysian wedding. I remember everyone else. There was my four-year-old cousin who, as the only boy child present, was taken by hand by his father to the bridal suite, promised the rare delight of getting to jump on the bed. (You will recall that this is arranged so that the married couple will have many sons.) He went along cheerfully until he realised that he was being followed by about twenty uncles and aunties wielding cameras, when he baulked.

“Come, boy, don’t you want to jump on the bed?” coaxed his dad.

“Don’t want this bed,” said my cousin, trying to make a speedy exit from the bridal suite. “Want another bed!”

Whereupon my aunt picked him up bodily and dropped him on the bed—but not before another four-year-old cousin, a little girl not remotely afraid of the limelight, had hurled herself onto the bed and starting bouncing, screeching with delight.

There was my mom, who plunged into wedding planning with typical intensity, standing over my aunts with a whip while they made a million fabric loofahs to decorate our house with. She also developed a psychosomatic cough from the stress, and went around rasping about floral arrangements. “Oh Mom, I feel so bad that you’re stressed because of the wedding,” I ventured. “No!” said my mom, coughing. “I’m really happy! I’m coughing because I’m so happy!” Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning: Journeys, Tradition, Wedding Graduates | 12 Comments »

Nov 2012

Wedding Graduates: Elisabeth & Amin

Each week, as we’ve run our 2012 planning interns’ grad posts (you can read Zen and Madeline’s here and here, respectively), I’ve been eager to see how the weddings themselves turned out. Not so much the visual stuff (though to be clear, I was dying to see Elisabeth’s final choice of wedding outfit), but to see how the big emotional decisions played out. Because in wedding land, we often hear about the complicated decisions made during the wedding planning process (particularly when you’re planning a super long-distance intercultural wedding after having converted to Islam), and rarely hear whether or not those complicated things actually ended up being… important. Which is why I love that Elisabeth’s post explores it all—the unexpected highs and lows, and, perhaps most importantly, the things that were neither high nor low but still contributed to making the day uniquely theirs.

I should tell you now, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month looking at my wedding photos. Not just because I look good (though I do look good), but because, as Zen pointed out in her grad post , they remind me of how good I felt. And man, did I feel good.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my wedding was the culmination of a weeklong marathon of family togetherness and intense partying. It included, among other things, the civil ceremony, which was my only opportunity to say western-style vows; a henna party where some of the ladies got together to gossip and get our hands painted by an insanely patient and talented henna artist; and a rehearsal dinner where my family had a chance to meet Amin’s extended family for the first time. It was a lot of fun—not only was it amazing finally getting to know Amin’s family, but it’s a rare week where my immediate family is together in the same place. To give you a taste, let me just say that the day after the wedding, my youngest sister flew to Iraq, my middle sister flew to DC, and my mom and dad flew to Philadelphia and Saudi Arabia, respectively. Loud family sing-alongs to “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” will long be one of my favorite wedding memories.

Amin and I had vacillated a lot on whether to have a big wedding or a really really small one. There wasn’t really a good in-between option for us, because his aunts/uncles/cousins number in the hundreds already, so either we left everybody out except immediate family, or we had a couple hundred people. We decided to have a big one for a couple of reasons, but surely one of the major reasons was my insistence that this would be one of my few opportunities to get all of our favorite people together in one place.

We had mixed results. We definitely succeeded in getting many (though not most—who knew flying to London during the Olympics would be expensive?) of our favorite people together, and since we did a rehearsal dinner, and a henna party, and a few other things in the week leading up, Amin and I actually got to spend a bit of time with them (though sometimes not together). But on the wedding day, we didn’t get a chance to speak to anyone more than superficially. Heck, we didn’t get a chance to eat. (I am actually gratified by this, because Amin had long been convinced he was going to get to sit down and have a nice long relaxed meal, and I had repeatedly told him that was a ridiculous fantasy and that we would spend the whole night walking around chatting with our guests. I do love to be right!) Our cheeks were sore from smiling by about the third minute in (you can kind of tell from the panicky look in our eyes in some of the pictures), and by the time we got in the car at the end of the night we were both so happy to finally be alone, and not to have to smile any more. Our caterers had packed us little boxes of leftovers to take to the hotel room (I cannot recommend this highly enough. Do this!) so we sat and had our real dinner together long after the party had ended and we had deconstructed my enormous hairdo, while in the background the Thames was lit up by fireworks in honor of the Paralympics Closing Ceremony. For me, this remains one of my most cherished memories of the night.

The reception, then, is something of a blur of smiling and hugging and shaking hands and taking pictures, but I expected that. I always prefer little groups to big ones, and my wedding was no different. When I think back, though, I am still suffused with joy, and I think what made it such an awesome day was less the grand sweep of the party, etc., and more the little snippets of memory and remembered emotion that still stick with me two months later, and I imagine will stick with me forever. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Elisabeth & Amin

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Wedding Graduates | 24 Comments »

Nov 2012

Wedding Graduates: Madeline & Brandon

One of the great pleasures of taking over for Meg while she’s on maternity leave is that I get to work a little bit closer with our writing interns in her absence. And as the internship draws to a close, I’m finding myself surprised at how much their grad posts resonate with me (you’d think three years after my own wedding that they’d stop, um, making me cry). I know we say it all the time, but wedding planning really is about marriage, and fewer posts highlight why better than Madeline’s grad post. Which makes sense, because after planning multiple transatlantic celebrations all while dealing with immigration and health issues, she and Brandon aren’t just graduates of the program. They are, as she describes, much like seasoned veterans instead. Now, if you haven’t armed yourself with a tissue, please don’t say I didn’t warn you, mkay?

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

Although this is a wedding grad post, it’s hard to know where to start, looking back at the various wedding-themed events I’ve been a part of this year. In case you haven’t been reading along, I’m not a wedding grad at this point, more a wedding veteran. Brandon and I are just a couple of months from the first anniversary of our City Hall elopement. We’ve celebrated in the UK, where I’m from, in New York, where we live, and in Ohio, where Brandon’s from.

So what’s changed? Brandon and I were living together in the same apartment this time last year. I sat on the same couch, typing out my application to write for APW. There are more rings on my fingers and more laughlines round my eyes. But what else? What is the real difference between almost-married and actual-married?

A top wedding gift: The cookie mustache.

It’s easier to assess if I step back and look at other transformations. This time last year I was facing surgery and extended medical leave. I didn’t have a green card, or the funds to apply for one. Brandon was facing unemployment. In some ways, the fact that we’ve hung onto our living arrangements is far from stasis—it’s an achievement in itself. For practical reasons, we needed to get married to deal with these challenges. But the wedding celebrations, and the support of family and community, also provided a container for us to grow into older, braver versions of ourselves.

Then there are the honest-to-goodness gains. We expanded our families. I get moments of true joy every time a close friend sends a personal note to Brandon, making an effort to extend our friendship of many years to include him. And somehow I married a man who swears that he likes doing laundry. Do you hear me, APW? I may never do laundry again. I have won the marital lottery.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Madeline & Brandon

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Wedding Graduates | 13 Comments »