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Published in The Mom Egg; Lessons (Volume 8); 2010

We were married in the one thousandth, nine hundredth and eighty ninth year of the Christian calendar.  Even though we married before a Justice of the Peace without any regard for a white dress, I deemed our marriage a celestial miracle.  Our orbiting masses were pulled to fusion by divine magnetic force.  Our marriage would become an oversized billboard for the future’s multiculturalism.  His Pakistani, Muslim family however, privately doomed the union to cataclysmic combustion. Mine held their breaths while swearing support of my most grown-up decision.

It never occurred to his parents that he would marry a firenghi even though they had lived in this country since he was twelve.  He was such a good boy – combed, obedient, successful — and there had been no warning.  No girlfriends.  No drinking nor disrespect.  So they were shocked when their eldest son told them of his intentions.

“Please.  Don’t do it, Behta,” his Abbu cajoled affectionately.  “It will not work.  They do not have our ways.”  When logic failed, he sat numb at the fringes of female hysteria.

“Ayyy.  Ayyyyy.  What of my boy’s happiness?” his Amma wept inconsolably.

So spastic were her intakes of air and snot, that there was almost a primal quality to her distress.   “What will they say about us in the community?” she wailed.

But she knew.  How the aunties would commiserate and wag their heads.  Aiiii la laaaaa.  They tried soooo many times to introduce him to some girls – ve-ry bhew-ti-ful girls.   Fair and charming.  And from such good fam-i-lies.

Lingering, we lived at the edges of his family’s upheaval.  Having watched just a few of their Bollywood movies, I recognized our drama’s script: the tragic yearning of resisted lovers; a mother’s heartbreak, morphing into life-threatening ailments; the painful unraveling of a knitted family.  Yet, we had tampered with the familiar plot.  My Salams were those of an Amrikan and my Blackness felt twisted and swollen in a story line to which it didn’t belong.

“Why don’t you just stand up to them?” I challenged.  After all, it had been seven years.  “If you tell them what you are going to do, all this will stop.  They’ll accept us as a couple.  We’ll be happy.  I know it.”  I considered their outlandish cackle, their immigrant fears for their son and our dreams, mawkish masks for true devotion.

”Just give me more time.  It will destroy them if I go through with this right now.”

“But what about me?” I pleaded.

Now my parents love as parents should, I’d thought to myself.  In a synchronized dance that my mother and I knew by heart, she only questioned me, hoping my lead and her shadowy suggestions might prompt me to consider something more.  “What about the children?  And Christmas?”  Wary, she’d still smiled.

But my parents had modeled a strong, independent woman from their shared history and they were born of families and a people steeped in struggle. “It took your great, great grandfather,” they’d said, “mulatto son of a slave owner, to buck the law and bequeath land to his Negroid descendents.”  It had demanded my grandfather, a strapping, Baptist minister in segregated Mississippi, look down a rifle barrel on a bridge’s crest rather than back down to allow a white man to pass first.  And, it had taken both my parents to leave the suburbs and enroll themselves at Harvard, just to make a difference.  Family had sculpted me and they were proud of a job well done.

But perhaps it is difficult to calibrate devotion by the nature of our parents’ protests.  For who is to say whether acceptance or resistance defines the greater love?  Now a parent, I know how resolute is a mother’s love for the hollow, bony pocket behind a scraped knee.  And I know how crippling to a child’s flight, is a parent’s crush of love.

My husband and I would persevere, determined to marry.  Moral conviction and intellectual certitude propelled me to fight, although I understand now that I was but one of many masses hurtling through the stratosphere, and that our two celestial bodies colliding may have been more random than anything else.  My fervor intoxicated my husband with power he had never known. Yet twenty years into our marriage, I realize our battle was not about me.  Perhaps our mothers, in the pits of their stomachs, knew our most grown-up decision would commit us to a marriage of much harder work than most.  A marathon where I can only hope breathing deeply and pacing myself allows us to finish the course.