The year that has intervened since I last posted has brought some momentous changes...my husband is now here, living in the United States with me.
I thought that the best way to re-launch this blog would be to post the piece that I wrote and submitted to the New York Times Modern Love column. They rejected it, but that's their loss...
The Moment of the Mundane
The last six months of my life have revolved around the ongoing series of small adjustments that newly married couples make as they begin to build a life together. It's a chain of mundane moments, negotiations over the banal bits and pieces tossed back and forth between two people who are just beginning to share space and time in a way that is anticipating such sharing for an indefinite but surely lengthy duration.
Yet my husband and I feel profound gratitude for the banal, the moments that committed couples experience every day but we had waited over three years, thousands of miles apart, to savor. I vividly remembered my friend, one of the few who had experienced a relationship trajectory remotely similar to mine, saying to me shortly before my husband arrived in the United States, "he will finally be here after all you've gone through and you will argue over things like putting stuff in the dishwasher and you'll cherish it."
On August 5, 2011, my husband walked through the door into the arrivals area at JFK as a new Permanent Resident of the United States. His passport was stamped with CR1, the indelible mark that gave him the right to pass, again and again. The right to stay with me. Here. I had envisioned this moment so many times, like a scene in a movie, soundtrack strings swelling, us running to each other across the crowded arrivals lounge, but these realities are never as melodramatic as we imagine. We met each other at the airport, as we had so many times in the course of our inter-continental relationship, held each other, took each other’s hand and kept walking, naturally, as naturally as our bond had been from the start.
Not that I was unused to melodrama. Four years ago the script of my life took a dramatic turn that I had never anticipated and would never have been able to conjure up if I had summoned my most creative storytelling skills. I wrote a grant to travel to West and South Africa to collaborate with organizations using theater for social change, which included attending a theater festival in the country of Burkina Faso. I had known about the festival for many years, had looked it up repeatedly on the internet and thought about what it would be like to go to a continent that I had fantasized about in incomplete and essentialist terms and see what theater, at its most important, could do to change lives. And I could use my rusty French! Two months later I pulled a fat envelope from the funder out of my mailbox to realize that this fantasy had become absolutely real, and as I quickly dove into travel logistics, it became apparent that the West Africa leg of my trip would push me over budget. It was impractical to go but I had to, just had to.
At the same time, my future husband was in the same boat. He had been to the festival in previous years and the NGO he worked for in Niger, his country of origin, barely had the funds to send him. It hardly seemed worth it. But he went, he just had to.
After several cycles of adult relationships and the meta-cognition that comes with greater maturity, it becomes easy to settle into a view of intimate partnerships as a rational function of life. But then there’s the inexplicable that swoops in to remind us otherwise. We shook hands and sat next to each other at a theater performance, discussing its merits and shortcomings. We were both committed to other people, to women, to be precise. So as the layers of psychic padding, the constructs of my life and identity as I knew it that protected and held me, flew off at an alarming rate as I realized that this man and I had a deep connection that neither of us could explain, the melodrama actually calmed me. As an artist, I embrace the theatrical, so why not in this case?
Sometimes I try to remember when the inconceivable became the possible. Perhaps it wasn’t one moment, but a series strung together like delicate beads on that thread we held onto because we knew how precious it was. When I couldn’t stop writing to him, despite the chorus of voices both inside and outside of my head, from people who loved me, that said, in so many ways, that I was attempting the impossible. When I left my partner of almost eight years and bought a plane ticket to Niger. When I screamed and cried in frustration over the stress and expense of re-arranging his travel plans to the US after a visa mishap, when I reacted calmly and methodically when the situation happened again. When I endured the aching loneliness of not having the person I desperately loved near me, day in and day out, for months at a time. When I said goodbye to him in the public and impersonal space of the curbside check-in, departure lounge and security line, again and again. When I waited for him to untangle himself for the intricate and binding social web that is marriage in Niger. When I spent three months navigating the challenges and hardships of feeling my lifetime of privilege and comfort colliding with the reality of my husband’s country. When I finally came to a place of inner peace and acceptance with the prospect of parenting his children.
But somehow the thread was there from the beginning. I knew I had to continue, because there was no way that I wouldn’t. The alternative was, well, impossible.
I returned from my time in Niger in January 2010 with the certainty that we would get married, but without the certainty of where we would make our life. The first two years of our relationship somehow had led me to a place where I could hold the absurdity of this contradiction without any fear. The impossible had become the imminent, and from that concrete possibility would flow. And in April 2010, when my husband came to the United States to finally meet my family, he told me in the calm, deliberate way I love so much that he intended to immigrate to the United States and bring his children.
My husband loves Niger very deeply, and has spent his entire adult life working to make conditions better there for at least some of the millions for whom daily existence is crushingly hard. He had never intended to leave, but then again, as he said while reassuring me that he was comfortable with this life-changing decision, he had never planned to meet me.
Our first wedding took place in July 2010 in Niamey, Niger. This event was precipitated by a crisis of confidence on my part that almost derailed our entire plan. From the beginning, my relationship with my husband had been set against a backdrop of profound cultural differences. My adult life has been unconventional from the get-go, marked by being raised in an extended family that very much valued intellectual debate, pursuit of individual passions, and openly expressed affection. Layered upon this base is my fifteen years of living in the Bay Area as a queer feminist artist, a risk-taker, a free spirit. So as I began to realize that my wedding ceremony was going to challenge almost every single belief I held about individual choice, religion, and gender equity, I did what I know how to do best: retreat and rebel. It took much convincing on my husband's part that this highly ritualized spectacle was ultimately a means for his family and community to recognize us as a couple, after which we could create the marriage that we both wanted I had to hold even more tightly onto what I knew of us: two people who loved each other across so many barriers. And I had to close my eyes and take the leap.
And ultimately getting married, whatever package it comes in, is a profound and pretty surreal act. In my case, the surreal was heightened by the fact that it happened in West Africa, and subsequently by my return to the United States weeks later to wade into the waters of immigration and begin enduring the new torture of being separated from the person who I'd just married. This torture was exacerbated by the well-meaning but insistent questions about where my husband was and why he couldn't "just come live with me". My husband was left in Niger to explain, alone, why his new wife wasn't by his side, and furthermore, why he wouldn't marry a second one to fill the void given the legality of polygamy in his culture.
Immigration is a rabbit hole of a process, a series of scrambles for paperwork and i-dotting and t-crossing followed by long periods of silence waiting for a text message that will suddenly without warning appear from the government saying that, without ceremony, the next level has been attained.
And after a series of nexts and fits and starts, our second wedding took place in August 2011 at my family's house in Connecticut, a mix of the traditional and the non that fit perfectly with who I am and how I wanted to celebrate our re/union. My husband, being the adventurous person that he is, closed his eyes and took the leap.
Both my husband and I are project managers, and from the very beginning we viewed our relationship as a series of stages. When we accomplished one stage with its attendant benchmarks and outcomes we immediately mapped out the steps to accomplish the subsequent one. All we have experienced and strived for thus far has led us to the end of a major phase and the beginning of another which entails my husbands' adjustment to living in the United States and to devise a plan for bringing his children over to live with us. It goes without saying that this phase will throw new and enormous challenges our way.
But nonetheless, we continue to bask in the glory of the everyday and mundane.
