Complicated

Baby S Enters the Christmas Battle

2011-12-20T14:36:00.002-05:00

haha, I say that to add drama. There's never really been a Cbristmas battle, but there's always been this lingering fear that one might appear. To set the record straight, baby S is firmly in the "pro-Christmas" column. Oddly, M is pretty far in the pro-Christmas column too, but he is loathe to admit it.

There is a fair amount of debate about how much Christmas is okay between American Muslims, specifically the ones I talk to (lol), this time of year. I've heard the "It's not okay to celebrate any holidays that are not specifically Islamic" I've heard, "Is it okay to accept Christmas gifts from American friends?" My husband is totally okay with accepting gifts from his American family and baby S is right there with him. (He sometimes wonders if what he is doing is totally okay, but the receipt of his favorite colognes and clothing straight from me allays his fears. . . .)

S is very excited. This year she is two and a half years old and knows exactly what her job will be on Christmas morning. She walks around telling family members about how SHE bought them a Christmas present. She adores the lights and snowment and is enamored with the mall Santa Clauses. My parents took her to a work Christmas party and Santa arrived on a fire truck and distributed gifts. She now has a beloved "Pandy" named after a sub-character on "Kai-Lan". This only made her newfound love of Christmas stronger.

The battle I speak of, truly comes down to the Christmas tree. Baby S sees the one at my parents' house and wants to know, "Where's OUR Christmas tree Momma??" My husband, normally her fervent slave, continually manages to not bring it out of storage. Before baby S we alternated between having one and not having one, and this year it seems very important to him that we do not display one. I'm not sure if it is his attempt to make sure she realizes that our family is "different" or what exactly. I've actually asked, but he just shrugs it off and says he'll take it out soon.

This really is not a battle though, because I don't mind at all. I think it is great that the baby gets to celebrate her "American" "Christian" holidays and her Islamic ones as well. I'm happy that he does not mind letting her hang out with my family and celebrate the way that they love to celebrate. Frankly, I love seeing how excited she's getting for the holidays and how her eyes light up at the sight of the gifts and Christmas lights and everything that goes with the season. I'm especially proud each time she reminds me that we need to buy someone specific a gift or she clamors to help wrap one. Totally fun.

Language Barrier (or Jobs M will never do . . .)

2011-08-13T17:36:00.000-04:00

It was a very surreal experience to wake up in someone else's house. . . .in PAKISTAN. I could hear S playing somewhere, but there was no one else in the house where I had been sleeping. I had pulled up these velvety cushions on the floor and M's Aunty had given me a blanket to sleep with. I found my way out of the house and out of the room and found M and S pretty easily and the baby was obviously happy surrounded by all of these cousins.

In the house where we stayed there were two young cousins, both boys. S was 11 months old when we went and the boys were 4 and 8. S was getting tons of attention and everyone was doting on her. I still had a headache, but M armed me with a 1.5 Liter bottle of water, and that helped quite a bit. I found myself trying my best to smile, widely, at everyone. I am, to this day, unable to string coherent sentences together in Urdu, but could understand most of what was said in Urdu. The problem was that the people in M's family tend to switch to Hindko when in the company of family. And then, M has friends who speak Punjabi and/or Pashto. . . so I was lost quite a bit.

M's best friend was married to a quite educated woman (I later discovered this was the cousin involved in arranging M's first marriage. . .the one who wanted to marry a woman whose family would not consent unless M married the particular woman he did. . . ) It became evident over the course of the trip that this friend felt like he "owed" M something. He became our voluntary chauffeur, refusing to allow us to take a taxi or rent a car for any trip we took. He took days off work and took us to meet family, invited us to dinner in his home, took us on shopping tours and even enlisted the help of his wife in negotiating bangle prices for me (haha.)

I felt guilty for a lot of the trip for not knowing the language. M's sister also tried to speak to me in the English that she knew, and we got quite good at using hand signals.

I learned, on this trip, that M is a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE. . .I would say nearly worthless, translator.

Okay, back to the trip. . .

2011-08-11T02:48:00.001-04:00

Trying to gather all of our luggage together was absolutely nuts. There was a porter (or five to ten of them) jockeying to try and "help" us with our luggage. M was really wary of these guys, apparently having had a bad experience with them in the past. Everything went really fast once we managed to find our luggage.

I turned around and suddenly family members were everywhere and M's youngest brother had grabbed baby S. The next thing I know M's mother had her hands on my face and was hugging me and saying a lot of things in Hindko. She was a few inches taller than me and had a long, thin face. I was still looking frantically around to find the baby, but M's brother had gotten way ahead of us. All of this was exacerbated by the fact that I really had no idea who was who.

M's mother grabbed my hand and started walking quickly towards the exit. I was a little delirious at this point, probably from dehydration, so I just tried to smile as much as possible and follow along. It was hot when we left the building, but it was a dry heat, something I'm not really used. Having grown up in the southern portion of the United States, I've always lived in places known for humidity. . .so this was a bit different experience. M was smiling widely, and I must admit, from his hesitation before the trip, I was a bit surprised. There were two men besides M's brother and he didn't bother to introduce them. I was later told they were cousins.

M's family had gotten a tiny van to carry us from the airport, but it only fit our luggage and three people all squeezed together. Truth be told, no one bothered to tell me what was happening, but we were walking for a block or two to a parking lot to grab a taxi. M's mother was holding on to me most of the way and trying desperately to dote on baby S. Beyond my headache, this was encouraging.

The headache, my most major mistake for the trip, will be something I try to fix next trip. I've read since then that airplanes are some of the dryest climates we face (lol)and I did not pre-hydrate at all. Also, the stewardesses on the plane, while very polite, were too busy to deliver refreshments for the largest part of our 16 hour flight. Since there are restrictions on how much water you can bring through security (as in none) I'll be forced to make a large investment in bottled water from the stores in the airport after we pass through security.

As it was, I was so nauseous and dizzy by the time that we reached M's home, I ended up sleeping in one of M's uncle's houses, next door. He had an airconditioner in his sitting room and offered it up for me to nap. M and baby S socialized and I slept in the uncle's floor, for how long, I will never know, but when I woke up, M's brother had arrived with a delivery man to install our very own airconditioner in the room M, S and I would be staying!

Good Tidings of Great Joy

2011-05-01T20:53:00.003-04:00

Today, my father-in-law called. He does not call often, in fact, it only happens once every two, sometimes three years. It is never "good" news when he called. . .unless you can count today.

Today, he called to tell M that the youngest brother in the family is getting married. He is the last in the family to do so. M's youngest brother is "W." W met the lady on the train last month. He was on the way with my MIL to the nephew's wedding in Lahore. On the train he "fell in love." He and the family have decided he will get married next month.

We are not invited to the wedding. . . but we are. . . .

hmmmmmmmm, what is the right word? "Requested?" "Ordered?" Hmmmmm, not sure. . .

We don't need to come, but should send $2,000 to pay for the wedding.

Can anyone explain to me exactly how I'm supposed to react to that?

:/

Presuppositions

2011-03-10T11:48:00.006-05:00

My biggest fear on this trip was how the in-laws would behave. If you've read the beginning pages of the blog, you understand that my in-laws could never be considered "fans." I kept running scenarios through my head where I was separated from my husband for too long or where they were just plain mean.

I convinced myself that this was the absolute best trip we could have ever planned. The baby was eleven months old (and terribly, terribly cute.) I figured there was no way they wouldn't like her, and thus she would turn all of the negative energy they had for me, into positive energy for her. Since it was my first intercontinental trip, we were to visit for only ten days. This was another thing that worried me, since M's last trip (scheduled for two weeks) lasted nearly five months. M did not tell them how long we were staying, and this scared me. I had this nightmare that they would push M into staying longer or refuse to take us back to the airport causing me to miss work and/or lose my job.

What actually happened was amazing. When we arrived, Karachi International Airport was not nearly the huge, busy airport I had imagined. M had told me stories of the separate lines for returning citizens and for foreign citizens, and those lines were nothing like what he had described. The officers spoke a funny kind of English asking jumbled up questions that they expected me to understand. M finally tried to just talk to them in Urdu and they resisted, jumbling up more English phrases. One example, "What is your good name?" It literally took me four repetitions to understand what he was saying. I mean, when was the last time someone asked you for your good name? I had also been up for hours and must have looked like I had been run over by a train.

I had changed into salwar kameez on the layover in Dubai and felt very, very out of place in my sandals. It did not matter that everyone else was wearing salwar kameez, I felt like an elephant in my bright, new shiny outfit as compared to the normal everyday wear around me. This is always exacerbated by the fact that my husband insists on wearing western slacks and outfits, EVERYWHERE, our home, our wedding, PAKISTAN.

Each officer was dressed in green uniform that resembled the Pakistani army uniforms I had seen on television. The biggest surprise was that one of the customs agents was a hijab wearing woman. When we got to the desk, in my muddled Urdu understanding, I could tell that the male customs agent next to us, while interviewing someone re-entering Pakistan, was on his cell phone, trying to finagle a visitor's visa to the United States.

The Trip

2011-03-09T09:18:00.001-05:00

It's been almost a year now since I first traveled to Pakistan. By nature, I am a planner, but I am also a procrastinator. And I can tell you two things I've learned about my husband in the last eight years: He does not pack for trips, he does not plan ahead.

The night before our trip I was packing until 2:00 in the morning. I then got up at 6:30 am to go to work. I left work early that day because I had an open block in the afternoon and had to pack the car. We had decided that for a very cheap fare, we would fly from New York city, and so, we rented a van to carry the absolutely crazy-huge suitcases into which we had packed gifts and food for the baby. Keep in mind that baby S was eleven months old at this time and was kind of particular about the type of food she ate. There was this irrational fear I had that we would not be able to find anything in Karachi to buy that she would eat. Sooooo, we packed baby food jars and bottled water and extra bottles.

I told you I am a planner. It was my plan to take thos disposable bottles that Playtex makes with drop-in liners so that we would not be trying to boil bottles at all hours of the night. (Even my in-laws balk at the idea of washing a baby's bottle in regular tap water in Karachi.) In my frenzy to pack everything, I packed the bottles, and did not pack the liners. Out the window went my great plans. I ended up in Karachi with one, yes ONE, Avent bottle. It took four days to find a store to buy another bottle to save me some washings.

We drove to New York and arrived at our hotel at 1:30 in the morning. We had to be up the next morning at 6:00 am to make our flight. Our flight was to go through Dubai, UAE and the first leg was to be a 13 hour flight. We would have a layover in Dubai for three hours and then take a 2 hour flight to Karachi.

By the time our flight began, having slept less than seven hours in two days, I was exhausted. S slept quite a bit on the plane, when she was in the bassinett provided on the plane, but someone was supposed to monitor her at all times and when she was on my lap, in an airplane seat, there was no sleep. I had this nutty stewardess too who kept making me take her out of the bassinett and buckle her into my seat with me. By the time we stopped in Dubai, my headache had begun, and we weren't even there yet!

A Teacher's Rant

2011-03-06T19:53:00.007-05:00

People choose to become teachers for a lot of different reasons. From the time that I was a small child, I wanted to be a teacher. It started in the first grade when my teacher read us "Charlotte's Web." It was the first "chapter book" I had ever heard and it was magic to me when it became the first book of that length I ever read on my own. The sense of pride I felt at being able to open that world for myself, the gratitude at being taught to read, I wanted to give that to other people. I tutored all throughout my elementary and middle school years.

By the time I got to high school I had changed my mind about being a teacher a few times. My family became involved in emergency medical services, everyone was a Paramedic and I wandered into that world and dedicating my time to medical careers. I never stopped teaching, but spent my time teaching CPR classes and precepting (training) other EMT's.

I spent a lot of my time during school, evaluating and re-planning lessons that I saw. I thought a lot about how I would have done something differently or how much "fun" teaching a certain lesson might be.

I have never met anyone who became a teacher for the money, and anyone who says they did it because teachers have "summers off" was joking.

Politicians and more prevelantly, "journalists" have been balking at the "high salary" and "outrageous" benefits given to public school teachers for such an "easy" job. They further complain about teachers having the summer off and leaving work "at 2:30."

I would like to go on record as saying that I'm not sure which teachers these guys are talking to, but I, for one, do not leave work at 2:30 and have a lot more responsibilities than this gentleman seems to think. They quote the average salary as $51,000 and benefits packages at $27,000. Those numbers must be inflated, because I am nowhere in the ballpark of those figures after five years of teaching. That is all I will say.

I do have a few challenges for these "journalists." I would really like them to go and teach journalism classes (six per term) in a normal public school. I would like for them to forego their journalist salary, and take on the teacher salary they would earn for their respective degrees (Glen Beck you don't qualify, because I hear you didn't attend. . . .) I want them to have "normal" class sizes, be responsible for all parent contacts that a normal teacher would have, the grading practices of a normal teacher, the meeting ratio and continuing education requirements of a normal teacher.

I would like for them to have the same reporting requirements, and the same peer observation requirements. The only difference is that I would like for there to be a REAL journalism teacher present in an observational capacity, so that someone will be there when the journalist runs screaming out of a room of thirty-three 15-18 year olds.

I really try my best not to talk about topics that I am not knowledgeable about. I really feel personally attacked each time one of these journalists balks at teachers wanting class size limits or when they say how lazy teachers are. I take very personally the attacks on teachers.

*I apologize for this post and promise to get back to the Pakistan trip soon.*

The Eye Roll--or--Still not Quite Accepted

2011-01-07T22:27:00.002-05:00

If you've read past the first page of archived posts, you know that I have a very personal and deep interest in intercultural marriages and the effects on both sides of the family. For some reason, this last few days I've been reading up on other blogs talking about the difficulties people have faced in intercultural, interreligious marriages and it reminded me of my first trip to Pakistan.

Yes folks, I went to Pakistan. M was pretty against it for a long time. He actually tried to talk me out of it. I just kept looking for tickets. It was really important to me to see his city, to know where he was born and where he grew up. All this time of not having experienced Karachi made me feel like there was a part of M that I did not know. . . like there was a bit of a puzzle missing and I am a real type-A personality. I must complete the puzzle.

M still laughs now, months later about my determination to visit Karachi. He and I were watching the notorious "Not Without my Daughter" opening scenes where the husband begs his wife to go to Iran with him. She fights back insisting that it is not safe and he tries to convince her over and over of his ability to protect her. M just looked at me with feigned astonishment at this scene, "What in the world did I marry?" he said. "He's standing there begging her to go, and I was begging you not to. . ."

Anyway, this leads me to what M considers an American cultural phenomenon, eye rolling. He is certain that he has never seen a Pakistani woman roll her eyes at anyone. It would be too disrespectful, he asserts. . . .it would never happen.

I let him argue this way for several weeks before I finally said, "I've met your mother, and she is a really good eye roller." At his insistence, I gave him an example.

We went to Pakistan in April. Our trip ended on our wedding anniversary. His family, thinking I could not understand their Urdu, told his mother, "Ammi, this week they've been married for four years! This is their anniversary." Her response, a large eye roll, tilted head and pulling tighter her duppatta. At the time, I overlooked it, but now it is one of my strongest memories of the trip.

Karachi really is a beautiful place, by the way :-) I will have to write more about it soon!

Pakistani Holidays

2010-12-29T19:46:00.004-05:00

Every marriage is interesting when you try to mix traditions, but when you try to mix staunchly American and Pakistani traditions, when mixed with Christian and Muslim traditions, it is more than interesting, maybe better described as mind boggling.

I really thought that after all my husband and I had been through together we knew each other well, but it occurs to me, that you cannot know anyone completely, EVER.

One of my best friends is married to a German man, they are both fairly agnostic and knew each other for about eight years before deciding to get married. We had a conversation recently about how many things she has now discovered, five years into the marriage, after having two children, that she would have never expected.

I feel the same way she does. M and I have been married for almost five years now. We have baby S. We've celebrated Eids together and Christmases together. We've put up a Christmas tree, after a HUGE disagreement, I've bought Eid gifts and helped him pick out new clothes for the baby--part of the tradition. I've learned about the Eidee tradition (and taken full advantage of it!) and I've tried my best to be respectful and helpful. This year, my husband volunteered "his wife" to make food for the entire mosque for the breaking of the fast during Ramadan one night. Since they wanted fried chicken, he figured it should be right up my alley.

Forget the fact that they also wanted vegetable pullao, which until that day I had never made, and that we were to feed at least 100 people. One-hundred people! Thank God for my mother, we pulled off the chicken and I extorted a rice maker from my husband for the pullao!

This brings me to Christmas, largely ignored by my husband. This, normally, wouldn't be a problem but this year my parents had to celebrate with us on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas day and this confused my husband. This year is particularly important to my parents because baby S is finally old enough to open their presents and ooh and ahh over them. But my husband, suddenly felt that tradition was being broken by not celebrating on Christmas starting a conversation about whether or not he supports my traditions in the same way that I celebrate his. Cue his *remembering* Iftari dinner and my mother's contributions and how it came to be that I received $200 in twenty dollar bills as my Christmas present. . . .

I think there might still be a culture gap.

Chopping Tomatoes

2010-12-24T23:13:00.006-05:00

When I first met my husband I had never chopped a tomato. I was that girl in college who ordered fried chicken wings when everyone else ordered normal Chinese from the takeout menu. In fact, this was what a good friend of mine from college pointed out to me the first time she learned that I was cooking Pakistani food. It was my first tastes of chicken curry that convinced me I had to learn to cook Pakistani food, not to mention that I thought it might be a little unfair for me to expect my husband to convert to American cuisine only.

The first dish I tried to make was chicken curry, but if I had only worked on that dish until I perfected it, we both would have starved. I kept getting chicken curry wrong! I would cook it in Canada and everything would seem fine and then, back home, I'd invite my best friend over to try it and cook it all wrong. Eventually, my husband and I all but gave up on it and I learned to cook byriani by watching Z's wife cook it once. It was really great! Even though she does not speak much English, she talked as much as she could and was very tolerant of my note-taking. That dish was so easy that I've done it just right since that day and it really built up my confidence. Since then, I've gotten really good at Kadhi Pakora, all types of byriani, beef and chicken, bindhi and daal curries.

Finally, in year number seven, I've made a chicken curry that I consistently adore. It took me seven years of ShowMeTheCurry.com and youtube cooking gurus with trial and error to finally get proficient enough to even ask coherent questions of others who are better cooks! Gori Wife, you've no idea how much I envy you!

Forced out of Silence

2010-11-29T21:28:00.003-05:00

When I first decided that I wanted to marry a Pakistani, a lot of things went through my mind.

What if his parents don't like me?

What if I cannot understand the religion?

What if I can never learn the language?

How can I learn the language?

What if we don't have the same ideas about kids?

What if, what if, what if?

So, to figure out the answer to my questions, true to form, I Googled it. In my Google search I used lots of search terms, but "learn Urdu" or "Study Urdu" became frequent. As you can imagine, there are not a lot of places online that you can learn about Urdu for free. . . . .you can't even get Rosetta Stone for that language! I felt dejected, so I started typing in goofy stuff like, finally, "Urdu for Gories." "Gori" is the word that I found out my husband's family used to describe me. It means, basically the equivalent of "white girl," so I was typing, "Urdu for whities."

Anyway, up popped the Sometimes Sobia forums. Most of you are probably very familiar with Mrs. Sobia, but someone many years from now who stumbles on this blog looking for support with their own Pakistani may know nothing about her. Why? The forums are now closing.

It's a really sad day for me because I kind of credit the support I got there for keeping me from going completely nuts. By the time I found the forum my husband and I were neck deep in the most horrible parts of our long, sad story. By reading about Sobia and her husband, and their successful, Pakistani/American marriage. . .and even by reading about the not-so-successful Pakistani/American ventures . . .I was not alone. I knew that there were other people just as crazy and weird as my husband and I (or at least close to it.)

I was kept from total insanity by a pink floral print website. I was able to share pictures, and see pictures of families I will likely never meet in person. In real life, I've only met one family with a Desi husband and a white wife, and when that woman saw me across the crowded Verizon Wireless store, she shouted aloud. We never spoke, so I guess it doesn't count. Without "Sometimes Sobia" I would not know anyone, much less 10 people, who are the same as me. Now, that is not to say that everyone there is there for the reason I was there. In fact, I met people of all different nationalities married to people of the same background or completely different background, another aspect of that forum I will forever miss.

I will miss knowing and talking to people literally all over the world, every single day.

Change and Overcome

2010-10-22T09:03:00.003-04:00

Living with your husband for the first time is always a strange experience. Okay, that sounds funny, but think about it, you've lived most of your life with your parents, then in my case, lived for ten years or so alone or with roommates. Living with your husband is something completely different. You share a lot more space than you share with a roommate.

M and I had been married in April, 2006 and arrived home July 1, 2008. We had definitely passed the honeymoon stage! I have decided that the "honeymoon stage" is essential to a good co-habitating experience, without it we were both just a little crazy. On top of that, after two years of marriage, I was in a baby craze. We had both wanted to have a family from the very beginning, but held off because of the living situation. "Baby crazy" is just a little bit too much pressure for a husband and wife truly starting out.

M loved the apartment. He was depressed at having left his best friend Z in Canada, and that added to my stress and frustration. I had expected, naively, for everything to be just perfect and for us to be splendidly happy all of the time. It was so unrealistic, and I know that now, but at the time it made me pretty miserable.

Happily, I found out in August that baby S was on her way and got to calm down about the baby craze which made things a lot better.

But remember? I said M hates change. . .

Leaving Canada

2010-09-13T18:53:00.004-04:00

The day the visa finally arrived, I was a crazy person. M was at work, but I opened the package anyway. I immediately started snapping pictures of the visa inside his passport with my cell phone camera. From Canada I started picture messaging the picture to my family and to M. I kept opening the passport page and running my fingers across the lettering just to make sure it was real.

I really could not help myself. I started trying to hurry M along to leave Montreal. I was so excited for us to go home! his apartment lease was very flexible since he'd lived there for many years, his original lease was up and we did not need to give any notice and it was coincidentally near the end June. I wanted to leave within two weeks. I rationalized it with "saving money" and that was what eventually convinced M to do things my way.

M is not one of those people who like change, even if it is change they've been waiting on for years. Remember, this is the same man who took MONTHS to leave a HORRIBLE situation in Pakistan because he couldn't make a firm decision. I was in Canada because the summer had come and I was off work, but I was so excited to finally show my husband our home. I had spent two years married to a man living in a different country from me. I was excited.

The furniture I had carted to his apartment in Montreal, we decided to "gift" to some of his bachelor friends. The curtains and pillows and all were left out in the garbage pile when we left and as we drove away we noticed families from his neighborhood sifting through it and even taking some "jewels" away. What is funny is that this is not something I would have expected to happen, but M had told me earlier it would. He had laughed when we saw it happening. He was actually excited that something he left behind would find a new home with someone else.

The Biggest Break

2010-09-11T23:30:00.005-04:00

It took two weeks to get a response from the consulate. It came in the form of a voicemail message that I received as I drove between the two schools where I taught Spanish. I nearly crashed my car into off the side of the road when I heard the man identify himself and leave a DIRECT number where to contact him with questions. In the message, he directly admitted the error in our case. When I called the number he left, he actually answered the phone. There was no routing message, no secretary, this number led directly to a consular officer. This NEVER happens and would in the end be the only way that our case was ever resolved.

At exactly the six month mark, my husband received confirmation in Montreal that his 212 waiver that I had filed in Buffalo was approved. Luckily, I was in Montreal when the notice arrived, because it did not DIRECTLY just say "approved." It was a long, confusing letter that listed all of the good/bad factors and just said, in the middle of the letter that he was now allowed to pursue his immigrant visa. I had to read it three times before I could tell we had been approved and then I began jumping up and down uncontrollably. It was the biggest rush I had felt in a very, very long time. I was able to get things rolling while there, setting up a new medical exam and prodding M to go and get updated police certificates. The letter was submitted to Montreal via fax and we waited. I emailed them and we waited, they emialed back that it could take 90 days for them to get the notice and to contact them again after that. They also stated we could turn in the updated documents and wait for them to recieve the letter directly from Buffalo USCIS.

Here is where the story gets frustrating (as if it were not already.) We waited 60 days and I started getting antsy. The emails they sent back to me kept saying that the form we were given was "not printed on the right form" to be an approval. Montreal refused to contact Buffalo and when my House Representative's immigration liaison contacted Buffalo, all Buffalo would do is send out a re-printed form, only this time with a date. After waiting this long, I started freaking out. One afternoon in June, the last day of school, I finally called my friend at the Consulate. We had spoken a few times in the between time and he had just told me to be patient. This time was different, I was freaking out. I was ready to cry. Mr. C answered the phone and I explained the whole story about the repeated emails from their consulate, the repeated emails from Buffalo, I was on the verge of crying.

Mr. C acknowledged that it sounded like I was "getting the run-around" but by this time he literally recognized the sound of my voice as soon as he answered the phone and had even stopped calling me by the respectful Mrs. M and started addressing me in an exasperated tone by my first name. He told me that he was going on vacation and was just cleaning things up that day. He decided he would contact the House Rep's liaison directly and at that point stopped talking to me.

Within two hours the House Rep's liaison called me sounding more excited than I had ever heard. She told me that Mr. C had called her and that things were moving. She thought that the visa was going to be issued and was faxing and emailing everything she had from the Buffalo USCIS office. I was too shell shocked to believe it, but I had that excited/nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach. The next day, I got another phone message from Mr. C, the visa would be issued before he would ever get back from his two week vacation, I am sure by his own threat of bodily violence to his staff if he ever had to hear my voice again.

In the end, here is how long our case took:

Married April, 2006
Filed App May, 2006
USCIS Approved Aug, 2006
Interview Feb, 2007
New Divorce Cert July, 2007
212 submitted Oct, 2007
AP Over Feb, 2008
212 Approved March, 2008
Updated forms April, 2008
Visa Issued June, 2008

Getting the 'Scoop'

2010-08-14T21:34:00.006-04:00

I figured out pretty quickly that the only way to get information from Islamabad or the Department of State or local offices of USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly INS. . .) is the dedicated help of elected officials. I enlisted the help of two, one of whom, sadly, has since retired. The retired official's immigration liaison was the most militant lady I think I've ever spoken to. By the time I spoke to her for the first time, I had discussed my case with several prominent attorneys and held my own. I had discussed very intricate sections of law and even introduced a few of them to some new aspects of processing. This lady made me shake in my boots. Everything she did was done in the most "word efficient" way possible. She wanted to know only the most important facts and she wanted to know them quickly. She made it clear that she was only going to help if you were, for lack of a better term, worthy. I felt that every second I was on the phone with her I had to make count.

Before contacting her, I had spent three months waiting on my worthless other Senator's (who unfortunately has not retired) liaison who accomplished less than nothing. I allowed him to work on the case for three months with no news and not a single call back to me. The expedient woman had my case number for three days and I had information back, VALUABLE information. For the USCIS aspect of the case, I had my House Representative's immigration liaison taking care of things. . . I think I just feared asking Ms. Expedient for too much. I was kind of afraid she might abandon me if I became too needy. Through much online research I found that Islamabad typically takes around six months to clear simple stuff and at exactly seven months after we submitted the divorce certificate, the case miraculously came out of administrative processing (aka, black hole of death.)

At that point, the consulate contacted me to tell me that they needed me to file two waivers, a 601 waiver, better known in immigration circles as the "Hardship Waiver" and the I-212, which I knew I had to file, for the expedited removal that I wrote about earlier. I had been preparing for this and immediately started drafting letters explaining why my husband did not need the 601 waiver. . .mostly because he had not broken a law that required the 601 waiver. I worked all day, and once home, was awake until 3:00 in the morning drafting and faxing the letter. It was two pages long, plus evidence, the fax ended up being about five pages. I sent it to the Immigrant Visa Specialist and the Consul General of Montreal. I also sent a hard copy. I then faxed a copy to both my Senator and my House representative to request that they write a letter in support of my letter and attached a copy of the fax I had sent. With all of this done, I settled in for ANOTHER wait.

Administrative Processing

2010-07-19T22:18:00.001-04:00

*Reader Note* While this post is not all that impressive, I just updated the dates because I started writing it on May 21. Life is a really, really busy place!

The second divorce certificate was submitted to the US Consulate in Montreal, July 2005. Immediately our case was put into "Administrative Processing" which is a scary thing when you're dealing with US Immigration and a Pakistani-born immigrant. The petitioner (me) has no way of knowing why the case is in AP or how long it will take. There are no guarantees and the Department of State uses "National Security" as an excuse to blow off any inquiries or questions one may ask.

By August, I was freaking out. It took me a long time to figure out what exactly what was going on with the case because the US Consulate and the Department of State do not like to just give you information on your case. . .they make you work for it. I tried one of my Senate Immigration liaisons and gave him two months to try to get a response. I would call him back every two weeks, he would promise to follow up and call me back and then would never call me back. After two months of that, I made an inquiry through then Republican Immigration liaison to Senator John Warner. This woman was intimidating as Hell, but she was the most efficient and effective representative EVER. Within seven days she had a response and more information than I could have ever hoped for along with LEVERAGE!

She slipped in telling me that the AP was for "Document Verification." They did not tell her what type of document they meant, but I already knew that information, and that meant that my AP was finite, because it was not security checks! There are no words for how excited that made me. It was leverage because the more you already know when you call the Department of State, the more information they will give you. All I had to do was call and say, "I know that the case is undergoing AP to verify the divorce certificate I submitted to Montreal on. . . .Could you tell me what stage it is in?" Or, "can you tell me the last day a note was made on the case?" or "Can you see if the case has been returned to Montreal yet?"

I was able to find out that the rest of the case stayed in Montreal, while only the divorce certificate was sent to the US Embassy in Islamabad. In September I had a moment where I was discussing the case with M and told him (only half joking) that they were checking up on him for me and that if he was still married to some woman in Pakistan they'd let me know . . .he took it waaaaay too seriously and got all offended.

I now found myself spending time trying to get information from Islamabad, but if you've ever done that you know how futile it is. I sent them an email and within 10 minutes had a reply. They had SO MANY cases undergoing Administrative Processing that they give you an automated response ANY TIME you email them saying that they will not respond to emails sent before your case has been in administrative processing for 180 days or more. You know what I discovered?

They don't respond after 180 days either.

Side Step

2010-05-03T14:10:00.005-04:00

For just a moment, I'd like to take a leap faaaar into the future. Today is baby S's first birthday and I've been having flashbacks to the day she was born for the last three days!

Having a baby, while a beautiful experience, is stressful in a lot of ways and when you have the huge differences in culture involved that M and I have, it can be made even more stressful. When I first told M that I was pregnant, he panicked. I am not talking about a little freak out, I am talking about major panic, household crisis.

M wanted children, yes. He knew that we were planning for children, yes. He just apparently did not realize that it could actually. . .happen. As time went on there were larger and smaller panic moments, for instance, the day we found out the baby was a girl and M silently disappeared for several hours only to return with 20 pounds of beef. Yes, I said BEEF. I still have no explanation for what happened there.

Over the course of the pregnancy, we discussed how things would go for the delivery. We knew that I would have to have a Cesarean ahead of time and I informed M that he would have to be in the delivery room. He balked and was nervous about it and many times told me that he would not do it, but I never took him seriously. The difference in birthing habits culturally is huge. I've heard friends from Pakistan talk about the mother spending the weeks leading up to and the weeks immediately after delivery with her parents and as M relates it, the man is DEFINITELY NOT expected to be in the room.

My Cesarean was scheduled for the morning of May 7, 2009 and M felt that he would be prepared. He still joked that he wasn't going in with me, but I knew that with the advance warning and preparation, he would be fine. Saturday, May 2 and Sunday, May 3would be my last chance to get the house prepared for the baby to come. I spent all day Saturday cleaning the house and cooking byriani and haleem and spaghetti. The haleem would be done Sunday morning, the byriani was done around 5:00 and M wanted to take some to his buddies at work, and a friend who was visiting. These visits usually last for hours so I just kept checking the haleem and doing laundry, and cleaning the house.

Here I was, days before my planned birth running up and down the stairs with big boxes of laundrey and three meals cooking in the kitchen. I was feeling SO well organized! So prepared! Just after M left I noticed some signs of labor. I pushed them aside as being to minor. . .called my parents who encouraged me to call my doctor. Talked on the phone with my bestest friend who begged me to call the doctor. She told her mother, who called and scolded me for NOT calling the doctor. So, under pressure, I paged my doctor directly, she did not answer. I paged again an hour later, she did not answer. I took it as a sign, but my father, did not. By this time, a normally very mobile, active baby was not moving at all and had not for hours. He demanded that I call the on-call physician who listened apparently, to the first part of what I said and told me that there was nothing wrong and that I should wait a few hours and call back.

I called M and told him about the ruckus (downplaying a little, not wanting to cause a panic) and he told me he'd be coming home soon and not to worry. An hour later, no M. I called the hospital again and the nurse said that the doctor had told her to tell me to come in and be evaluated if I called back. . .still no M. So I called him back, 10:30pm and told him we needed to go to the hospital. . .sounding annoyed, he told me he'd be on his way home soon. . .

At 11:30 when M was not yet home I called him and absolutely tore into him no longer downplaying or being calm. It was just before midnight when we got to the hospital. There was construction all around and the normal entrances (I am a Paramedic, you'd think I could figure out how to get into the hospital. ..) were all closed. The Labor and Delivery was closed at 8:00. . the emergency room entrance blockaded by cones and "Do not cross" tape. M was mad. Mostly he couldn't see past the fact that I had yelled at him on the phone and that though he'd been up since 5 am I was dragging him to the hospital to be "checked out" for something the doctore said was "nothing." Frustrated, I stomped back to the car and called my dad. I told him that the doors were all locked, we couldn't find an entrance and that I was taking this as a sign that God did not want me there tonight. By the way, I DROVE TO AND FROM the hospital.

We got all the way home while my father berrated me for leaving the hospital. He told me that I was acting crazy and that if I did not turn around and go back he was leaving work and driving the hour to my town to MAKE me go. THIS is what convinced M that I needed to go to the hospital. . . .and so we drove back. We went to the non-emergency entrance and found construction signs saying it was now the emergency entrance. We were registered (while my water was continuously breaking) and I was forced to sit and calmly sign all the paperwork--they even asked for my $500 copay. . .

In the room, the nurse did her tests as M dozed on the daddy couch. The nurse confirmed that my water had broken and told me that the surgery would be moved to the next morning around 7am. We discussed a few questions back and forth before M looked up, oblivious and asked, "So when are we going home?"

Running Away again

2010-04-23T21:48:00.004-04:00

Blooming Peaches had a very good question for the last post. The question was

so did the situation create a rift between you two or was it the two of you guys against the entire community?

did anything good happen when you moved in lol? you only talk about the frustrations... i am curious if you were happy with your decision at all

The truth is, I was pretty miserable living there even for a short time. The first few days we were together were great. I was always on a huge high when he picked me up from the airport, so excited and happy and relieved to be together again. The problem was, the reality of the pressure around us really got to M. He would get depressed because of the accusations and the looks he got every time he went to the mosque. For M, the mosque is a huge source of comfort. It is where he goes to feel better, he feels peaceful there and for the other people in the mosque to take that away, it was just too much for him.

In addition to this, the main language in his province was French, and I only speak English and Spanish and French is not one of the five languages M speaks. It was an all-around uncomfortable experience. M always said he considered me his ally, but sometimes when everyone around you is against your ally, your ally doesn't look all that great to you, see my point?

At any rate, after the egging experience and the fight that triggered it, I was sure I could not live in M's town and was certain that I was going home at the end of the summer. I immediately updated my resume and called my employer back. By the end of the first month I was there, my school system had scheduled me for school interviews. My old school even called me back to offer me my old job back, which I happily declined. I hated that job.

I started really pushing hard for M to get the required divorce certificate from his parents and by early July, after four and a half months they finally sent it and I was able to submit it to the US Consulate in Montreal. As soon as I sent it, they placed our case in Administrative Processing. This means they again had to verify the validity of the document and this time it would be sent to Islamabad Pakistan. In research I discovered that Administrative Processing could take as long as "they" wanted. Six months later, we still would not have an answer as to the validity of the certificate.

The Opposite of Over Easy. . .

2010-04-19T19:38:00.005-04:00

It's funny the things that I remember from those years. Memories get a little hazy over time, but some things I remember very clearly. The other day, I was washing dishes and flashing back to the day that M flew to Pakistan. I had that first immigration package all signed and copied and ready to go. I was so excited, that I carried it away from the airport with me knowing that as soon as I got into the US I would mail it.

I felt so independent staying in a hotel alone the night after I dropped him off. . . .I got up the next morning in this teeny tiny town determined to find a post office to mail it from. I had asked directions and smiled the whole time I walked around half-lost thinking that this one day of extra time was going to make things faster than waiting to mail it tomorrow when I got home. Even then I had this strange feeling that something was not right. . .but I had no idea what was in store for us.

******************************************************************************
I had no idea what I was getting into trying to "live" with hubby in his little apartment. Okay, my husband is Muslim (*gasp*) and I am not, at all. M's apartment was right across the street from the local mosque, not just the local mosque, the regional mosque, the biggest one in the province. It was a mostly Pakistani mosque with a large Egyptian and small Arab population. On Fridays and Sundays the streets were especially full, but it was pretty busy every day, all day. At any time you could find bearded and robed men seated on the front steps, often having heated discussions, about what I will never know, they were always in Arabic or one of a variety of South Asian dialects.

If you think the white girl gets stared at while travelling in Pakistan or Egypt or wherever, that is nothing compared to the white girl who suddenly appears with the Muslim who lives across the street from the mosque. Not just any Muslim who lives across the street from the mosque. . .the muslim who has attended this moque for more than eight years and knows EVERYONE, but refuses to talk about . . . the white girl.

Because the mosque had refused to perform our marriage, they somehow got the impression that we just didn't get married, and this made things all the worse. There were members who would follow us down the street staring at us, people who would sit across from us at the restaurant and stare at us and people who only stared at us as we walked in and out of the building. One guy was so obvious that I walked backwards down the street so that I too could stare at him. Once, M got so angry that he had to talk to one man in our favorite restaurant, and he stopped.

It was bad enough that we got reports from two of our closest friends about conversations they had with members of the mosque where they had to "defend" us by testifying on the validity of our marriage. One particularly nasty neighbor made claims to THE IMAM of the mosque about our "illegal" acts. . . those of a marital nature. The stress level in our house was pretty high with all of these stories. I thought they were funny, but M was a lot more sensitive about it. He was the one who had to be questioned and confronted about it in a place, the mosque, that he had once considered a peaceful and safe place to go.

Everything culminated into one big fight wherein M did something really, really stupid. I will not post it here, but I was angry enough to make a complete fool of myself in a manner loud enough to be heard by the entire building where we were living. . .this is not saying much, since I could always hear the kids upstairs rolling in an office chair and was a party to every phone conversation the Egyptian next door ever had. . .but it was loud enough that when we were finished I walked outside to find my car, egged.

2010-04-16T21:37:00.002-04:00

I spent a lot of time thinking about that divorce certificate. Was it real? If it was not real, did M know? What would happen to the case if it turned out that the certificate was a fake? Were we not really married? We had used the divorce certificate M's family sent us as proof when we got married. I was exhausted after the interview. I had only slept for about two hours during the snowstorm because I kept tossing and turning. I wanted to make sure I woke up early enough to make it to the interview and now, one of my "worst case scenarios" had actually come true. There was absolutely nothing I could do but wait.

What if the divorce certificate was real, but the consulate wouldn't accept it? What if we couldn't get M's family to obtain the real certificate? We'd already looked online for ways to obtain it and it was not a possibility. Would M have to go back again to Pakistan just to get the certificate? What would happen if he went? What if, he was still married to that woman, he went back there and obtained a better fake divorce certificate. . .

I could. not. sleep.

Two weeks later I was back home in the US when the letter from the consulate arrived. The certificate we had submitted was not enough. We would have to submit a certificate from the Union Council over the area where the woman lived, hundreds of miles away from M's family and thousands of miles from where I sat at that moment, angry and crying. I called M and yelled at him.

It was the last week of February, my work contract was up in June. As a teacher, the contracts are renewed year by year. I hated the school where I worked. The county didn't allow first year teachers to transfer and I was lonely. I made a decision that I was moving to Canada. M was certain he could get the certificate, but I had no faith. I typed up my resignation and started making plans. I would move the furniture from my apartment to M's barren apartment in Canada. I would get out of my lease early and save a little bit of cash to make a start. I would spend the summer in Canada and we would start the paperwork for my immigration. We would not stop M's paperwork, but it would be our own little "race" to see which would finish first. We still didn't have the new divorce certificate from Pakistan and it had been nearly four months.

I would come back to the US and work as a Paramedic while we waited. June came, and I drove straight to M's home from work. We were going to live together for the first time as husband and wife and I was excited, we had been married more than a year.

Hopeless

2010-03-14T12:31:00.005-04:00

The world felt like it was crumbling up around me. I was prepared for the long wait for a waiver. I was prepared to fight about the legalities surrounding whether or not my husband should be forced to file a waiver at all, but here I was being told that they were doubting whether or not my husband was even legally divorced. I had spent a lot of time worrying about this when it came time to submit the divorce certificate initially, nine months before, but when it made its way through the USCIS and then the NVC, I had, wrongly, assumed that it had passed muster.

For those of you who aren't aware, US Immigration takes polygamy very seriously. They also take fraudulent marriages (when they rarely correctly diagnose them) very seriously. Every piece of paper related to a marriage visa that we submitted had to have a certification on it that he was not married to anyone else, and we had CONFIDENTLY signed them. Now, instead of filing a waiver and moving on to simply waiting, we were going to have to figure out if his divorce was valid. We knew it was valid in Pakistan, for his "ex-wife" had remarried years ago, but how to prove that to the United States Consulate in Montreal?! The certificate would be sent to Islamabad by fax and we would be notified of the result in "a few days."

I was crying for the rest of our consular visit, quietly, angrily, crying. I was not only angry at the consular officer for the hold up, but I was angry with M. I had begged him to obtain a different certificate, the type I had read about online. I had lectured him on how unhelpful and unsupportive his family had been already, and I had reminded him of how hard it was to submit supplemental evidence once one piece had been found to be insufficient. I had reminded him of the delays we has already suffered because of his stupid Pakistani marriage. I was livid and M was going to be the one to bear the brunt of it because it was he who had again trusted his parents' word in place of mine. Again it had cost us. I was mad, and I had no idea of the amount of time we were now going to have to wait.

I walked out of the consulate with our huge bag of irrelevant, useless proof along with our five pound waiver envelopes all worthless. The snow was piled high around us as we walked out to the car. Now, even I worried if the divorce was real, I mean, I only had one man's word, right?

The Interview

2010-03-07T07:16:00.002-05:00

We waited for quite a while before being called and looked like a couple of crazies sitting there in the waiting room. I was wearing my new favorite outfit, business casual best, high heels included. I got a huge hug when I walked in. M looked relieved and nervous. He had bags under his eyes as if he had not slept for days. He held my hand tightly as we sat there waiting for them to call out number.

Consular interviews are made as stressful as possible. In Montreal, there are a series of about four windows on the left and eight on the right. They have separate windows for submitting documents and then windows for submitting payments. It has a similar feel as the Deparmtent of Motor Vehicles, only at least there when they call your number you can get everything done, exept your license picture. He was called to the left first, and then to the right and then to the left again to show the receipt from the right. It was all terribly efficient. When we were finally called in for the interview, there was a gray-haired and balding man who was in a separate room from us. We were separated by what I assume was bullet-proof glass and there was a tiny depository to place requested "evidence" through if asked.

The man's eyes were huge when he saw me. He knew about the blizzard and had all of the paperwork showing my home as more than 700 miles away. From his facial expression, he knew what I had gone through to get there. "You must be Mrs. M," he said. I found it hard to talk, but forced a smile and said yes. There was only one seat, so I stood at the far end of the room while M sat down to be interviewed. I nervously held onto my coats with both hands, and had my thick packets of paperwork and evidence held close to my body. M held a paper shopping bag with pictures and other evidence he had brought from home. (There is strict security at the consulates and "candidates" are not allowed to use any type of bag, but open shopping bags. . . .)

The interview was short the Consular Officer (CO) asked M about how we met and how long we dated before getting married. M's answer was incorrect and I, without blinking said, "Oh no it wasn't! You called me the first time on ****, but we didn't go out for three months after that. You kept standing me up!" The consular officer giggled and M nervously followed suit. I have to laugh when I think about it, because after that the officer did not ask any more relationship related questions.

One of the things about the interview that made me very angry was that the officer bluntly asked me why it was that I could no live in Canada, instead of the United States. While I understand that this may not seem offensive to someone reading the story, it really offended me. For one thing, why in the world should this guy infer that I should have to leave the country instead of applying for my husband to immigrate to my home? I was legally entitled to apply. Second, how was it any of his business? At least that was what I was thinking. I just replied, "I am a Spanish teacher. In the United States, teaching Spanish is a critical needs field, at least in my state it is. Here, French is the necessary second language and I don't speak French. It would be very hard for me to work here or even live here. Also, my whole family is in the states, and his is in Pakistan."

The CO left the window for what seemed like forever. When he returned, he pulled out that hideous piece of paper that M had gotten from his parents. The officer said, "Where did you get this document." M told him about his attorney in Pakistan and his parents sending it from there.

"Well," said the man, "this is not what we are used to seeing from Pakistan. It is possible that this is valid, but we are not experts on Pakistani documents, so we wil be sending it to Islamabad for review."

2010-02-27T18:21:00.000-05:00

Around me were a few tractor trailer trucks and a few pickups. Most of the pickups appeared to be government vehicles with orange lights on top. There were no more snow plows and the snow was coming down hard enough that it was difficult to see. As I drove I began to feel the car sliding intermittantly and it really did worry me. I was driving slowly, but it was becoming obvious that this was not enough. And then it happened, I felt the car start to spin. It was one of those moments that you try to remember everything that anyone has ever told you about defensive driving. I was repeating advice in my head frantically. I had just looked in my rear-view mirror and seen headlights behind me. . .big headlights.

The car came to a rest covering three-quarters of the two open lanes and I saw the headlights getting closer and closer, but I was unable to move. Like a miracle, the truck stopped just short of my car and gave me a moment to drive my car back to the right direction. The emotional damage was done and my heart was beating very quickly. I had two more spin-outs before I was able to find a hotel. I was on the phone with M crying. I was promising that I would get up early in the morning. I was less than two hours short of Montreal, but there was no way to make it that night. M was despondent and I knew that there was no way he was going to that interview if I didn't make it to Montreal in the morning.

I set my clock for 3:30 the next morning, and went to bed, it was impossible to sleep.

*********************************************************************

The next morning it was dark when I woke up. I had not packed a lot of my toiletries for the trip because I had duplicates of everything I needed at M's house in Montreal. I went down to the front desk and managed to procure toothpaste and men's deodorant. (As an aside, it is amazing the difference there is between men's and women's scents. I felt like I could smell myself for the whole morning after putting that stuff on!) I had been planning what I would wear to this interview for months. That sounds really silly even typing it now, but I had my outfit picked and planned to look amazing.

One of the things that always scare people about these interviews is the fact that the consular officer has an amazing amount of power over your life when you present yourself for one of these immigration interviews. They have the power to declare your marriage "fake," they have the power to slow things down terribly. I wanted there to be no doubt in this guy's mind that we were the real deal. That part of the interview would turn out to be the least of our worries.

I got in my car and got on the road. What a difference a few hours had made! I must say that the people who take care of the roads in New York mean business! The roads were as if it had never snowed. The only proof was the three feet lining each side of the road. I had no problem making it to the embassy only thirty minutes late for the scheduled interview. Lucky for me, the interviews NEVER happen at their scheduled time and I was more than two hours early. The look on M's face when I walked in was another moment I will never forget.

Memory Lane

2010-02-22T22:29:00.002-05:00

I've been asked over and over why I didn't "cut and run" when everything started happening. . .why I didn't just give up. I would sit and remember things we did together before things happened in Pakistan. For example, we went through this phase where M would randomly pull a "movie moment."

One of our movie moments came when I visited M at work. It was raining very hard and I had just gotten off work. I changed out of my uniform and into regular clothes. I went to say hi and M was really excited to walk me out to my car. It was funny to see the expression on his face as he walked me out. I was trying to run to my car but he pulled me back to him. We're standing in the pouring rain when he pulled me close and kissed me. I could feel the rush even past the cold water running through my hair and drenching my clothes. Hundreds of memories (a little less cheesy than that) kept me waiting for him to return.

Dedicated Stupidity

2009-12-26T23:00:00.005-05:00

The week of our appointment I took personal days so that I could go to Montreal to be at the meeting. It was also the day after Valentine's Day, which was exciting for me because I had spent every Valentine's Day since we had begun dating with M. The plan was that I would fly on the evening of the 14th, a Wednesday, take Thursday and Friday off and fly back Sunday for work on Monday.

I knew with the expedited removal that we would not be approved same day but somehow I fooled myself into hoping that some kind of miracle would happen and they would realize just how pathetically stupid the whole thing was and just give him the visa. I wished for this, but prepared a waiver package to deal with reality.

With an expedited removal, a visa applicant has to file for a waiver called "Permission to Reapply after Deportation or Removal." It is filed on form I-212, and required a package of reasons that the waiver should be approved. I had consulted with attorneys and researched things and was also fairly certain that they were going to try to force us to file a hardship waiver too, this is usually for people with other inadmissibilities like Misrepresentation--lying to officials or on visa applications, or most often overstays with or without a visa. M did not legally need one of these, but based on my conversations with attorneys it was likely they would try to force us to file one. I had an envelope two inches thick to take with me to the appointment. I had also packaged up ticket stubs, copies of my passport stamps and pictures going back three years to show to the consular officer.

The night before I was to fly, a very rare noreaster hit my city and the entire east coast. It followed its way northward towards Canada and all the way up Interstate 95, my route to M. All flights were canceled ahead of time up to an hour before my flight was to take off. I was frantic. School was canceled for the day, so I had plenty of time to panic. I was certain my flight would not take off, and that I would wait there all day and it would be too late to drive the 12 hours to M's appointment. It had become obvious over the days just before the appointment that M was not going to the appointment by himself. Days before the appointment he started having flashbacks to our detention at the border and I knew that if I did not go, he would stay as far away from the U.S. Consulate as possible.

I started driving in the morning in a manual transmission, 2001 Mercury Cougar. My father felt that this was the least intelligent part of my plan. Not only was there snow, a lot of snow, but once you get into northern New York it is entirely mountainous. There was no way I wasn't going, I couldn't rent a car (internationally) on such short notice and so he and my mother stalled me as much as possible and eventually just reconciled themselves to the fact that their daughter was a dedicated moron and let me begin my trip.

The first miles were not the problem, but about 7:00pm when I was deep into New York state, the snow started coming down so heavily that I could not see ahead of me. The roads were entirely white and it was obvious that they were no longer even attempting to clear the roads. Around me were tractor trailer trucks and four-wheel drives. Apparently, no one else thought it a good idea to take a manual transmission, low driving car into a blizzard.

The Waiting Game

2009-12-22T19:03:00.001-05:00

As I have told you before, I am quite obsessive. I had everything planned out and had gone through every last bit of information I could find online about the National Visa Center process. What the NVC does is process the visa application (and $355 fee) the Affidavit of Support (and $70 fee) and asks for all supporting documents (the same ones just sent to the USCIS) and adds requirements for a police certificate from every country a person has ever lived. It also gives you the instructions for getting a United States approved Medical Exam ($250.)

Now, it would not be good government if this did not slow down the process considerably, so at the time we were applying, they would send you the fee for one form, wait til they received it, cashed it and "processed it" and then send you the form to fill out and send back. They would wait for that form to arrive and be processed before they would send you the next fee and the process would start again. Luckily, newer visa applicants get to use an online system where one can pay the fees at one time and recieve the forms to fill out. You can actually get the forms online too, but you have to have a special barcode form to mail back with each application under the laughable guise of "faster processing." I'm sorry, but there is nothing "fast" about the immigration process.

Having said that, I have to defend whatever lovely soul got their hands on my husband's USCIS application paperwork because they transferred it from Vermont, our assigned office, to California. Our I-130 (Petition for Alien Relative) was processed in less than three months! That is completely unheard of! I have no idea how it happened, but I assume some kind soul took pity on us after reading the application and realizing the horrible long process that we were going to have. So, after three months, we were on our way to the NVC and the rest of the processing.

I had every fee sheet sent back to NVC same day, and every application pre-filled from their website just waiting for the barcode sheet to be mailed to me. Once the barcode arrived, I was on my way to the post office to mail that out same day too. Somehow, I was crazy enough to think this was going to help. In the end, it served its purpose. . .it made me feel better thinking I was helping.

Our case "went complete" at NVC on November 14, 2006, seven months after we were married. This meant that all of our paperwork was in and that all we had to do was wait for the consulate to schedule our appointment. Another two months passed before M received notice in Canada that he would be interviewed at the US Consulate Montreal on February 15, 2007.

Charter of the French Language

2009-12-20T17:52:00.006-05:00

Three weeks after getting back home I had figured out how to get copies of the marriage certificate. They had originally told me to mail a request back to Montreal, but in my hurry I had found a way online to do it instead. The certificate arrived, in FRENCH. Call me sentimental, but I always kind of imagined having my marriage certificate, seeing it, and it was never in French in my visions. Immigration also prefers to see things in English, though you can have anything translated, it just sometimes causes hang-ups and delays.

If you think the beaurocracy in your government is bad, this is going to amaze you. I called Quebec to get a new copy of the certificate. The nice gentleman on the phone advised me that since I had signed my marriage document in French (something I did not actually realize I had done at the time) that I would never, I repeat, NEVER, be issued a certificate in English. He further went on to tell me that it was actually law under the "Charter of the French Language" instituted in Quebec. (Oddly, the CFL also mandates how languages are displayed on restaurant menus, i.e. French has to be first and a larger font than any other language. . . .there is even more inane, crazy stuff in there, but I won't bore you. . . ) It was not that they did not issue English certificates, they did, they just wouldn't issue one to me.

At any rate, I had to get the certificate translated. Now, the words on a marriage certificate are cognates, so even I could translate it, but someone who is actually qualified has to translate it for immigration purposes. Amazingly, the teacher I was working under doing my student teaching, a middle-school Spanish teacher in her 43rd year of teaching had for the first 24 years of her career, taught French! The dear woman agreed to help me by translating it and signing the certification of translation for me and gave me several copies because we both knew I would need extras for the steps down the line in immigration. It was beautiful, fast, and FREE!

In no time I compiled the package and mailed it out. The applications had been waiting for more than a year to be signed and mailed out, finally we were on our way, May, 2006.

How it works

2009-10-25T21:26:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I had been reading and studying for immigration since I started dating M in February, 2004. It was now April 2006 and the entire game was changed by his expedited removal in 2005. Everything about the immigration system is convoluted. Most Americans still believe, from their extensive study in sitcoms from "Wings" to "Ugly Betty" that once a person marries a U.S. Citizen, they themselves are a U.S. Citizen. . .I mean, it worked for Balky on "Perfect Strangers," right? Nope. It is actually nothing like that. Nothing at all.

There are actually a lot of steps. People who don't believe in the automatic citizenship theory usually--in my limited experience--believe that you just file a simple application, it gets processed and the immigrant comes to the U.S. Much like the idea that immigrants here illegally should have just applied for citizenship (as if a classification like that exists) this is also not true. There are actually a lot of steps and even in the best of circumstances it can take more than a year for someone to make it to the United States, even when married to a citizen.

The first step is filing a petition with the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Service.) They charge you a little over $300, keep your petition gathering dust on someone's desk for a few months, check to see if you do, if fact, have a marriage certificate attached to your petition and then they either approve or deny it and ship it on to the National Visa Center (NVC) where they ask for more documents--and *cough* more money--and then they can either schedule your interview at the consulate or they will forward the case and the consulate will schedule the interview. None of your documents are really reviewed until that interview at the consulate. USCIS takes them and only verifies if they are there. NVC does exactly the same thing, makes sure that they are *still* there. Only the consulate gets the right to evaluate if they are in fact good enough, and that does not happen until you are months and months into the process.

In our case we would have to submit our marriage certificate and M's divorce certificate from Pakistan. Remember, the one that M had gotten from his parents, the one printed on Rupee paper, yeah, that one.

The marriage certificate from Quebec would not be ready for at least three weeks and so, we were left to relax for the rest of my little vacation. Four days after our wedding I was on my way back home, back to work and back to separation. I had almost forgotten the reality of my life, full time Master's program, a middle school student teaching experience and working 36 hours a week to pay for my Pakistani-Canadian habit.

The Next Frontier

2009-10-24T21:14:00.003-04:00

Every little girl dreams of their wedding day. Mine was not quite what I had hoped for, but we were happy nonetheless. My husband looked like weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He walked easier and smiled in a way I had not seen in more than a year.

I think the happiest person though, might have been Z. He emerged from the mosque and proudly lifted his hands to the sky above his head with a sigh and an "Alhamdulillah!" and my mom got a picture of it. The look on his face says a thousand words. He was happy for M and I, of course, but I think it counted to him as a personal success that he was able to be a part of his best friend's happiness and a really nice day.

Here now a tribute to my extreme dorkiness. My mom, at my request, had brought a white wedding dress I had purchased with her when she came. It had been fitted and was just waiting for me to wear. There was no way for this to happen. It just didn't fit into the surroundings. That part of my dream, that kind of wedding, was gone. My lengha, on the other hand, made an appearance at a little dinner party at M's house two days after our Nikkah. Z's wife was wonderful, as always and loaned me gold bangles and a lovely pair of hoop earrings. Z purchased food from a local restaurant and his two brothers came to celebrate with us.

Z bought us our only wedding gifts, a watch set for me and flowers to hold. Z took pictures and his wife made a video to be sent to M's mother in Karachi. She was going to be taking a trip there soon and would make sure they saw it.

I had now moved on to my next obsession, one I had been holding onto for many months, one I had been planning for and studying for: my impending battle with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

A Wink and a Nod

2009-10-23T18:10:00.000-04:00

As the conversation with his mother ended, M got up and we were ready to go. The Imam had scheduled us for 3:00 pm and Z was trying to round up another witness. They weren't sure if my father was going to count since he was Christian, not Muslim. No one else was available because it was midday and everyone was at work.

It took about 35 minutes to drive to the mosque. None of us had ever been to the area where this mosque was and M kept telling me I was never going to find it. When we arrived we saw a tall brick building with a bank attached to it. It was large, but was obviously not originally built as a mosque.

The inside had offices and a banquet room. We were directed into the Imam's office and M went for wuzu. My parents sat on my right and when M got back he sat on the left. Z sat on the other side beside M. We discussed the mehr and filled out an application form. The Imam sat behind a large executive style desk. He only had a copy of the marriage documents in French. At this point, that was the least of my worries.

The paperwork was all in French and the Imam let me know that M would recite some Arabic. After M repeated a few phrases in Arabic the Imam asked me if I consented to the marriage. I looked up and nodded my head. I started to say something, but the Imam had already moved on to more Arabic. He had us both sign the marriage documents and I was married.

In short, I married a Pakistani-Canadian in a dual French/Arabic wedding by nodding my head.

Oh, and M wore blue jeans.

The Blessing

2009-09-08T20:03:00.007-04:00

As soon as the words were out of M's mouth, Z jumped into high gear. He needed the number to the mosque that we had contacted (the only one that agreed to perform the nikkah (wedding)) and he took it upon himself to start trying to round up witnesses. I tried to slow things down because I was convinced that M didn't mean it and that if we went too quickly I'd end up with a runner at the proverbial altar. . . Well, there was no altar, but you get what I mean.

Z made the calls and on two hours notice, we had a three o'clock appointment at the mosque. The Imam himself answered the phone and set up the appointment. We went back to M's apartment, he said he had things to do before we went, and I needed to change clothes. I decided to wear a pretty salwar kameez that M had brought me back from Pakistan and I decided the shirt M would wear. But as I turned around I saw that M had gotten Z to give him a phone card and he disappeared into the bedroom. It was after midnight Karachi time and M looked very serious. He took the phone and the phone card and I heard very stern Hindko coming from the bedroom. I walked in, worried. M had started to cry.

He had called his mother to tell her what was happening and to his surprise, and mine too, she started to cry. She was not crying as if he was betraying her by marrying 'gori,' which she still called me, but because, she told him, she wished she could be there with him to see it happen. After everything they had done to fight the marriage, he got his mother's blessing.

His Everything

2009-09-05T22:47:00.008-04:00

As I've said before, one of M's biggest complaints living in Canada was his lack of familial support. This is not to pretend that if his family was with him in Canada that they would have been much support, but in his head, that was the meaning and importance of family--to support you in big life changes. To want the best for you. The week I came for spring break, the week my parents came to Montreal, Z became all of those things for M. Z took the place of M's father, uncle, cousin and best friend.

My parents arrived while M was still at work. When he got home we led them to their hotel room and ordered a pizza for dinner. We saved all heavy talk for the next day. My dad and M spoke in Urdu and my dad told stories. M really just listened a lot and then we left them to rest. The next morning Z went with M and I to talk to my parents. Z and my dad got along very well. They all started with talking to my dad in Urdu and telling stories before jumping right into marriage talk. M seemed petrified. He was scared and it was something that I really had never seen before. I mean, I had talked to him while he was sick in Pakistan and he was upset, but never just petrified like this. He explained his whole story again to my dad and they compared stories of their own fathers.

It seemed that Z was trying to talk M into going ahead with the wedding and my father was just telling him that he had to do what made him happy. I listened over and over as M explained to both of them that he knew he was going to marry me. He explained that he had been ready to marry me even before his trip to Pakistan, but that now was not the right time. He explained that things were not right yet. I could see him getting frustrated and more and more nervous. I had to leave the room.

I walked into the bathroom and before I knew it I was sobbing. I was as silent as possible because I did not want anyone outside to hear me, but my mom had seen the look on my face as I walked into the bathroom. She walked in a few minutes after me and hugged me. For my mom, it was M's fault that I was crying. She knew the whole story and thought that he should be stronger, that he should be more firm and more ready. I defended him because it was all I could do. I had felt the fear oozing from his words and tones in the front room. I had held his hand the entire time he spoke to my dad and it was obvious to me that he just could not do it. After all this time, he still was not ready and in the bathroom staring at my tear-streaked red face in the mirror I knew it was over.

I took a deep breath and sent my mom back out into the front room. I washed my face with cold water and stared at myself in the mirror. I gave myself a pep talk to go back out and do what I knew I had to. I again was sure that this would be my last trip to see M and I was not even sure how I could do it. I pictured myself without him, ignoring his calls or not even getting any calls at all. I imagined myself having to explain why I was coming home alone and why I was no longer engaged. I imagined myself alone.

I walked back into the front room and took my seat again beside M. He was looking at me and the talk died down a bit before Z and my dad started discussing something I could not understand. M looked at me his eyes pleading for understanding, "You understand, right? We can do it next time. We can plan something bigger, we will do it later." I took a deep breath in.

"Everything is going to be all right," I said. He looked at me puzzled.

"We can do it next time?"

"Everything is going to be fine, you will be fine. Whether I am here or not, you are going to be fine. It is obvious that we are just not going to do this. We've talked about it too many times." I trailed off.

"I don't understand, we are going to do it, we just have to wait until the right time." he was continuing, but I wasn't really listening anymore. I had in my head what I had to say and I knew that unless I kept reminding myself, I wouldn't go through with it. I had, in fact, tried to get myself to do this before but was totally unable. M and I had even broken up once. We made it thirty minutes before we called each other back and apologized.

M saw something in my face and while I was turned around talking to my mother, he announced to my father, "We are getting married today."

Z and my dad were taken aback, my mom stopped talking. She looked at me and told me what he had said, and I did not at all believe it. I didn't want it. I had decided I was going home alone, and had as much as told M so, and I didn't want to get married as a last resort! I took M aside and told him that I didn't want him doing this because of pressure. I repeated over and over again, "You will be fine and so will I, we do not have to do this."

M was now oppositely certain of what we had to do. The day had begun with his inability to get married and ended with his inability not to.

I was still not convinced it was going to happen.

Ongoing Negotiations . . . .

2009-07-27T15:55:00.009-04:00

Z and his wife welcomed me in so happily. I have always loved his wife. She absolutely amazes me! She married Z very young, but knows just how to handle him. She is always patient and calm, attributes I do not have at all! He always knows when she's angry, and she doesn't have to say anything at all!

Anyway, I had my bag holding the lengha in my lap as we made small talk. Once we had exhausted the topics of weather and how my trip went, I turned to N (Z's wife) and told her that I had brought a lengha to show her. I told her I wanted to know if it was good or not and that I had found it on the internet. I pulled it gently out of the bag and she looked politely over the beading and embroidery with me. She smiled and looked at Z and we discussed how heavy the lengha was. Z was smiling from ear to ear and I knew that now he would ask the question that I needed him to ask.

"So then it's good news," he said.

I took a deep breath, and though this was how I expected the conversation to go, there were still tears trying to ruin my voice. "Well, we had planned for good news," I said. "But it appears that I have brought this dress for nothing. He has changed his mind again."

Z became serious and asked me what I meant. Z was one of the few people who knew the whole story of what happened with M in Pakistan.

I told Z that M had changed his mind again and that he was just too scared. I told him that we had already gone through this several times and that I just did not think that it was ever really going to happen and that I couldn't continue to live this way. "I will talk to him," he said, and that was that. N looked very sad for me and reassured me that Z was going to take care of things.

When M got home, I told him about my visit with Z, and M knew what to expect. Immediately after M got home, Z was calling him to come and talk. They went out together and were gone for two hours.

When M came back he was happier. He told me all about their conversation and laughed about it with me. The long and short was that Z basically asked him if he was crazy and what was wrong with him. M thought it was funny that someone besides me felt so strongly about his getting married. I could not help but think, here M was, sharing his "secret" conversation with me, as he did everything that happened in his life.

We were living in two different countries and yet we spoke to each other multiple times daily. We shared everything, but he couldn't seem to get over the fear of what had happened to him in Pakistan enough to make it "permanent." We were best friends, but so far, that was not enough.

Negotiations

2009-07-13T23:26:00.011-04:00

I stepped off the plane and got my luggage. I was going back and forth in my head about how the visit was going to go. M picked me up at the airport, late as always, and helped me put my bags in the trunk. On the ride home he held my hand and I watched the now familiar shopping malls and bus stops go past my window. I stared out the window, worried and making sure not to turn towards M.

You know what? There is just no way to maintain your dignity and at the same time ask a man if he still plans to marry you this week. I couldn't believe that after all this time I was still in a situation where I just had no idea of where I stood. I knew that M loved me, but it just didn't seem like enough any more. What point is there to being 'in love' if it is impossible to even live in the same country with the person? In our situation, the only way to live in the same country was to get married.

We got home and had dinner. It was the next day before we discussed our plans. M was still unsure. It was maddening to me! It was his comment this day that got me started. He said, "You have your parents and K [my best friend.] I have no one to get advice from. I have no one to advise me."

You may remember Z from my earlier post. Z was a friend of M's from way back. They immigrated to Canada around the same time and were even from the same town in Pakistan. He and his two brothers were roommates to M in his earlier years in Canada, and the four had never moved away from living on the same street in their town in Canada. The two often gave each other advice and I had visited his home often to see his two small children and wife. Z had long been asking M why it was that we were not getting married and had in fact been one of the first people M discussed our April plans with. Z encouraged him. Z told him that he knew "better than anyone else" how M was when I was not there. He had told M, "you are depressed all of the time, until she gets here."

It was my opinion that it was time to enlist help. I called my dad. My dad and M had always gotten along ever since I tricked M into meeting him, more on that at another time. My dad had studied Hindi (Urdu's, for lack of a better term, 'sister' language??) for years long before I ever met M and for this reason, M found him intriguing. M also had a lot of respect for him because of all the help and advice he had given me while M was in Pakistan. I asked my dad to come all the way to Canada, not to watch me get married, but in case, I was getting married. I called him so that M could talk with him. (M actually had requested it too.)

My second action was to make a visit to Z and his wife. I had the week off but M had to go to work. I picked up my lengha, walked up the four flights of stairs to Z's house and knocked on the door. I had never visited them on my own, but this was important and I was nervous. I went up the stairs under the pretense of showing M's wife my bargain ebay purchase.

The End of the Road

2009-07-05T18:24:00.005-04:00

I started my student teaching in January, 2006. I was assigned to teach Spanish in a middle school. This particular school district only taught Spanish I in Middle school and had two different versions. They allowed seventh graders the option of starting Spanish 1 in seventh grade and taking the second half in eighth grade or just taking Spanish 1 as a full year subject in the eighth grade. My supervising teacher had been teaching for more than 40 years and so she had a cake walk schedule: six classes of 7th grade Spanish I (part 1.) This easy workload (as compared to a friend of mine who taught German I, II, III, IV and V in a high school, even though her desired post graduation job was teaching ESL) really helped me out in my already stressful life, since I was, in essence, working two full time jobs and finishing up graduate work too boot.

I took trips to see M for Christmas, and each three day weekend I was allowed. . . I saw him again in February and then had to wait for Spring Break in April. M and I had been calling mosques all around his town trying to find one that would allow us to get married. I could tell M was still scared of getting married, and the fact that his mosque still would not perform the marriage did not help. Finally, I found a mosque on the other side of the city that would perform the marriage. It made me very excited to hear the imam sound so accepting of the idea. I had begun to believe I would never find a mosque that would accept us.

The plan was that we would get married during my Spring Break. I started looking for something to wear as a surprise for M. We had been talking marriage so long that I actually had bought a white wedding dress (big mistake!) but this was not an appropriate occasion for this and my life was not conducive to planning a big reception in Canada. My family is also not able to travel frequently or on short notice. I looked over and over for a lengha to wear for M after the marriage.

*For those who may not be familiar, lengha is a traditional outfit in Pakistan for basic receptions after marriage. The traditional colors are red and gold, but people wear all different styles and colors.*

It was surprising to me that lenghas are VERY expensive. The majority that I found were more expensive than any of the American wedding dresses I looked at, and much more expensive than the one that I had bought. . . And so, I did something typically 2006 American, and looked on Ebay. Much to my surprise, I found several gorgeous ones, but as is typical of Ebay, they were usually used and altered and had only one available. It took months to find one that was my size and I liked (and could win at auction. . . )

I ended up with a gorgeous (to me) pink one with two layers and heavy red/gold embroidery. The shirt left much to be desired, it was not well kept and not as had been described, and there was no dupatta or covering for the head. I also did not have the typical jewelry, but since I was doing this as a surprise, it would have to do. Typically the jewelry and lengha purchase is up to the groom anyway, so I felt I was going above and beyond!

Just before my trip M started backing out. He started talking about postponing our plans until the next visit. We had already done this since November, and I had already been feeling abandoned since then. This was the last straw. I could not take it anymore. I was patient with M on the phone as we discussed his idea. I told him that it was not an option. I explained that it was completely up to him, but that I could not live like this anymore, travelling to visit every chance I got and being otherwise alone. I told him that I knew he wasn't happy this way, and that I already knew he was feeling guilty about meeting me anyway. I knew what 'boyfriend/girlfriend' was considered in Islam, and I had been doing it for too long.

My parents had taken time off of work to come and see us get married, I told them to scrap their original plans and I would let them know if they needed to come at all. I packed the lengha in my luggage carefully, convinced this would be my last trip to see M. I knew we weren't getting married, and I knew I would never see him again.

Separation Grind

2009-06-29T20:23:00.004-04:00

We did not immediately get married, and I settled into a routine. I went to school, volunteered at my rescue squad and worked every available shift to make extra money to take trips to see M. I kept my eyes peeled for cheap airfares, signed up for a frequent flier program, and got used to driving each time I could not find a good fare.

*As a side note, any students who might be reading, check out www.studentuniverse.com for really good airfares. You have to book a minimum of two weeks ahead of time and have to keep your eyes peeled because the fares change daily, but I got some monster good deals during that period of my life since I was working on my Master's and full time in school.*

The fact that M and I were not yet married and therefore could not start his immigration process really began to get me angry. Every spare moment I had was dedicated to either finding ways to travel to be with him, actually travelling or working so that I would be able to travel. I was beginning to get exhausted and started to blame M. After all, we could start if he could just get over being petrified of marriage after his Pakistan ordeal. On reflection, I may have been being selfish, but I knew he wasn't going to get better until things were settled. He was still horribly depressed, and this on top of everything else really stressed me out.

On the up side, school was really interesting, but didn't consume much of my time. The most difficult scheduling for that semester (Fall, 2005) was doing 30 hours of high school observation. The next semester, however, I knew was going to be absolutely crazy. The culminating project for my Master's in Teaching was a full-time (unpaid) student teaching assignment at a middle school. I would be required to work the same hours as a teacher, including all after-school assignments and parent meetings, and somehow manage to keep up with my "M travel" and work enough to keep a roof over my head. The way I did this was by working 14 hour night shifts on Friday and Saturday nights and a 10 hour day shift on Sunday. My saving grace was the November/December horse racing assignments.

That sounds funny, right? . . . an ambulance at a horse race. . .well, we were to take care of any jockeys that fell off. For this, we were payed overtime pay, 1.5 times our normal rate, no matter if it was midway through shift or if we came in specially for it. These were basically snooze assignments. We would sit on the field, watch the race, or read, whatever, and wait for something to happen. Thankfully, usually, nothing did.

Anyway, exhausted as I was, I continued all of these assignments and waited, impatiently, for M to wake up.

Slow Changes

2009-06-17T21:14:00.004-04:00

The divorce certificate arrived in November 2005, seven months after M sent the divorce. I went for my Thanksgiving break and we got it notarized. I thought that this would be the end of all our problems and that we would just immediately get married. M was not thinking the same thing. M was still reeling from his last "marriage" and felt like nothing should be rushed. He was getting a little more to himself but was still much more gun-shy than the man I once knew. Before his trip M was almost cocky, now he was hesitant about each new move. He had the urge to study everything and wanted to just 'let things happen' without any forward motion from his direction. For this reason marriage, among other things were difficult.

M again sought counsel about marriage from the Imam of his mosque, who did not even listen to his question and basically sent him away. He tried instead the gentleman who handled marriage ceremonies at his mosque. This man actually yelled at M. The man demanded to know why M would want to marry a non-Muslim. M could not even try to reason with him, he was too embarrassed by the man's reaction. M never tried to speak with either man again. M had attended this mosque for more than eight years, but when he needed assistance and counsel, no one would listen, except for Uncle.

**********************************************************

M had arrived in January and since then had not been able to find consistent work. In April, as soon as the divorce was declared and sent, he managed to find agency work. It was not always the same place, but it was daily work and gave him some money to work with. After a month of showing he was dependable, the agency sent him to work in a factory as a temp for a long term assignment. This gave him a bit of consistency and a higher wage, but ended after only three months and though his supervisor wanted to hire him permanently, the contract they had with the temporary agency prohibited it. And so by November, it was just temp work again moving from place to place to place and working for meager pay after trudging through Canadian winter snow and riding the bus.

M hated riding the bus more than anything. Riding the bus meant walking a fair distance through the snow, and added about 45 minutes to what would normally be a 15 minute drive. When you have to be at work at 7:00 am, this is a significant hardship, at least for my friend M. I was trying to find solutions to this problem and it came in the form of my own car-lust. I wanted a different car. I had long been wanting a change and fell in love with a little sporty Cougar. They were not very new, and thus were pretty cheap. I wanted one and that meant that I would no longer need my older 1999 Contour. I thought it would be a cool idea for M to have a car and for me to have my Cougar. That November M got his divorce and his Contour.

Getting up 45 minutes later than before somehow made living in a motel, working temp jobs for crappy pay and 700 miles of separation a little more tolerable.

Obsession

2009-06-12T00:31:00.007-04:00

I am not a patient person, I am actually quite obsessive. I can obsess about anything. I usually turn it into a good thing, again by learning everything I can about whatever is going on. In my obsession about getting M to live with me in the United States, I began researching everything about immigration that I could. Google was again my best friend. I found legal websites and forums where there was a ton of information.

I found out that in order to overcome the Expedited Removal from that day at the border, we would have to file a special waiver and wait for it to be approved before being given a visa. I reasearched waivers in depth during this period. I spent every extra moment trying to find instructions on how to compile evidence for the waiver, how it would be filed, statistics on wait time and approval rates. I was completely obsessed. I couldn't have M, so I had to have something to fill my time.

My secondary obsession, only secondary because I had absolutely no control over it, was getting M motivated an getting a copy of that divorce certificate. After much nagging, M began calling his father (over and over again) to get him working on a divorce certificate. This was another aspect of my research, I knew that M needed a copy of the union council certificate.

*Cultural note* In Pakistan, smaller towns are divided up with Union Councils. . .think equivalent of a Town Council or a Board of Supervisors only with a lot more leverage. The Union Council maintains divorce records and tries to set up arbitration to prevent a divorce. This is in addition to many other duties . . .

Unfortunately, M's family felt that the council would not give a certificate because of the influence of the girl's family. For this reason, M's father and brother enlisted the help of an attorney, who drew up a paper for M to get signed and notarized in Canada. This letter was written on something called "Rupee Paper" and had Government of Pakistan watermarks on it. The attorney assured M's family that this was "exactly" what was necessary to prove divorce. He claimed to have had clients successfully use it for U.S. Immigration in the past. I, on the other hand, assured M that it was not what was needed and even showed him the information on the Department of State website.

M believed the attorney.

The Divorce

2009-05-14T14:22:00.003-04:00

In my mind it took quite a bit of time for M and Uncle to get the divorce letter written. M thought of it as a very complex document and had no idea whatsoever in how to write it. For this reason he allowed Uncle to write the letter and he would simply read it for accuracy. The letter had to be very specific, Uncle told him, for the sake of the girl. It was comforting to me that they took this into consideration, but I still wanted him to legalize it specifically in Canada.

The Canadian divorce would be viewed much more favorably here in the states as well as in Canada. I had already read how divorces from Pakistan were eyed suspiciously be U.S. Immigration because of the supposed ease of obtaining fake certificates and the prevalence of 'fake' so called 'green-card' marriages from that country. I must have been 'warned' by 'friends' a million times about being careful of my Pakistani fiancee since he might have another wife waiting for him in Pakistan. . .especially hurtful since, haha *insert horrified, hurt face* on me, technically he did, and I hadn't told any of them. (Some of my friends had even told me they were worried when I took my first trip to Canada to visit, that I would find him there with a whole other family. . .)

M's reaction to this suggestion was not good. The cheapest attorney we could find in Canada to handle this was about $2,000 and wait times ranged upwards of a year, even with an unconsummated, short marriage with no compicating financial entanglement or children, etc. . .Divorce in Pakistan, on the other hand, was simply the cost of the postage and the notary stamp. Since rukhsati had not taken place (the girl never left home and the marriage was not consummated) divorce would be almost immediate on the receipt of the letter. This uncomplicated version of divorce was probably another reason U.S. Immigration frowns on these certificates.

As if the situation couldn't just be this simple, it was further complicated by the fact that M would have to obtain an official copy of the divorce certificate from Pakistan. This would be completely impossible from the U.S. or Canada, so he would have to rely on his family *insert malicious laugh here* to obtain the official documentation. You can well imagine how keen they were on helping out with this matter.

And so, Uncle wrote the letter, M recopied it, so as the divorce would be from him, it was signed and notarized and copies were sent to all involved parties, Union Council, the family of the woman in Pakistan, and M's family. This was not the end of the story, since the union council and the woman's family wanted to try arbitration. I got more than one panicked call from M about some family member or another calling to threaten his family, with what social outcasting I was never told, if the divorce went through. As far as M was concerned, religiously and legally for Pakistan, the divorce was already done. The letter was final and since he had written it a specific way (3 talaqs) it would not be undone. Now, we just had to wait for the legal certificate.

Rebuilding

2009-04-26T21:38:00.004-04:00

We were devastated that M was not going to be able to return with me. We had not even considered any other options, but now we were working overtime trying to make a plan. I had brought a considerable amount of money with me for the trip and so a hotel was not a problem. M's cousin, with whom he usually stayed after long trips like this one, was not in Canada. He was at the time visiting the states.

It was very difficult to swallow the new situation, and we didn't yet know all of the implications. At the hotel room we tried to discuss options, but to him it was just hopeless. The next morning we got up and started looking for a longer term hotel to stay in until he could get contact with his cousin and apply for jobs. We used some of the money I had brought to pay for a month in a not so nice motel next to M's mosque. The condition of the motel did not matter as much as it's proximity to both the mosque and his cousin's apartment and the fact that it included his necessary furniture and electricity. Do remember that it was January in Canada. The motel was warm, and that pretty much says it all.

After a few days I had to return home and left M sitting in his room, alone.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to be a little less detailed about the next few months. The incident at the border had M convinced for months that he had done something wrong and was being punished by God. He was depressed, his cousin was still away, and finding a job in the winter in his city is sometimes difficult. His only comfort was the mosque.

I visited every three to six weeks at that time. Every time I got a few days off, I would drive myself 12 hours to see him. It took months for me to book my first ticket by air, which was a new experience for me. I had never flown anywhere. I scarfed up student airfares and found last minute bargain prices as often as possible.

M was having trouble figuring out the best way to go about the divorce and was beginning to doubt that he could even go through with it. He had called his parents within days of his arrival in Canada and made it known that he intended to divorce the woman. It was made a somewhat more simple (a difference of degrees here) because within days of his return to Canada, the girl's siblings has started calling and writing to M and his family trying to get money (large sums of money) sent for business ventures, among other things.

M tried going to his imam and some of the elders at the mosque for advice on what he should do about the divorce. He ran into a wall when he asked for advice about divorce. The answer was always "try to work it out." The men would not even listen to the story, they just advised not to divorce. It took M until April to find a man he still refers to as "uncle" to listen to his story and advise him based on the actual background and not the pat answer.

In the meantime I was not patient or kind. I was growing more impatient every day. I had waited months for him to return and I had mistakingly thought it would be easy for him to 'leave' the woman he'd met only once. I had no concept of the emotional toll this would take on both M and his family. His parents would change their minds daily going from supporting the decision (on days when her family called for money) to yelling at M for trying to "abandon" this woman and his own family.

In April, "Uncle" managed to convince M that his marriage was not real. M describes it as if Uncle were trying to wake him up. He says Uncle yelled at him that it was not a marriage at all. Uncle criticized his family for ever allowing it to take place. Uncle's own marriage, though it was 45 years ago, was one of love and not necessarily family arrangement. Uncle told M he was "not really married" he told him he had done nothing wrong, and that the woman would be free to marry someone else, as soon a M would "free her" to do so, meaning the divorce. It took this man's opinion to make M feel comfortable enough to go through with everything. It took this man's knowledge to figure out how to best go about the divorce for the sake of both M and the woman.

I had always assumed that M would do a divorce in Canada, but this man asserted that a divorce would be better for the woman if handled in Pakistan. The requirement being a formal letter, witnessed, sent to the union council in her area. This would be quickest for her and would give her proof and the ability to move on quickly. And so, this was how it would be done.

The Memory

2009-04-21T10:18:00.002-04:00

Certain things about that day at the border are burnt into my brain. The name of the officer who issued all of the orders, the reactions of his co-workers to his attitude and demeanor, the way that the other officers watched M and I each time we were again placed together over the course of the day. But I think the picture that I replay the most was M's face.

M was already 'broken' when he came back from Pakistan. He was emaciated, aged and more depressed than anyone I had ever known, but each time he saw me start to break he would come alive, and I did the same thing for him. It sounds dramatic as I type it, but when the officer first told us M was going to be denied entry I turned into stone. Every American stereotype about believing in "rights" and "justice" came out in me. I glazed over and stared at the officer. I made him give every inch that I could possibly take. I demanded explanations of each sheet of paper M had to sign. I stood my ground about getting my phone back and being allowed to call home. I demanded to know where M was going to be each time he left me. When M started to break, I told him not to worry, things would be fixed. This would be fixed. I drew my determination that day, and trust me, I needed it.

I had no idea of the determination it was going to take. I had no idea of the multiple laws that had been written in such a way as to undermine exactly what it was that I wanted, a life (in the United States) with M. I was ignorant to exactly how powerful this one man was in the grand scheme of things, and I had no idea that my government really has written away the rights, the same rights we as American citizens take for granted, for anyone who is not a citizen of our country. The same rights that dear Mr. Bush ironically propagandized spreading all over the world.

When it was written that "All men are created equal. . . ." it did not mean "all" men. At the time it left out both women and people of color. Now, it left out anyone not from the United States. When we tout "due process" and "justice" and "innocent until proven guilty," all of that has been intentionally written out of our immigration laws, and NO, it does not make it easier if you are married to or related to a U.S. citizen.

The memory that strikes me the most from that day, I was sitting in the waiting room in between the first and second round of questioning, still hoping to be allowed to take M home. M had disappeared from sight for what had to be an hour and I heard his voice. M is tall, over six feet tall. I caught sight of him as he was being led between a few cubicles. One of the other officers was taking him to be fingerprinted and he looked out and saw how worried I was. I was standing on my tiptoes to try to see him, to gauge the look on his face. He looked square at me, and winked.

'Dedicated' pt.2

2009-04-20T20:27:00.001-04:00

I was nervous as we walked inside without our passports. We looked for a representative to have them. We waited a few minutes before addressed by an officer who started to ask M questions about his trip to Pakistan and then questions about his residence in Canada. M was too honest and though he technically had a place to stay with his cousin, admitted that he had no lease in Canada as he had just come back from a five month stay in Pakistan. They discussed his previous jobs in Canada, since he also had no work in Canada right now, again, he had just returned from Pakistan.

Every part of the conversation continually went back to Pakistan and it was then that I started to get antsy. I must have rolled my eyes too obviously because the officer told me that I was no longer allowed to stand beside M and must go sit in one of the lobby chairs a few feet away. I felt I had no choice but to obey. Within a few minutes M joined me and the officer set out to search our car. When the officer came back he had basically decided we were up to no good. In my briefcase he found, as I had told him he would, out of date immigration paperwork and as I had not warned him, articles on divorce. The articles were research I had done on what M would have to do to divorce the woman in Pakistan, but somehow the officer had conjured in his head that we had some elaborate scheme starting six months ago for M and I to apply for his immigration, get married, and then for me to divorce him.

The officer placed us in holding cells behind the secondary inspection desk. We were separated and I was seated on a wooden bench in an entirely green room. He decided to "interview" us separately. I began calmly and explained that I had already told him about the expired visa application and told him that it didn't matter anyway, that M had been forced into an arranged marriage while in Pakistan and that was why he found the research on divorce. I also pointed out that if he read the research I had come up with, he would know that M had to return to Canada to divorce the woman since in my state you have to be a resident to obtain a divorce.

Additionally, I rationalized, we could not apply for the visa at all since M was already married and a divorce would take months or even a year to accomplish. I did not stay calm during this interview and in fact was reduced to tears in telling the story along with the investigators questions and accusations. The man basically ranged from accusing me of immigration fraud to complete stupidity for believing anything this Pakistani man had told me.

M's interrogation was handled a bit differently. He was offered coffee, and the officer tried to "rationalize" with him. Somehow, this officer believed there was something sinister behind the two of us traveling together, besides the obvious fact that M was in fact, technically, married and I looked like a hussy. I was kind of beginning to feel like one too.

The officer placed each of us back into the cells alone and I got to listen as he and his coworkers searched through my purse and briefcase taking great care to look at each of my ID cards and EMS certifications. At that time I carried with me all of my Paramedic cards, student ID's, etc. He used the computer to research us and I listened as he joked about the contents of my purse and the fact that "She's obviously from *insert my state name here* look at all this stuff." Continuously my phone rang as the hours passed and I got to listen to them sit and ignore it as my mom frantically called to see what had become of us.

Posted all around the secondary inspection area were rules that they were supposed to follow. . .things like allowing a phone call. . .letting you speak with a supervisor. It did not matter which of these I requested, all were denied. In fact, I was there seven hours before being allowed to drink water from the water fountain or to even go to the bathroom. I was forced to not only request the bathroom trip, but wait for my specific officer to come back (after 30-45 minutes) to be allowed to go.

The officer decided that allowing M to enter the United States was too much of a risk. You know, being married and Pakistani and all. Instead of allowing him to withdraw his petition to enter, the officer decided to conduct what is called an Expedited Removal. This is a process that was signed into law in 1996, the Clinton era. It was a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act and basically gave Customs Agents the right to deport anyone applying or attempting to enter the United States. The entering 'alien' is not allowed to appeal the decision or to see a judge. They are not even in the United States, but they are declared 'deported' just as if they were, and are banned from entering for five years.

There is no appeal process and no seeing a judge. One requirement is that a supervisor approve the removal, there was not one on duty that night so the officer phoned him at home and he must have given verbal permission. Additionally, it is posted that I had the right to speak to the supervisor--the only manner of appeal--the officer denied this and did not allow me to speak with him.

M was photographed, fingerprinted and driven back to the Canadian side, after nine hours of holding, by the officer. I was allowed to follow, apply for reentry to Canada and pick M up in the Canadian immigration office. It was about 10:30 pm when we headed back to find a hotel where we could both stay.

A 'Dedicated' Protector of the Homeland

2009-04-11T11:08:00.004-04:00

Okay, so I admitted that I was a fairly naive person. I had not traveled much by this point and definitely not with M. We had all of course lived through September 11, but somehow in my mind, nearly four years later it just did not occur to me that it could cause me an issue. Neither did I think that the fact that it was the week of Bush II's second inauguration should cause me any issues. Truthfully, I had forgotten it was the same week.

Bordering on completely worthless and stupid, It didn't occur to me that a Pakistani man traveling on a Canadian passport could be singled out because of a Pakistani visa in his passport even if that visa was used so recently.

I did have qualms, knowing very little about immigration law about the two of us traveling together one on a U.S. passport and one on a Canadian passport, but I figured being truthful about our plans and the fact that M only had one suitcase of luggage would be proof enough that he had to return to Canada. In case anyone is unfamiliar, when entering the U.S. no matter from what country you are required to basically prove that you do not have immigrant intent. This usually comes into play with countries that require a visa, you've probably heard about it in reference to Pakistan, Bangladesh, India. . .even Mexico a lot, but every border agent is "trained" to try to figure out if you are trying to immigrate without the proper visa.

M and I had discussed it, and I had to go back to school and work relatively quickly. M would travel with me to my town and stay there a few weeks. It was our assumption that he would need to return to his home in Canada to obtain a proper divorce from his "wife" in Pakistan. And so, on the morning of January 15, 2005 we set out on our trip. We decided to stop and see a few of his friends first and got lunch at a nice little Italian place before beginning the journey. In a nice pile of mistakes I made, I had printed out directions from online and they were different that normal. They sent us to a different POE than we usually used, one in a much smaller, rural town bordering New York and Ontario, instead of my normal New York/Quebec POE. This makes a difference, I think, because of the "type" who was staffing each POE and their level of racist paranoia. (oops, did I write the word racist. . . .hmmmm?)

Anyway, M was unhappy with this route because it wasn't his normal either, but we didn't have a map and I was too worried to try to do the other route by memory, so we took it anyway. We waited several minutes in line before being "inspected" by the border agent. He quickly flipped through my passport and then M's, asking as he went, "How long are you planning on staying in the United States." My answer was not certain enough when I told him "Three weeks or so" for M's answer, and the man wanted to know how he would return. I honestly told him that M usually took a flight or bus back, but that we hadn't made plans for that yet, we would buy the ticket when we got there.

It was at this point that I realized the guard had stopped at M's Pakistani visa and used my passport as a bookmark to keep it open to that page. "Ma'am, " he said, "I'm going to need you to pull your car over beside that building. Leave the keys and all of your personal belongings inside. Do not take your cell phone with you." And still, I did not see that things had gone terribly wrong.

Airport

2009-04-09T12:12:00.003-04:00

I arrived at the airport at 12 noon. I couldn't sleep anyway and what if his plane landed early? (yeah right, an early international flight, right?) M still had not called, but what else was I going to do? I had driven 12 hours to pick this man up from the airport. . . . I walked around the airport shops looking for food. Drank some juice and watched others waiting for their families in the international section of the waiting area. There weren't very many stores because this section of the airport was undergoing renovations.

I found a phone card after walking around for a while and called M's home number to see if he picked up the phone. One of his brothers answered. I called the cell phone, no answer. It wasn't a definitive answer, but at least I knew he wasn't stupid enough to have ditched me and then answered the phone. The brother who answered the home phone seemed to be trying to tell me he wasn't there anymore, but with our broken language lines, I just couldn't be sure.

I checked the flight prompter, each time I checked it there was a different delay, it went from on-time to one hour delay, to thirty minute delay and then to landed. The plane marked landed around 1:45 pm and by 2:30 I was getting antsy again. I was pacing a little and each time the doors opened I watched intently to see any sign of which flight was coming in, an impossible task considering that there was such a crowd and I couldn't catch a glimpse of a ticket or luggage tag, and was too far back to question anyone as to which plane they had gotten off of.

I began to notice that other people who were waiting had began to watch me. One specific old man had been watching me for the last two hours or so, I guess wondering why I was still here and what I could possibly be doing. I was starting to lose hope that M was coming at all. His plane had registered "landed" for more than an hour and a half and still no sign of him. I was standing behind a crowd of people and I was too short to see over them, I had to peer between them to see the new arrivals. I began to get panicked thinking that maybe I had missed him completely and he was in another part of the airport looking for me.

Suddenly the doors opened again and a fresh batch of arrivals came walking through. I could see women, then a family and an elderly couple and then a thick batch where I couldn't make out each individual face. I was standing on my tip-toes when I saw him. He'd only been gone for five months, but he had aged years. There were bags under his eyes and his normally strong thin frame was emaciated. He was a little darker and rail thin, but as soon as he saw me his eyes changed to the person I remembered. He grinned the same surprised grin he gave me when I had come to Montreal the first time.

His mouth was open and his eyes turned red. I teared up, but I did not cry. I darted to the outside of the ropes and M came underneath it. He hugged me the way I remembered. He hugged me hard and close. I couldn't believe he was back. For the entire trip I had convinced myself that I might not see him even this time, but here he was, thinner and sadder, but here. He quickly stopped hugging me and grabbed my face and just stared at me. "I really thought I would never see you again," he said, "I didn't think you would come."

We walked out to the car holding onto each other all the way, tightly.

Back to Canadastan

2009-04-07T22:28:00.003-04:00

So the night before M's flight to Montreal I drove and drove and drove. It was January, so there was a lot of snow. I didn't reserve a room figuring I would just get one close to the airport.

Twelve hours is a long time to drive, especially when you've worked a day shift and only napped a few hours before starting the trip. I had a lot of time to think. . . I was very excited, but not completely convinced that M would actually be on the plane when it landed. I spoke to him again before he was scheduled to leave, he had stops in the UAE and Frankfurt before landing in Montreal and I asked him to call me from one or the other. He called me before he left and didn't call to cancel, as he had on all previous trips. During my whole trip I pegged where he should be and when. He was supposed to land in Montreal at 1:00 pm. . .he did not call once during the night.

I arrived in Montreal around 5 am. I barely recongnized the streets covered in snow. It was wet and dirty, beautiful Montreal in January. The first two hotels I stopped at had no rooms and I was getting a little tipsy. I desperately needed a nap. When I walked into the Ramada they had a room, but I had to rent it for the previous night because it was before check-in time. . .and pay for the next day. I did not care, I needed a shower and somewhere close to stay before I picked up M. I went back outside to get my luggage and slipped into a mud puddle under ice. I was so excited and nervous, it made me laugh.

I went upstairs to shower and laid down in the bed. I could not fall asleep. I had been so tired originally, but now I couldn't shut down the images in my head. For months I had imagined that M would just appear in places around my home. I kept thinking that he would just show up at my work, or at my house. I would see him places, in the store, on the street, even in the towns I had to go to for work on the ambulance. I would see him places he would never be.

I would dream about the day that I would pick him up from the airport. I imagined hugging him. I imagined the way he would look at me. I could feel it sometimes, the way that he hugged me. M had this way of hugging me like he might never see me again, hard and tight. I could feel that in my dreams sometimes.

Now, I couldn't sleep because I wasn't sure if he would be there, and if he was, I wasn't sure of what was going to happen now. My good little Pakistani Muslim was technically married, we had technically already broken up and I technically hadn't heard from him for his entire flight.

"Reeling" Me Back In. . . .

2009-04-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

While M was gone I was not in the best of health. I've never experienced something so completely physical caused by something so emotional since. I was unable to eat normally. I would wake up in the morning with a nervous stomach ache. I would go to work at 9am and by 2:00 pm I was able to eat something. I would eat a small meal and most every day, I vomited it right back up.

Thinking back to it, it is quite inexplicable. It was a depression that I cannot rationally describe because looking back it seems quite ridiculous. It resulted in a 30 lb weight-loss that was actually quite obvious. I had been working while M was gone and had also gone back to attending graduate school. I was doing a Master's in Teaching, working my two Paramedic jobs and doing a short practicum for school. My luck was always that my Paramedic schedule was very flexible and that college schedules always give ample breaks.

It was the very next day that after my lashing out that M called me back. He said that he just wanted to let me know that he was flying into Montreal on January 13. He told me that he didn't care if I came or not, that he had a lot of "decisions to make" and that he would "find a way home" even if I didn't come, but that he thought I would want to know after such a long time.

It was obvious to me that this was his way of making a plea. We talked for a few minutes and I told him that I would be there. I was quite afraid that he was going to let me down again, but at the same time, I could not refuse. It was completely impossible. I had waited too long and dreamt too often of seeing him again. The things I said the day before were clouding us both, as was the obvious overhanging of the past five months. Nonetheless, I again rearranged my schedule and planned for a week of travel time. I knew that he would come back home with me. There was no doubt in my mind.

Broken Promises

2009-03-29T18:07:00.006-04:00

It became obvious over the course of those few weeks in December that a quick return home and a quick annulment/divorce were not going to be realistic. The family pressure was actually scaring M in a way that I simply never have understood. The paperwork was finally delivered in the last week of December and M was free to book his ticket. The ticket was almost expired at this point and booking a flight with it carried a cash penalty.

M tried to convince me this was the main problem, until I discovered the U.S. Dollar value of 50 Rupees. . . .

The cash penalty wasn't the main problem though, the main problem was booking a flight that corresponded to his original booking from five months earlier. Consistently, he would think he had a flight and then would call me the morning of or the day before, to let me know that the plans had fallen through. Finally, on January 5, 2005 I had had enough. I had waited and waited and actually made plans for my trip to pick him up at the airport in Canada. (A 12-hour trip, mind you.) He called me from the cell phone, while riding in a cab. He sounded out of breath and apologetic as he once again cancelled telling me he had even gone so far as to ride to the airport and his ticket was not accepted. In the background I could hear all of the horns honking and traffic noises. He gave me the news and quickly had to get off the phone due to all of the distractions.

I had been called and cancelled three times in two weeks, and I gave up. I called M on the phone after he got home. I was crying and told him that I did not care if he came back or not. I told him that he obviously had no intention of being honest with me and did not care for me in the way that I had been led to believe. I told him that he had proven it multiple times, first by making the trip when we both knew it was a bad idea, then by extending his stay, marrying some strange woman, and cementing it with 'jerking me around' for such a long time.

Instead of apologizing he simply listened, made an excuse or two, and acted as if I were being unreasonable, which made me more angry. Finally he said, "Fine," and we hung up.

M's Inner Battle

2009-03-24T20:13:00.012-04:00

I talked to M for a long time that day. Mostly I did the talking. I grieved as I talked, and said things that had he been strong enough, would have made him angry. Instead, he just took it. His voice was too quiet to hear at times and he thought out loud about his religion, about the 'wedding.'

M is Muslim, very Muslim. He tries to find out what he is 'supposed' to do according to his religion and tries to put aside what he wants no matter how much it hurts. As I said before, he has more than once referred to me as his "weakness." It was his family's opinion that marrying me would weaken his religion and change his "line." This was a worry he had begun to share. Now, being technically married, he worried that even talking to me on the phone was bad, but that turned out to be something he could not leave.

Don't doubt that he tried.

M's parents changed immediately after the marriage was conducted. The watch of his cousins was loosened. Suddenly, M's demeanor started changing back to a more normal replica of himself. He was not getting sick every night and was allowed out of the house alone. I would call and find that he had the cell phone in the market or on the streets. His family started making plans for him to leave but required that he wait for his "wife's" papers before going. The marriage happened November 24, 2004, and on December 13, the paperwork still had not been delivered.

The thing that got more complicated for me was M's guilt. He kept trying to determine if divorcing this woman was allowed by his religion, and at what cost to his family. His marriage had been a work of several both distant and close members of the family. One of the most instrumental in the planning was a certain favorite and trusted cousin of his who wanted to marry one of his other cousins. Theirs was a 'love' match, but unequal in education and wealth. The female was college educated while the male was by description of the prospective bride's mother, "illiterate." Oddly, this part of the match was not made known to M until long after the marriage had taken place and he was no longer even in Pakistan. The trade was the Canadian immigration, which apparently is as good as gold when it comes to marriage planning.

In addition to this matter, were subtle family threats that I cannot begin to understand. I know that families are very involved in marriages in Paksitan and how could this not be true when there are so many interrarranged cousin marriages? But it becomes very personal when someone hints at breaking an engagement or divorce. This is not even to mention the cultural stigma carried with divorce in the first place.

And so, there was M, stuck between a 'wife,' his family, religion, and a gori-amrikaan 'girlfriend,' a word, which, by the way, he despises.

Haze (pt.2)

2009-03-17T17:22:00.000-04:00

It would be three more days before I could get in touch with M. I did not spend those days idle, instead I put my time to good use prank calling Pakistan. By this time I was very angry that I was not able to get in touch with M and did not care who I disturbed. I would call intermittantly from around 1:00pm my time to 3:00pm which translated to 12 midnight-2am their time. When someone else answered the phone, that did not stop me. I simply hung up and dialed again.

The person answering was a voice I had never heard before, but that did not stop me either. You could probably very accurately have labeled me both psychotic and obsessive at that point, with a good measure of bitter. I called too many times to count. Allowed the phone to ring until it was answered, no matter how many rings that meant. I shouted at the phone when the line refused to connect, I spoke to the person on the phone in my broken, rehearsed Urdu as much as possible, and then stopped.

On the day that M finally answered the phone he was sullen. He sounded angry and sad at the same time. It took several minutes for him to tell me that he had married and when he did I shook. For a minute I thought that I couldn't breathe and quite literally I could feel my heart. I could feel my heart breaking.

M was mine, at least, he was supposed to be mine. We had firsts together. We had history. I was mad. I was mad at him. I was mad at what I perceived as his weakness. I was mad at his failure. I was mad at his tone and his inability to answer my questions.

I started shouting, "I cannot believe that you have done this!" I berated him, "Do you know how much trouble this is going to cause us? How much time we are going to lose? This is not easy to fix! This was a stupid decision. Why didn't you run? I begged you to run!"

In the time that M had been gone, our preliminary visa paperwork had been approved with an expiration date in December. I used that against him.

I shouted about the "poor girl" he had married. I asked him if he'd even tried to explain the situation to her. His story at the time was jumbled and confused and told in a weak voice. He apologized and then I got to the point.

I asked him where she was and he got angry. He had made it clear to his parents that the one thing he would not budge on was bringing "that woman" home. He would marry as they demanded and then be allowed to leave. Their condition for this was that he wait for all of her "paperwork" so that he could immediately apply for her to immigrate with him to Canada. With her living in NWFP and he several hundred miles away, this would be a logistical problem and take time. He had finally reasoned with them that there was no reason to bring her to his home for her to live while waiting for immigration.

Culturally, an interesting point to this marriage, was the strange matching of the pair. M grew up in a huge city in Pakistan. While his family was definitely not rich, and in fact, was quite poor while he was growing up, M had gone to college, learned English both on his own and by taking classes at a private "institute." He had learned to read and speak English quite well before immigrating to Canada. The girl, on the other hand, was from a small village, spoke only M's "tribal" language, not Urdu and not English. She had finished only the secondary portion of her education and was teaching at a small school in her village. They had never really met, or socialized though technically they were cousins. None of this mattered, what mattered to his parents was that she was not, in fact, me. She was not white, not American, not a stranger, not a Christian. Chosen by them, she was not me.

The Haze

2009-03-14T22:47:00.005-04:00

I had my first panic attack on November 24, 2004. I did not know what was happening at the time, but it was the same day that M got married.

I had gone out to dinner with two really good friends. It had been three days since I had last spoken to M. We drove back from a really nice dinner and all of the sudden I could not breath. My chest hurt and my whole body was numb. I started to hyperventilate and could not speak. This had never happened to me before, nor has it since. I couldn't even cry appropriately, just watery eyes. I had cried too much and I guess in my heart I knew something was really wrong.

Since then I have tried to get M to tell me what happened that day. The part he tells me is after making a long trip from his home to the mountains his whole family piled into a van and they drove for a very long time. He always describes that day almost like a fog. He says they were driving and he had his cell phone in his hand. He would look out the window and think a lot of things, but he vividly remembers wishing that the van would drive off of the mountain. He remembers wondering where they were going, though he really knew.

He describes thinking that his cell phone wouldn't work there and that it was time for me to call him.

They took him into the mosque just long enough to sign the paperwork. Though she signed the nikka nama, it is unclear to me if she was even in the same room of the mosque that he was when it took place. There was no dinner, no party, and no rukhsati.

Her family was given jewelry, purchased by M's mother and aunt, and clothing and then there was the trip back.

My Father's Advice

2009-03-09T14:53:00.000-04:00

I found myself in this situation while in the middle of a shift. I was crying uncontrollably and could not stop. My luck was that I was working with my best friend who knew all that was going on. There was no way to hide it from her and she was able to listen and not betray her distrust of the whole situation. K was my best friend and roommate and had listened all of the times that M had stood me up in the beginning. She didn't quite trust him, but she knew how attached I was and knew every detail of what had been going on in his absence. I finished out the shift and made my way to my parents' house.

I was 23 years old, but I sat in my father's lap and cried that day. I told him what was happening and got the most unexpected advice. My father said that with all the things I knew about M's situation in Pakistan and the family control of marriages, that M might be telling me the absolute truth.

I had been convinced that no one in the world would be able to respect me if I listened to this story from M. I had assumed I was the only person who would believe it, and even I wasn't completely confident in my trust. In my narrow, naive viewpoint, something like this could never happen. I was more used to the story of the "suspicious Muslim man" having one family in his home country and one in his 'adopted' country. Those were the stories I had read and seen on television.

I had heard of women that this happened to, but not men. I listened to my father's advice, and I went home to research. I googled "forced marriages" and "forced arranged marriages." I googled any topic I thought might bring me closer to finding anyone else who had the same situation. I found fewer men than women, but there were men to whom this had happened.

I laid awake that night trying to think of what to do. I tried to think of ways to encourage M to run and I reminded myself that that had been a failing tactic for nearly three months already. I reminded myself that he didn't even have access to his own passport at this point. There had even been an incident where I got him the phone number to the Canadian Embassy, he'd even called it only to finally cancel their assistance. There was nothing inside him that was able to just run away from his family at this point. That method was futile.

I went the next day and saw one of M's friends. It was this friend who sealed my belief in what M had been telling me from Pakistan. The friend felt that M was not doing enough to get away, but said to me, "How could you not have known this would be a problem. Did you not realize his caste?"

To this day, I'm not really sure what exactly his "caste" had to do with it, though I've come closer to understanding in that M was Pathan. His family had moved one generation before his birth directly from NWFP. No one in his family ever had a "love marriage." No one in his family immigrated outside of Pakistan. No one in his family married anyone else but a cousin properly chosen by their parents. In fact, little did I know, that M had attempted, unsuccessfully, to have his marriage arranged to a cousin long before his immigration to Canada, and that failure was one of the driving motivations for his self-exhile.

M had immigrated to Canada and had since become the family's sole provider, breadwinner and bragging right. This, had not occurred to me.

I called M the next day. It took every ounce of strength I had to tell him, "Do what you have to do, just come home."

Difficult Decisions

2009-03-07T14:35:00.002-05:00

I spent the entire months of September and October listening to various excuses about M's father's health and his brother's wedding. I was still working as a Paramedic at that time for two different jobs. I carried my cell phone 24/7, had phone cards stuffed into my bags and made time every day between 12 and 1 to call M on the off chance that he would get the phone instead of his family.

It got to the point that I would be sleeping at 3 am and get a strange international call from M who had gotten time with his brother's cell phone. These calls were always panicked and nearly always irrational. He sounded like a completely different person in these calls. When he was with me he had been happy, and funny, without a care in the world. He could have fun mopping a floor or posing for goofy pictures. But now he was just sick, depressed and paranoid.

I spent those two months carrying around ticket estimates and a visa application. I was always trying to get his address and permission to come bring him back home.

It was in November that M gave me the bottom line, "They are not going to let me leave until I've gotten married."

He explained that his entire day was loaded with family visits from people his parents considered prospects, calls on the telephone and his family shoving pictures of eligible cousins in front of his face. He spent his days arguing his case in futility and being fought by his parents and siblings, as well as the cousins who accompanied him everywhere he went. The cousins were more subtle, but their message was clear.

I was livid and angry and screaming at this point. All I could think of was broken promises and how 'disappointing' he was to me. It was my opinion that there was no way that he could be so sick that he could not run away, that he could not pull himself out of the illness or the reaching distance of his family. Even hearing his voice, listening to his stories, even with the decreasing contact I could not possibly believe that there was nothing else he could do.

I used every argument that I could think of, the paperwork we had processing, the difficulty of obtaining an international divorce once he'd left, the effect on the girl in question having been married and immediately divorced. I reminded him of his promises to me, and I cried, a lot. I spent the conversation trying not to imagine my own reaction if they made him bring this girl home, something that I did not know was optional in Pakistani culture.

His family had chosen the girl, a cousin living in NWFP whom he'd never met. My phone card died.

Conspiracy

2009-02-28T17:58:00.002-05:00

Things just kept getting worse. For the first several months I spoke to M every single night. We would talk for at least 25 minutes and most of the time longer. I was very inexperienced with international calls back then and all I knew about were those crazy STI phone cards, so I would spend $5 for a 25 minute call, and that was pretty much the best bargain I could get. I would run one card out and start another only to use it completely up too. The phone calls were the high point of my day.

Inconsistently, we could use MSN Messenger. M had taken his computer with him and when he could get online and stay there, we would talk. But it was just not the same since we couldn't hear each other that way.

And then suddenly, M wasn't around for calls each night. It became difficult to contact him and sometimes his mom would get the phone before he could and hang up on me. I finally had to resort to getting one of his male friends in my town to call for me, get M on the phone and then I could talk to him. M was not helping the situation. As depressed as he was he started mentioning how persistent his family was being about getting him married there in Pakistan. They had people calling the house all day long with proposals and daily had pictures of the "prospects." In the beginning M had found this funny and even minorly gratifying. He explained to me that he could have three arms and one eye and be a 'catch,' as long as he still had his Canadian passport.

It was around this time that M's passport disappeared from his bag along with the ticket stub for his return ticket. M's younger brother was getting married and this had been the family's first reason for an extension request, but as they got bolder, they pressed harder and harder about M himself.

The pressure and arguments started about his 'family responsibility.' They pressured about his getting 'citizenship' for one of his cousins. They chose specific members of the family and the extended family got involved.

One of M's closest male cousins was working behind the scenes as well, because his own arranged marriage had become tied to a demand for M to marry a cousin of the woman this cousin wanted to marry. This situation was complicated further by the lack of education of M's cousin as compared to the education level of the woman he wished to marry. For this particular cousin the situation was dire, because theirs was a 'love' match. It did not seem to matter that M had a 'love match' of his own, that was of no consequence.

The interesting thing is that this part of the dynamic was hidden from me, and part of it was hidden even from M. The only information we both had was that M was getting sicker and sicker. M knew about the demands, but he didn't know how many people had a hand in it, and seemed oblivious as to the connection between the demands of his family and his health.

I knew that M was having episodes of vomiting nightly and that he was weak. My real fear came in when he started describing his other symptoms, which I knew to be serious. He was having bleeding problems--which I decline to describe--in addition to hallucinations. This was when I got scared. This was when I started pressuring for M to give me his address in Pakistan. M refused.

Green and Gold

2009-02-24T16:16:00.008-05:00

Just before M left for Pakistan we had a huge fight. M did not have a permanent apartment in Canada, so he had to leave his possessions somewhere. There were very few of them, so few that they fit into a small suitcase. It had been my assumption that I would keep them for him since we had already discussed my coming to pick him up when he got back from Pakistan.

One of my favorite M pastimes was going through his stuff. Silly, I know, but it felt good that he really didn't care that I did it. One of my favorites was his wallet, and my new favorite second was this suitcase. M had used his Canadian passport to get his visa to go to Pakistan, and his old, outdated Paksitani passport was inside this suitcase. I opened the book in awe of the picture I found there. In M's Canadian passport was the most beautiful picture of M ever. He was wearing a very fancy burgundy shirt with a tie that appeared silk and was a slightly different color than the shirt.

That outfit had been his pride on the day he went to get his Canadian citizenship and he had had the passport photo taken the same day. Getting his Canadian passport was very important to M. He loved the country and was very proud that he had made it there and made his way to citizenship. In the picture he looked very fancy, hair perfectly coiffed with gel, short and just a tiny up part in the front. He was freshly shaven and had this half smile that was typical for him when he was really proud or happy about something. In this picture, you could even see the tiny dimple to the left of his mouth, the one I fell in love with.

The M inside the Pakistani passport was an entirely different person. The M in that picture had longer, more tousseled hair. He was wearing a large jacket that looked like something a Canadian would wear to a hockey game. The M in the Pakistani passport looked a little mean and very bulky with a square jaw. He was very concerned with bodybuilding back then. My eyes were wide looking at it and M got embarrassed. We laughed over how much he had changed in such a short time.

We drove to M's friend's house and I sat in the car while he walked in to borrow a bigger suitcase. M and I had gone shopping for the relatives and he needed a much larger suitcase than what he had to hold all of the gifts. Shortly after going in, M returned to retrieve his small belongings bag and asked me to give him the Pakistani passport. His friend was going to hold it for him.

I'm not sure if it was the stress of M's trip, or my trip or simply the embarrassment I felt at being asked to hand the belongings over to a complete stranger (to me) or that we'd been discussing his own forebodence of the Pakistan trip, but I got angry. I became a strange kind of angry. I to this day cannot explain what made me so mad because it was nearly unexplainable. My only explanation is that as the girl he was going to marry, it would stand to reason that I would hold his things for him. Besides, I was still insecure about the whole no return ticket thing. His thought was that his friend always did this for him and why would this time be any different?

As a result of the fight, M asked me to keep his things, and I, being stubborn, refused. The Pakistani passport ended up torn into two separate pieces and nearly chucked out the window in a shopping center parking lot. It was the first time I had seen M truly angry. In the end it was returned to the suitcase and dropped with M's friend.

The loss of that passport changed my ability to react in those long months that M was in Pakistan. I lost one very important key to the problem, his address in Karachi which had remained constant, the same over twenty years. The same address written inside that tiny green book with the golden design.

Crazy

2009-02-22T11:37:00.003-05:00

The first few calls went beautifully. The phrase worked like a charm, I'm a good parrot. M's mother was always the one answering the phone and she giggled uncontrollably each time I called. She always went yelling for M in the same sing-song voice and I started analyzing the way she said his first name.

One annoying thing about M and I was that when he introduced himself to me, instead of using his given name he used his surname. He did not think I would be able to pronounce his first name properly and he hates his first name anyway so he just told me to call him his last name. It was three months into 'dating' that I found out his real first name and by then I was so stuck on the name he'd given me I just couldn't change it! So when I listened to his mom sing out his real first name I would try my best to imitate it and that made me giggle as well.

M would tell me stories about his visit and how his friends were all coming by and how he was sleeping late every day. He would tell me that his father was taking his time in making appointments and that they had scheduled a date for surgery. He told me his mother wanted him to stay at least a month, but that it was really hot. . .we talked about a little bit of everything.

It took about a week for the fighting to start. His father from the very beginning was against M marrying an American, much less a Christian, white American. His father had never met one, but he knew, certainly, from all of the talk in his city, that we were not a good match. And so it happened one day, probably in the fifth week M was in Pakistan, that M's father happened to answer the phone when I called. To my amazement, my phrase did not work. M's father simply screamed into the telephone, "NO!" and promptly hung up the phone as violently as possible.

It was soon after this that M started to get sick. By sick I mean violently ill. It could be heard in his voice, this depression and weakness. He told me that he was vomiting every day and that there were times he felt like he couldn't even make it out of bed. He would call sounding hopeless and upset. He would tell me about fights he'd had with his parents about our marriage and they always ended with his parents demanding an arranged marriage with one of his cousins. He was told that this was his responsibility to his family. He was told horrible things about 'me' by people who had never met me.

His parents made wild claims about how I would only stay married to him for seven years, and how our children would have no religion and how after seven years I would take the children and he would not be allowed to see them. They even came up with an example of how this had happened to 'so and so' a member of their community as concrete proof that this was the only way it could happen.

Each day we talked and he would start out hopeless. I used memories and pep talks and he always sounded better when we got off the phone. He said he always slept better after those talks and I thought it was giving him resolve to convince his parents or to abandon ship. We had discussed this many times and it was always my conviction that he felt strongly enough that it was his right to marry whomever he wished. The problem was that time was slipping by very quickly. He had left on August 03 and by October he was ill, had lost a lot of weight and suddenly his parents had drastically changed.

My phone calls were limited to after midnight Karachi time, and sometimes we couldn't even talk then. M's brother had a cell phone and M would call me from that sounding more desolate than ever. Constant fighting has a way of taking a toll. M was also advised by one of his close friends that his mother had been out with an aunt to buy 'something' from a magician recommended by his sister. To me, this made the illness make perfect sense. While I don't really believe that 'black magic' can change one's mind or work in the classical way that his mother obviously did, it made perfect sense that having some crazy weed or pill put into his food would make him ill. I begged him to start eating away from home. He thought I was crazy. Three months into his two week trip to Pakistan, he was correct.

The Honeymoon Period

2009-02-21T17:28:00.005-05:00

It was my opinion that the ticket not having a return date proved a point. I was livid. M quickly left the travel agency to retrieve me. He argued that this was the way 'everyone' buys tickets to Pakistan. He argued that his father was sick and "what if something happened?" He argued that it was cheaper this way. I knew all of this explaining was complete bullshit and that he had only given a date in the first place to placate me. He had a habit of doing things like this in order to avoid conflict. . . .telling me what I wanted to hear.

I had never demanded a time limit, how could I? But I HAD asked when he was coming back. Apparently, he felt that two weeks was reasonable and just faked it. His main argument was that if his father needed him to stay longer, it would be expensive to change the ticket, whereas if he bought an open ticket, he could come back "any time."

M was certain his parents were going to approve of us after he talked to them in person. We were so serious, that I brought all of the paperwork with me to file a fiancee visa for him. We had decided it could start its processing while he was gone and be closer to done by the time he returned. We actually signed all of the papers in the parking garage of the airport. (So began my in-depth immigration education. . . oh how I have learned since then. . . .)

We arrived extra early to get him checked in and so that we could eat together before he got on his flight. As soon as he boarded the plane I was to start my 12 hour trek back home. We sat depressed, eating and he instructed me on how to make an international call and where to get phone cards and how to talk to his parents when I called. No one in his home speaks any English, so I had to ask in Urdu. He taught me the phrase and gave me the dialing instructions on a 'Burger King' napkin. I could tell that he was tense, but he was excited at the prospect of surprising his mom. She knew he was coming in the next few weeks, but he had not told her when. It was going to be a complete surprise.

We scheduled a time for our calls based on the time difference and made the first call within a few hours of his arrival time. I left the airport sobbing to make my way back home.

He called me from a pay phone in the airport waiting room before I even made it out of the airport parking lot. It was things like this that reminded me why I was going to miss him so much. He was worried about my crying and how I was going to make the trip.

Ticket to Pakistan

2009-02-17T21:07:00.003-05:00

M promised his trip would only last for two weeks and so on August the fourth I drove my crazy self back to Canada to help him get ready for the trip. M was NOT happy about this trip and the more I listened to his stories from Pakistan, I knew why. He was not exactly on good terms with his parents and it seemed obvious to me that the trip was not a good idea. M was set on it though. He had already reserved the tickets and so I went with him to the travel agency to pick them up. It was there that I got my first inkling that something was really wrong.

We went to the agent and he started explaining the terms of the tickets. Now mind you, I am not completely naive. The idea that I could be "fooled" by my Pakistani boyfriend into thinking that we have a chance for a happily married life, did not escape me. I read all the same stories and newspaper articles that you guys have. I read about men who married women in their home countries to make their parents happy. I read about women being married to these men YEARS before they found out. And so, I was on the lookout for anything, everything that might mean I was wrong for caring so much.

When the travel agent laid the tickets down I picked them up. I was curious. I had never flown or actually seen a plane ticket. I had never had a plane ticket, or any other piece of paper make me so angry in all my life. As I read the details of the ticket I seethed. I took in a deep breath, stood up silently, slammed the tickets into M's lap and walked directly out of the travel agent's office and down the street. I heard the travel agent trying to explain something, he had noticed I was angry even before M. And as I stomped down the street I heard M shouting behind me and then standing silently at the door of the travel agency as I walked away.

I had walked three blocks before I realized I had no idea where my car was parked.

There was no return date on the ticket.

Trouble. . .

2009-02-08T21:59:00.004-05:00

M and I had to search out a hotel room because there was no way for me to stay with he and his friend. M had never had to use a hotel in his own town so we immediately went to the closest one. It drew a QUICK veto from me, it was the nastiest hotel I had ever seen. We ended up instead renting a room for me in the "cheesiest" place I'd ever seen. Maybe one day I'll share a story about that, but I don't think you know me well enough yet. . .I'd never get you back if I described the place right now.

At any rate, we were extremely happy to see each other again, and M was amazed that I had come all that way just to see him. We spent a few days of him showing me around and doing minorly touristy things. This was the first time I ate samosas or found myself surrounded entirely by desis. M's little neighborhood was like a little piece of Pakistan, mixed in with a few scattered Egyptians and the random Saudi Arabian. I had never actually seen so many white beards in one place at the same time and in M's neighborhood, the people frequently wore Salwar Kameez. In the U.S. all of his friends completely wore Western dress, so this was a bit new for me too. The other new thing was that I had never really been around M and his friends when they spoke only Urdu or Hindko. Here, there were a lot of his friends that didn't speak English at all.

M had spoken to his parents about me before, but it had never ended well. He decided he should call them and tell them that he had decided he was getting married. I set about doing other things to clean up the hotel room, repack, get ready for lunch, anything to pretend to not be listening to his conversation, but I TOTALLY WAS.

He broke it to them slowly and then all hell broke loose. Apparently it started with his mother crying and then with his father yelling at him. His mother basically was sad that she wasn't going to be arranging his marriage but his father was livid. The conversation ended after 35 minutes of mother crying and father and son yelling at each other. This wasn't exactly what he or I had hoped for, but frankly it was what I had expected, at least feared.

I had, early on, made a point of asking M what his parents would think if he were to marry an American. He had told me a very well concocted story about how they would accept it and how they had told him he could marry whomever he wished. It was a nice story, but it was not the truth.

M called back the next day with the same result and on the third day he called back and his father told him that he needed to come to Pakistan. The pretense for the visit was that his father was sick. They said that M needed to be there to shuttle his father back and forth from the hospital. The plan was for his father to go to one of the American hospitals in Karachi and for this reason they wanted M to be there to take him to appointments and take care of him. Based on the sketchy information and timing, we were both pretty sure this was not the reason for the trip, but M was confident that if he went there he could not only help his father but he could convince his parents of his plans.

It was decided that M would go to Karachi on August 4, 2004. I knew I wouldn't survive too many months of separation, so I planned to coordinate another visit so that I could take him to the airport and see him right before he left. M thought it was silly for me to come, but he wasn't going to tell me no.

I returned home elated that my trip had gone so well, but crying the whole way.

Knocking on the Door

2009-02-02T21:17:00.003-05:00

As I walked towards the apartment building my stomach started to turn. M did not know I was coming, I had never met the friend he was living with and I had been awake for many hours too long. The buildings were tan and old and looked very run-down. I opened the rickety glass door by it's metal handle, which was broken and stepped off of the cracked stone walk and into the dark tile floored entryway.

Apt 1 was on my right and I knocked, timidly on the door and stepped to the side so that he couldn't see me through the peephole. I wanted to see his reaction when he opened the door. I heard him yelling as he came to the door. He poked his head out to see who was knocking and his eyes opened WIDE. M saw me and immediately took a step back inside and then all the way outside to look for sure.

His eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. He grabbed my arms and hugged me hard. "What are you doing here?" he asked. I could see he was in shock and I was giggling and smiling uncontrollably. "How did you come? Oh my God!" he just kept repeating over and over again. He didn't want to take me inside so we stepped out into the sunshine and I told him about the man on the balcony who had guided me to his house. In awe M walked out with me to introduce me to the man. M kept staring at the car and couldn't believe I had driven the whole way.

I was sleepy, but even more hungry so we drove to a tiny Chinese buffet in the shopping center just down the street from M's house. The food was absolutely aweful, but M just kept staring at my face. I explained the whole story about how I found the address and drove all night. I told him about getting lost and told him about how much I had missed him. M just kept staring at my face. I told him, "I just had to come. I couldn't wait any longer."

He finally just looked at me and said, "We have to get married. You have to marry me, right?"

It was funny, he said it just like that, like it was only logical. We had both thought about it, but never said it out loud. Just like that, it was out loud.

God and Luck

2009-01-29T22:06:00.002-05:00

So I drove all night and somewhere in the middle of the night passed right by I-287 which connects I-95 with I-87 to go through northern New York to get to Montreal. I did not just pass it, I passed it and kept going. About the time I hit Connecticut I knew I had gone wrong and I was going to have to call for help. I was freaking out a bit and didn't have even a small inclination to turn back. I called my mom. That night she was dispatching for 911 and still working for the city system. This worked to my advantage for many reasons, she's very experienced at guiding people out of being lost and she had immediate access to Google and Yahoo maps. . .she let me to I-90 and back up to I-87, but this error added a good three hours to my 12 hour planned journey which I had begun tired.

I didn't care, I was high on thought. I had to see M. I knew that things would be better when I got there. I fantasized what his reaction would be. I imagined it would be the same or bigger than the other surprises I had given him. He seemed to love surprises. His childhood had been pretty crappy (crappier than I even knew at the time) and the notion that someone cared so much about him that they spent all this time surprising him and doing things just for him seemed to please him immensely. I remembered how caring he had been when I had to leave him at the airport and had "Odie" with me on my lap. As I got more sleepy I would hold onto him and pet his head. Yes, I petted the fake dog's head.

I stopped in northern New York and ate some breakfast, talked to my parents and headed into Canada. It was a pretty fast trip through customs. The officer seemed very surprised and confused as to why someone would drive the 725 miles to Canada, and hadn't seen a plate from my state in apparently quite a while. For some reason this made me proud.

Now remember, M hadn't given me his address, I had looked it up online. He also hadn't given me directions and the signs when you hit Montreal are all in French. I do not speak French and spent about an hour driving and re-driving this horrible loop because I couldn't decipher the arrows on the confusing as crap sign. The way I finally knew I was in the right place is that M lived right across the street from the mosque. I spotted the minarets from his side street. I parked the car at just before 2:00 pm. I had been driving since around 9:00 the previous night. I must have looked half crazy when I stepped out of my Ford Contour.

I saw three apartment buildings and walked to the one with M's address number on it. Now the problem: These were apartment buildings. For some reason this had never occurred to me. It did not occur to me that I would have to figure out an apartment number, I figured the hard part was behind me. There were families outside playing and there was a couple on the balcony of the apartment building next to M's. I used my cell phone to call M's number figuring I could just ask the apartment number and walk to it still talking to him. No answer. I called three or four times, but knew that someone had to be on the phone and that his "roomie" never answered the call waiting and would spend hours on the phone. I started to get upset. I was tired and had no idea how to get to a hotel, and just wanted to sleep. I was pacing now on the sidewalk in front of the apartments between a mosque and an all Pakistani neighborhood. It didn't occur to me at the time how out of place the white girl in jeans and a ponytail must have looked, pacing up and down the street on about 27 hours straight of no sleep.

The man on the balcony yelled out to me. There were two women standing with him who looked like they were both serving him. There was a little girl sitting at his feet and they were holding a little infant. When he addressed me I thought that each of the women would stare a dagger straight through me.

"Hey," he got my attention, "are you looking for M?"

I was astonished. He used M's first name, and I always called him by his technical surname, so it took me a minute to figure out we were talking about the same person. "Yes," I said.

"Go on in, you have the right place," he said.

"I don't know the apartment,"

"Oh, it's the first one, go on in." he replied.

It took me a few steps to realize that I had never met this man, and I had no idea how he would know I was looking for M. Do all the white girls look for M??? I turned back around, "How did you know I was looking for M?"

"Oh, he showed me your picture. I knew it was you."

I melted. I thanked him and turned smiling. M was in apartment 1.

2009-01-25T11:55:00.003-05:00

It's funny to remember. I had never been outside the country, never had a passport, never flown on a plane, so what is the first thing a girl does when she starts dating a Pakistani Canadian? Goes out and gets her passport. . .er. . .well, that was what I had done anyway. For some reason in my crazy head, I knew I just had to see Pakistan, and that we might go to Canada as well, so I had gotten my passport pretty quickly.

I had printed out my directions, and didn't want to tell my parents about the trip until I was well on my way. I decided this was not the most intelligent thing to do so I immediately called my father, who tried to subtly talk me out of it. Not out of going, but out of starting my trip at 9:00 pm after a 10 hour work-shift with no plans for hotels. I would also be travelling through New York and that made him very nervous. I was not hearing any of that. I had to go and I promised to keep my phone charged and to stay awake. I also promised to stop at a hotel if things got really bad. I KNEW I would not be stopping. I had to get there, I quite literally could think of nothing else. So after my father, I called one of my oldest friends and started describing my trip to her, all the while driving North on I-95. I was 25 minutes into my journey when she said, "Okay, so you've got everything you need, right?"

I started making an outloud list for her to evaluate. . . .she says, "Okay, what about your passport? You'll need that, right?"

In my crazy haste, no, I did not have my passport and it made me laugh. I turned around to go retrieve it from my house, a quick running in and out and I was on my way again.

M called me while I was on the way. We usually talked in the evening. He could tell that I wasn't at home and it worried him. I told him I was just depressed and was going to drive around for a little while. He asked me to call him when I got home and I told him it would be too late and I would talk to him tomorrow. He was very upset by this, and tried more than once to get me to go home. He had no idea what I was doing.

Hey, did you know that you don't have to drive through Connecticut to get to Montreal from Virginia?

The Greatest Journey

2009-01-24T14:08:00.002-05:00

So literally less than a week after M left, I had a really bad day at work. I was on the ambulance and got a call to take this elderly woman home. Her home was outside our city and we got printed directions online, confirmed the directions with her family and then proceeded to drive her "home." I repeat the family CONFIRMED the directions. The daughter and granddaughter decided to follow us in a car right behind and we took the confirmation of route and the fact that they followed us the entire way (with a cell phone in the car) to mean that our directions were correct.

Well, the directions were not correct. Did the family try to wave us down? Flash their lights? Call us on the cell phone? Call our dispatch center on their cell phone? NO. They followed us, twenty miles, the wrong way to the same address in another town name, which was the town they agreed to and we were told to go.

We apologized profusely and they led us to the new address. Did they take any of the blame for confirming the wrong directions that I asked them if were correct? NO. Instead they got on the ill-used cell phone and called up every drunk relative they had to be at the house when we got there. When we got to the house, they verbally abused us, jumped into our ambulance, threated us and called us names and accused us of being "racist," which was of course why I had driven their grandmother/mother/aunt all over the county. There were weapons and there was alcohol and there were threats.

We, as calmly as possible, carried the woman into the house and deposited her into bed. We drove home and I was majorly depressed not only because of the fear for our well-being and accusations and stress of being on such a long (wrong) trip in the first place, but because of my personal situation more. I was thinking about how I was continuously unhappy with or without people being nasty to me.

I decided to do something drastic. It had only been a week since I had seen M, we hadn't even discussed his address yet, only a phone number. I knew that if I told him I was coming he would tell me no. I went directly home, used www.whitepages.com to "reverse look-up" his new address and then yahoo mapped out my route. It turns out I was 725 miles, door-to-door from M.

I was going to Canada.

The Great Depression

2009-01-23T21:56:00.003-05:00

When M went back to Canada I was lost. I was working as a Paramedic at the time. I would go to work fine and then in the middle of the day at random times I would just start crying. I couldn't really control it. I had never missed anyone like this before in my life and didn't quite know what to do with it.

I worked with my best friend on the ambulance and she was helping to cover my complete inability to adapt. She would send me off to the bathroom when I started to cry and could make me laugh when no one else could.

M and I were still talking every day but it was difficult to coordinate. He had gone back and immediately started staying with one of his old friends. Being with friends and not in his own place made it difficult for him to access private phone time to talk to his little 'gori' girlfriend.

He had taken with him a little picture book that I gave him from our six months. There were a ton of pictures of he and I at the park, at the river, him looking up at me, me taking pictures of us together holding the camera away from us, us at the river. I had bought the little book for his going away. I thought it was fitting for it to be decorated by maps.

Going Away

2009-01-23T21:40:00.002-05:00

On July 3, 2004, M went back to Montreal. I begged him not to go. I told him that I didn't think things would be okay with us if he left. He was very cryptic about not wanting to leave, but he had to, that was where he belonged. He was a citizen there and his time here was up. He kept saying he wished he had "known me longer." He never mentioned marriage, but I could tell that was what he was talking about. He kept telling me that things would be different if we'd known each other longer.

We had met only eight months prior and had only been dating for six months. M wanted a ride to the airport, and I wanted to take him. He stayed at my house for the last three days and my mom went with me to drive him the two hours to the airport. My mom fell in love with M that day too. She watched me trying not to cry and M wiping away all my tears as they fell. He would watch me and keep talking and kept wiping away my tears. He pretended I wasn't crying.

When we got to the airport, my mom took care of the car and M and I went inside together so that I could say goodbye. M took me into the giftshop and bought me a Beanie Babie. It was the softest puppy, made after the character "Odie" from the Garfield movie. It looked nothing like Odie, but it made me feel so much better. It was tiny and soft, and I knew I was going to need something on the way back home. I knew I would be crying and I knew he was not coming back for a long time. I thought I knew this, but I really had no idea how long.

I had never been outside the country before, and had no idea what Canada was. I felt like I was losing my best friend.

2008-10-15T18:40:00.002-04:00

After Applebees we were inseparable. I discovered a few things about my new friend.

That strange accent that I mentioned before, a hybrid mix of growing up in Pakistan, learning English from British tapes and books, and immigrating at 25 years old to French Quebec and then traveling all over the east coast of the United States with a brief stint in Louisiana. I guess that I should have expected no less of an accent with that history. The funny thing is, I think he adopted more aspects of the French in QC speaking English than anywhere else.

M was a lot of fun. He was funny when you least expected it and he was so cute that it overshadowed imperfections. I think the thing that always got him out of trouble was the dimple strategically placed just to the left of his lips, situated to perfection and showing every single time he smiled or laughed. I loved to see him laugh and you could always tell when he was happy. It was fun to watch the way he related to his friends and the way that he made them laugh and how happy that made him.

I started seeing him after work several nights a week. He would feed me curry of all different types. He taught me about daal and goat meat and naan. Trust me, these are not things that women from my area of the country are familiar with. In fact, one of my first college friends, from Bangladesh, was shocked to see me eating curry in pictures. She remembered the days when I would order chicken wings and french fries as Chinese take-out (another habit I have thankfully broken after meeting M.)

SuperBowl 2003

2008-10-12T22:33:00.004-04:00

M and I talked every night. He didn't get off work until after midnight and I had to be at work every morning at 9am, but I still waited for his call every night at about 1:00am. I was so infatuated with his conversation that every night I would listen to his cooking, sizzling vegetables for curry or whatever he happened to be cooking. We would talk until 3:00 am and I would sleep like a baby after that until 8:00 when I got up for work.

Our first date was February 1, 2004, the night of the infamous Janet Jackson "boob" incident and three days after my 23rd birthday. We had scheduled to go out for dinner, but 6:00 rolled around and no call. Then 7:00, 8:00, 9:00. . .he finally called around 9:30 pm. He apologized and said he just couldn't get out of work until later. At this point I was livid. We'd had about three cancelled dates (none of which he had called to cancel, just never showed up.) I told him to just forget it, and he sighed heavily. He said, "No. I really want us to go. I really cannot get out right now, but I will come soon. Is that okay?"

I still don't know how in the world I swallowed my pride enough to take so many stalls and starts, but at 11:30pm I found myself sitting straight across a very thin Pakistani man at my local Applebees. Don't diss Applebees. . . at least it was open late enough for him to have his orange juice and me my chocolate fudge cake. And don't diss the chocolate fudge cake either, I mean who waits until 11:30 pm to go to dinner?

I liked the way that M talked to me. He was still shy and embarrassed, and had no idea what to order from an Applebees. Frankly, he only ate halal food and wasn't comfortable trying to figure out which dishes might be safe for him. The orange juice itself seemed like a monumental risk. I finally did talk him into a bite of my cake, but only one. And even through my own ignorance for the meaning of "halal" food I remember it did not contain whipped cream, so we were okay.

I fell in love with M that night, and it was the weirdest thing in the world. He asked me what I had done all day. Keep in mind that I was working a few jobs, I had taken the day off to schedule our date. I told him that I had gotten up late, read a book, took a nap and now was visiting him. What did he say to this?

"You were a lazy ass."

You could see from the shock in his eyes as soon as the words escaped his lips that this was not meant to come out loud. You could see that it was not something he would have normally said to a near stranger. You could see that he was completely mortified and I had to laugh. M had just accidentally shown some of what is his trademark humor. While it sounds simple and silly, and I guess you had to be there, when I started laughing I just said, "Yes, I was definitely a 'lazy ass.'" It reminded me how unlike me that was, and how I really, really liked this guy.

What does it take?!

2008-07-11T20:47:00.002-04:00

So M didn't call for a week. I continued about my business. I would go to the store I saw him at, almost daily to get fuel for the ambulance I was driving, but I wouldn't go into the store.

Eventually I gave up even that pretense and went into the store, "to get Aquafina." He, to my surprise, was watching me walk around the store and apologized for not calling me and told me he "lost my number." He seemed very serious and I did not believe him. He asked for the number again and we made an appointment for him to call, which he broke.

Let me make a long story short. We met in November, he took my number in December, and it took until January for him to call me. When he did finally decide to call, it was my first night out to a birthday party. He called and I was not home. I called him back and we made another appointment for him to call me when he got off work, "after midnight."

This time he called. We talked for almost three hours. I listened to him cook, we talked about my school, his job. . .we talked about what he liked to eat, we even hit the "do you drink/smoke/streetwalk for extra cash." Oh, wait, not that last one, but everything else.

He made me laugh and we decided to keep calling each other. . .so, I had a date, every night after midnight, for a phone call.

M

2008-07-11T20:40:00.003-04:00

M was interesting to me. He was kind of a mystery and I think that was why I liked him. In the beginning, I would only see him at the store where I met him. He would ask me questions, and I would go about my day.

Eventually he asked me for my phone number and I had a moment's hesitation before giving it to him. I mean, who gives a guy they meet in a gas station their phone number? I just thought that it wouldn't make a very good "meeting" story, and would sound kind of funny on the news: "22 year old Paramedic killed by man she gave her phone number to in a gas station."

It was not a headline I thought my mother would appreciate reading. When I hesitated he had this look in his eye that won me over. He looked so,

innocent?

hopeful?

sweet?

honest?

I don't know what it was in his eyes, but I did give him my telephone number, and he told me he was going to call.

He didn't.

Research

2008-06-11T20:57:00.003-04:00

By the time that M and I began dating, I figured out that he was from Pakistan, which was strange to me. I had never actually "met" anyone from Pakistan. My father studied Hindi the entire time I was growing up and for that reason I knew several words of Hindi, and knew a small bit about Hinduism and India as a whole. I knew nothing about the Muslim faith, but because M was from Pakistan, I assumed he must be Muslim.

Because of his shyness and early inability to call me on the phone or drag himself out of the house to meet me coupled with the fact that he had once mentioned that he did not eat pork, I assumed that he was a practicing Muslim.

I began researching everything I could about Islam. I focused on all of the things Americans fear first. My most horrible fear was regarding Polygamy. My father, a devout Christian, always loved talking, researching, and even toyed with the idea of practicing Polygamy. My father's obsession with polygamy was to me like walking into your house one day and finding your father standing in the living room with a rifle aimed at your head ready to shoot you. I, in fact, found out about it while visiting my parents for Christmas break my first year in college.

Something inside me has always feared and thus hated--I know this is a strong word, I'm just being succinct here--Polygamy. I am not specifically a selfish person, but there is no way that I could share a husband. It is completely too personal. There is too much dependence and trust there. I grew up with the idea that my husband would be a "full time" husband, and there is no way I could live with anything else. It is my plan to give 100% and I expect the same in return.

Anyway, I digress, I researched everything I could find. The first thing I wanted to know is if a Muslim man is even allowed to marry a Christian woman. There are lots of different schools of thought on this, but the short of it is that the Koran specifically permits it. Most scholars today do not like it, but it is in the Koran either way.

Does it seem funny that I thought of marriage right away?

Addiction

2008-05-31T16:52:00.003-04:00

It turned out that M was addictive. It was something in his eyes that wriggled its way inside me. I could picture them, and there was something in them that I needed to know. It made me curious. I wasn't like I was in love with him, but I could not forget him. I found myself going back to the store where I met him trying to see him. For the larger part of a month I would only see him once in a while, but I kept going back and kept letting him ask me questions. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him. He was shy about asking, and for some reason that made me feel secure.

It was fine to feel secure, because no matter how many times we spoke in person, and how interested he was to talk to me, he never once called me.

And yet, I found myself day after day going into that store looking for him under the false pretense of buying a bottle of Aquafina. I went in every day and bought a one-liter bottle of Aquafina.

First Impressions

2008-05-22T17:31:00.003-04:00

M was tall. He seemed a little uncertain when he talked to me. He had an accent, and I had no idea from where. He did not smile when he talked to me, he looked too preoccupied with what was being said. He looked straight at my face. It almost looked difficult for him to speak with me, but he asked questions, and he listened to the answers. It was November and he was wearing slacks with a sweater. He was quite thin and had a long face and long slender fingers.

His eyes were what I remember most from this first meeting. They were dark chocolate brown and very sincere. He looked honest and innocent and vulnerable. As I think about it now, it is strange how deceptive his demeanor was in the first times that I met him. I saw nothing of what I know now, save for the beauty in his eyes. Now that I know him though, he is not timid like he seemed in the beginning, and his humor didn't show through in those first meetings either. My impression was very one dimensional and uncertain. He was very curious though and even through his embarrassment he asked questions in a manner that no one from my culture would dare to ask them. He asked them in succession and as if he had a reason to know the answer.

Simple, naaaaahhhhhhh, what would be the point??

2008-05-21T20:46:00.002-04:00

I met "M" at a very strategic point in my life. I had just finished my undergraduate work, and was taking some time off. I was exhausted from my four years of college. While I was in college I worked as a Paramedic with transport ambulance services, volunteered for a rescue squad, and worked a part-time job in a hospital. At any given time I was working two jobs, going to school for my degree full time, and intermittantly going to school to earn the right to test for my Paramedic Certification.

When you train to be a Paramedic it is very similar to nursing school. You have class time, then you have internship time. You are required to do hundreds of hours divided between hospital time, Operating Room, Delivery Room, Emergency Room, Critical Care, and the ambulance where you are expected to keep track of all procedures that you do, including intubations, IV's, medications, etc. I finished my undergraduate degree and my Paramedic class within two months of each other, and tested for my National Registry Paramedic in the between time.

I had NO idea what I was going to do with my degree, but I knew that a few months off of school would do me good. And so I started working full time on the ambulance, part-time at a hospital, and volunteering non-stop at my rescue squad.

I met M on a night shift. It was late, I needed a bottle of water and M sold it to me.

Learning

2008-05-20T17:45:00.004-04:00

My father really did educate me. He taught me to read before I went to school. He was obsessive about vocabulary and math. My parents were married very young and started having kids, me first, killing their college careers.

My father worked hard and over the course of many years eventually earned an Associate's degree from one of our state universities. It seems to me though that my father studied less during the times that he was attending school than he did when he was studying on his own. My father is one of those guys who could be just as much at home with an encyclopedia on his lap as he was reading Louis L'Amour westerns or translating his pet Hindi projects. That was one of the things I was most enthralled with, my father's obsession with learning everything he could about India, writing, reading and speaking Hindi.

My father's project of educating me continued with my education on our "status." My family never had a lot of money, but my father had goals for me. My father told me that it was my job to work really hard in school. He told me that we didn't have enough money to pay for college and that if I wanted to be successful I would have to go to college. My father always specified that his degree was not "good enough." He told me that it would take a Bachelor's degree to "get anywhere." He told me that if I worked hard enough I could get a scholarship to pay for my school. We never discussed exactly how good, or where this supposed scholarship would come from, I just blindly believed him. I believed that if I worked hard enough, the money would come to me.

I knew this was what I had to do. There was never a doubt in my mind that I would do exactly what my father said. I didn't talk about it as an "if" it was a WHEN.

Let My People Go!

2008-05-18T13:45:00.003-04:00

When I was young my father thought it necessary to "educate" me. It was a true education in all senses of the word. He thought that it was wrong to lie to your children, even if it was about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. He felt like once a child figures out, inevitably from friends at school, that their own parents were lying to them about something as innocuous as the Easter Bunny, it would erode their faith in all that their parents had ever, or would ever tell them.

Okay, so I'm being a little dramatic, but he figured it was better that the truths of the world start out coming from a child's parents instead of the other little kids at school. I was grateful for this actually and felt that the other children deserved to know.

My father had also educated me, in my five year old reality, that it was not my place to tell the other children at school, but I paid no attention to this part. I think I must have envisioned myself as a first-grade Moses. I was freeing "my people," in reality my first grade peers. This was how my life as an opinionated girl began, with phone calls home about how I made my entire first grade class cry.