Op-Ed
Jabberwocky & Marriage-Talkie
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Gain Through Loss
February 7, 2007 - 12:51amHaving freshly and finally married off the last and youngest of her own children, my cool and calculating grandmother wasted no time crawling down our family tree to the next oldest Varamini still in singledom: me.
I was alone in the driveway, gearing up for my trek back to Ithaca after Thanksgiving break. I stuffed my car like a turkey, chock full of newly clean laundry and oodles of supplies from my mother (because Ithaca doesn’t have Granny Smiths and paper towels — thanks, Mom). My grandmother, visiting us this past fall from Iran to attend my Aunt’s wedding, discreetly approached me, capitalizing on the lack of eyewitnesses in our driveway. I knew she had an agenda. She dropped a hint, though subtlety was never her gift.
“So, when is it going to be your turn?”
I grinned and threw my hands up, trying to look unhappy that I wasn’t yet married. “Soon enough, I hope.”
My grandmother took another small step towards me and gently held my hands in hers — hands worn and aged from raising seven children. She spoke again, “Now tell me, you’re not going to marry a foreign girl, are you?”
Umm, can we go back to the first question?
It was difficult for me to respond. “Foreign” means quite a different thing to my grandmother, who has spent her entire life in Iran, than it does to me, a fully Americanized child of Iranian immigrants.
She squinted up at me through the sunlight, several generations of love on her face. She has been through a lot. Aside from her seven fully grown children, she had two other sons who died young, and just a few years ago she survived being struck by a car in downtown Tehran, breaking several of her bones.
Growing up, I remember her visits from Iran. As a young child, I insisted that she sleep in my room because there was a Jabberwocky (scariest monster ever!) in my closet (I’m not kidding). My favorite memory is when I came running to my grandmother one day after school, crying because the neighborhood kids wouldn’t play with me. “Maybe you should try speaking English with them,” was her advice. It’s worked ever since.
And now I was faced with her again, only under different circumstances — Jabberwocky replaced by marriage-talkie. I was heart-warmed when I realized that her dying wish for me was to find a nice Iranian girl to marry, but I wasn’t about to make her a promise I couldn’t keep.
There are probably two main reasons my grandmother wants me to marry an Iranian woman.
First, I know she wishes to pass down the language and culture of Iran to my children, and certainly my marrying a non-Iranian would make that more difficult. But, of course, I’m getting way ahead of myself. First marriage, then sex, then children (yes, kids, that’s the right order).
Second, I know she would prefer to see me marry in a traditional Iranian ceremony, much like she did when she got married (at 16). Iranian weddings are a series of deeply rooted, elaborately decorated, and historically soaked meta-events which date back thousands of years to ancient Zoroastrian traditions. While I do agree that the ceremony is pretty spectacular, it just isn’t enough reason for me to sign up with iranianpersonals.com.
Maybe I just need to be open and honest with my grandmother, explaining that Iranian women are hard to satisfy, or that I don’t ever meet any of them, or that I’m not Iranian enough for some and too Iranian for others — or that I’m too eccentric for most. Maybe she expects that I’ll find someone as easily or quickly as my father did, who met my mother, his next-door neighbor, at 22 and married her by 23. Too bad I’m already 25 and my next door neighbor lives with her boyfriend.
I’m sure it’s difficult for my grandmother to grasp how different intimate relationships and marriages are in the United States than in Iran. Even today, many Iranian marriages are borne out of introductions young men and women receive from family or family friends. Dating around isn’t common practice. Even though I would argue I’ve led a pretty pure life — I can count the number of girls I’ve kissed on my right hand and still have fingers to spare — disclosing my full history with women might cause my cousins to call me a dokhtarbaz, literally meaning one who plays girls.
Being the people-pleaser that I am, I think I might just have the solution to satisfy all sides: a big fat fake Iranian wedding. All I would need, essentially, is an Iranian girl (and her family) willing to play along. It would be as traditional as Iranian weddings get, and, of course, we wouldn’t sign any official paperwork. Just a baklava-flavored dolmades-downing love fest. And dancing. Lots and lots of dancing. And kabob.
Or maybe such extreme measures aren’t necessary. Perhaps my grandmother would be fully content with a non-Iranian bride. I have been wrong regarding her tolerance in the past.
In third grade, I won an art contest themed “What Christmas means to me.” The prize? A statuette of the Virgin Mary holding Baby Jesus. I knew it would be interesting to take it home to my grandmother, who has been a five-times-a-day-prayin’ Mecca-trekkin’ Muslim all her life. When I arrived home with my prize, my mom gave me a fruit roll-up — an anecdote she still uses when she wants me to be quiet — and promptly hid the statuette in a closet deep in our basement. It was only later that I came to realize how tolerant and open my grandmother is to all religions, even though she clearly has her preference. Maybe this situation is much the same.
Or maybe what’s best is to go ahead and in fact throw a mock Iranian wedding and invite my grandmother and a number of friends who either can’t speak Farsi or are good at keeping secrets.
Or, maybe it is best to just trust in my grandmother’s openness and tolerance and proceed normally, which likely means marrying a non-Iranian. I’ll just have to make sure I’m notified in advance of my grandmother’s visits, so I can tell my wife to go hide in the closet with the Jabberwocky, Mary and Baby Jesus.
Behzad Varamini is a graduate student in Nutritional Sciences. He can be reached at bv29@cornell.edu. Gain Through Loss appears alternate Wednesdays.