First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  Months later I still had acne but less, and it delighted me to know that I had a chemical-free body that could now safely house a baby. I nursed the fat-chance hope that I could convince Hadi to try for a baby on Valentine's Day. That would be romantic, memorable.

  And it worked. All of it worked. After I found out I was pregnant, I felt as if my body was a sacred vessel nurturing my salvation. My days at the internado were more tolerable because I knew that soon I'd have reason to cut my hours. Hadi whispered to the baby every night while I applauded myself for choosing such a good father for my unborn child. I followed my baby's weekly development online, doodled little fetuses on paper, thought of names, and longed for the baby who would end all my loneliness, my struggle to find purpose.

  Two months later, I saw the first drops of blood that told me that all this specialness, hope, and relief were threatening to leave me. The results of the ultrasound were bleak—the technician found no signs of life, only an empty sac. The doctor said it was likely a blighted ovum, but still he advised bed rest, saying he'd seen stranger things happen. From my bed, I prayed fervently for a miracle, but every time I got up to use the bathroom, I was met with more blood. Two weeks later, my womb released a small sac that I eyed with horror. It was my twenty-third birthday, and my body had dropped what should have been my beloved in the toilet. Hadi tried to comfort me with science, with the cold, hard truth that we'd never really had a baby to lose, but this only made my grief feel unfounded and illegitimate. I was mourning who we had been when we were pregnant. For ten weeks, we'd been a family of three.

  My miscarriage happened before the start of Hadi's spring break, and we decided to keep our plans to visit our families in California. I wanted to get away from the sadness that had moved into our house, but it followed me on our trip. There was the loss of the good news we'd hoped to deliver, the loss of the baby as a topic of conversation between us, and the loss of the excitement over our new roles, Hadi as dad, me as mom.

  When we returned to our apartment a week later, the sadness was still there—in every place where I'd slept and sat, and where I lost the baby that never was and never would be—only now it was much worse. Before, my sadness had been tied to hope of a miracle. Now it had taken dread as its companion.

  I'd have to go back to the internado, to dealing with Viviana. When I'd started to miscarry, I'd called to say I wouldn't be coming in for a while, but I couldn't bring myself to explain why. Saying the words would've made me weep. Instead, I'd told Viviana I had hurt my back because it was also true. Bed rest had left me with a pinched nerve. Her reply stung like an unexpected slap on the face: “Don't deceive me, Joya.”

  The night before I was supposed to go back to the internado, I lay in bed and wondered how I'd face Viviana. Would I finally find the words to talk to her about spanking the girls and her empty threats of dramatic punishments? I feared being disrespectful. Not only was she older than me (I had been raised to never talk back to my elders), but also the spanking issue felt like a murky gray area. As time went on, I'd seen everyone on the staff, except for the soft-spoken Madre, give a child a swift swat on the bottom for one reason or another, and although I had conversations with a few of the other staff members about alternatives to spanking, I didn't know if my role as a volunteer entitled me to do anything more than offer ideas. I bristled at the accounts of Western feminists traveling in Middle Eastern countries, trying to liberate their oppressed women, and I didn't want to be the one doing what I'd accused them of—disregarding cultural context, exporting values.

  In the dark of my room, contemplating all this, my heart did something it had never done before: it fluttered in a way that left me queasy. I got up to get Hadi and found that the few steps to our office had left me breathless. Hadi sat me down in his office chair, took my blood pressure, and listened to my chest.

  Hadi was not at the top of his class when it came to his coursework, but he excelled in anything applied, such as his clinical rotations and his surgery class. With the bulk of his academic coursework finally behind him, Hadi had a newfound sense of confidence. It was as if he'd been waiting for the chance to learn by doing, rather than reading, his entire life. This was something new for us—Hadi, the owner of a body of knowledge that I benefitted from; Hadi, the one who was helping me. All this time, I had been so preoccupied with what I gave up to come here that I rarely stopped to consider what I was gaining. One day soon Hadi would be a doctor, answering questions and comforting so many of our friends and family.

  Removing his stethoscope's ear tips from his ears, Hadi told me that my heart was racing and that I should skip going to the internado tomorrow and go see his cardiology professor instead.

  Three days later, after an in-office EKG, a twenty-four-hour engagement with a Holter monitor, and an echocardiogram, Doctora Gomez, with the strappy high heels and matching beaded necklaces, called me into her office and told me everything looked normal.

  “¿No tiene angustia?” she asked.

  I thought for a minute and said, “No, no anxiety.”

  Not one of the storms that had raged in my mind for the last two years occurred to me. Not my giving up graduate school or moving to Mexico. Not my marriage. Not the internado or the miscarriage or the unanswered prayers to save my pregnancy that made me question whether God was the wish-granter I'd believed Him to be. In my mind, anxiety was something a person was aware of, a conscious state of unrest. It had nothing to do with the unsettling, dissatisfied whispers that coursed through my body. That was just my life.

  That summer, I flew home for Lina's high school graduation, torn between a sense of pride and betrayal. She'd chosen to attend UC Berkeley, the same college where my mother had locked the car doors and turned around before my campus tour began. Only five years later and Mama's expectations had changed so much. Mama didn't talk to Lina about marriage or getting engaged with any regularity. If somebody asked of Lina's availability, Mama said things like, “What's the rush? She's still studying.”

  As much as I wanted to be done with remorse, this shift in Mama boggled my mind. Lina had been granted the freedom that Mama had raised me to believe was only available through marriage. It was one thing to meet other Muslim women in Mexico, to see how differently they had been raised, but seeing the rules changing within my own family, and after such a relatively short period, filled me with a longing to go back in time.

  When Lina gave her valedictory address, all I could see was myself on the stage. Five years ago, my mind had been focused on the boy in the audience, on marriage, but it was because of marriage that today I had to smile and tell my former teachers what a wonderful experience living in Mexico was, how I loved the people, the language, when a different truth hounded me. I had earned a high school and college diploma to become a wife to a man whose career path had swallowed mine. I had nothing to show for my time, no advanced degree, no baby. Before I left Guadalajara, Hadi had found out that he had failed the first step of his medical boards by one point, and the news crushed me. No matter how much he excelled in his clinical work, the academics still kept him down. Now Hadi would have to retake the exam, and later when it came time to apply for residencies, he'd stand little chance of getting through the competitive selection process to get his first choice. Most likely, my graduate school plans would have to wait once again, but what hurt more was the overwhelming sense that progress was impossible for me. I took one step forward in accepting my marriage only for some news, a failed exam or Lina going off to Berkeley, to come along and set me even further back.

  That night as I struggled to fall asleep, a haze of unease cast itself over my room. It was an angst I had not yet learned to identify as anxiety. All I knew was that I felt misled. I'd thought following all the rules guaranteed me the scripted life I'd imagined for myself—the accomplished husband, the His and Her degrees, the bright and beautiful children. I had no idea that growing up was not so much the process of accruing a career, spouse, home, and child, as it
was this particular journey to reconcile what you dreamed of with what you got.

  When I awoke, I did my best to disguise my restlessness with makeup and a hair-dryer, jeans and a new top. Diana and Nadia were coming to see me, and for one day, I needed to pretend I was still in college, to forget that I was married.

  That afternoon, Nadia and Diana filled the living room with the kind of laughter that drew their heads back, their long, black, flat-ironed hair falling behind their shoulders. They looked polished, beautiful, and happy. We hugged constantly; we squeezed each other's hands and reiterated how much we'd missed one another, how good it was to be together again.

  And then we had lunch. Nothing unusual. Just the rice, kabobs, and grilled tomatoes I'd prepared that morning, but it didn't sit well with me. For perhaps the tenth time since I'd arrived, I was hit with diarrhea. My stomach rebelled when I was in Mexico, and it retaliated when I left.

  I spent the rest of the evening in the bathroom, missing out on conversation, missing out on my one girl's night of the year. In between bathroom runs, I sat at the end of the sofa, my stomach cramping, my behind sore, and my nose unable to clear itself of that vile odor.

  “Oh, Hudie, are you okay?” Nadia and Diana took turns asking.

  “I'm fine,” I insisted and tried to catch where we were in discussing Nadia's applications to medical school, Diana's choices of physical therapy schools, their engagements, and when they might start planning their weddings.

  My gaze landed on Nadia's and Diana's rings. Their rocks could've eaten mine and still had room for dessert. While it didn't surprise me that Diana had the kind of proposal we'd always dreamed of—the fancy dinner, the walk along the ocean, the boyfriend down on one knee while presenting her with a velvet box—I couldn't believe that Nadia, my sister in Islamic rules and limitations, had gotten her dream too. Nadia, the girl who'd been so focused on school, so resigned to consent to whomever her parents’ chose, had met a Muslim boy through her Muslim community. And although they'd gotten engaged the traditional way, with both families meeting and consenting, Nadia was in love. “Oh, Hudie,” she'd once sighed to me, “do you ever catch yourself thinking about the moment of Hadi's creation and just thanking God that he exists?”

  Listening to Nadia and Diana, I felt last night's thumping ache return. This is where you should be, it nagged. You should be in school. You should be falling in love and marrying someone now. You should be talking about dresses, and rings, and weddings in the present, not in the past. You should've never had the opportunity to get pregnant, let alone lose a baby.

  When Nadia and Diana left a few hours later, I made another dash for the bathroom and then returned to the same spot on the couch, now next to Lina and Mama.

  Mama looked over at me and said, “Tummy still making you miserable?”

  That was all it took to beset me with tears that captured my voice. Lina brought tissues, and Mama stood above me, prodding and waiting until I finally sputtered, “All my friends are happy, and all I have is diarrhea.”

  I heard how funny this sounded, and I released a loud, ugly snort that might've turned into a fit of laugh-crying but didn't. This was my life, my body that I could not trust. Over the last three years, I had been no stranger to self-pity, but tonight was a new low for me.

  Mama was usually the first person to laugh at an inopportune moment, but she did not so much as giggle. She rested her hands on her hips and released a low, long tsk. “I thought you were happy seeing your friends. Where is all this coming from?”

  I grabbed another tissue from where Lina sat on the floor, clutching the box in her lap, a stricken look on her face.

  “Mama, I haven't been happy in so long. I just can't take it anymore.”

  “Can't take what?”

  “Him.”

  “What about him?”

  “He's bringing me down. Look at Nadia and Diana. I'm just as smart, Mama. I should be in school just like they are. It's not fair. You let me get married so young, but this…this is the age I should've gotten married at.”

  “But I thought you liked Hadi.”

  “No, you liked him, and I listened to you. You made istikharas for me before I even had a chance to figure out if I liked him on my own.”

  She sighed and brought a thoughtful fist up to her chin. “He was so young. I never imagined you'd have problems.”

  I thought of Mama and Baba's almost twenty-year age gap. That was what had been important to my mother, youth. As long as she'd found me someone close to my age, she assumed I would be protected against the things she'd suffered from: the specter of early widowhood, a father who could not keep up with his children, a man who fell asleep at every back-to-school night.

  “Being young also comes with being immature,” I said.

  Mama shook her head, and I took this gesture of sympathy as permission to say something bolder. “Since I can't get a divorce, sometimes I wish I'd just die or he'd die so at least one of us could start our life all over again.”

  At this, Lina burst into tears. Mama looked over at her. “Why are you crying?”

  “I don't want Hudie to be this sad.”

  Mama's lips twisted in a tight knot, and her eyes watered. She'd never seen this fatalistic side of me. “Nobody has to die. You can have a divorce.”

  “What about, ‘Out of this house in your wedding dress and only come back in your kiffin’?”

  Mama took the seat next to me on the sofa and let out a sad, slow tsk. “You kids always take everything we say so seriously. Parents say things to keep their children safe, to guide them to make the right choices, but I don't care about anything more than your well-being.”

  It was the same sentiment Mrs. Ridha had expressed to me last year, and with it returned the same untethered feeling I'd had in Mrs. Ridha's company. I wished I'd understood the perils of basing my whole understanding of my culture on my parents and their immigrant friends before I got married. I had shaped an entire world from the things our older generation said, but their memories still held the experiences of an entire population of people. Even if those memories were frozen in time, at least they were of a diverse Iraq, filled with both the rich and the poor, law-abiding citizens and errant criminals, artists and scientists, the secular and the devout—whereas I only knew them.

  “I can talk to his parents,” Mama now added, placing a gentle hand on my leg.

  “I don't want that. I don't want anyone to know until it's official. Not them. Not Baba. We may get over this somehow, but if they know we're having trouble, they'll never forget.”

  “You don't have to go back. Just stay here.”

  This suggestion snapped me back into the life I'd left behind, the stuff I had in my house in Mexico and the girls at the internado; even Hadi seemed entitled to some kind of an explanation.

  “No, I have to go back. The one thing I promised my girls was that I would not leave without saying goodbye.”

  “If you are this unhappy, you really don't have to. You can send them something, call.”

  “No,” I said, the helplessness I'd felt only seconds ago giving way to a sense of purpose. The girls would not be back from their homes for over a month, but I needed that time to gather my things and talk to Hadi. “I'll go back and tie up loose ends, and then I will come home.”

  “Do you want to make an istikhara?” Mama offered, her tone measured and careful.

  I thought another no would emerge from me, resounding and clear, but the prospect of having this decision taken out of my hands was so appealing that I paused. If the istikhara came out good to leave, I'd feel not just validated but vindicated—as if God Himself had given me permission to leave. But what if I got to Mexico and wanted to stay? Would I then blame any future obstacle in my life on my failure to heed the istikhara's warning? And, if it came out bad for me to leave, would I, forever, blame the istikhara for forcing me to stay?

  “No,” I said with renewed certainty. This time, this decision had to be entirely
mine.

  Mama, however, could not resist the pursuit of closure. Instead of consulting God, she confided in Jidu that I'd been struggling, and the next day, when we were alone in the car, she told me that Jidu didn't like the idea of me getting divorced.

  “That doesn't surprise me,” I said coolly, my hands fixed on the steering wheel. “No one thinks divorce is a good idea.” And as if to drive the point home, I added, “If Jidu thought divorce was a good idea, he wouldn't still be married to Bibi.”

  Mama shrugged as if she was surrendering to me on this point and said, “I'm just letting you know. You make your own decision.”

  I said that I would, but I could feel Jidu's disapproval taking root in my mind. An istikhara may not have been made, but still a judgment had been rendered, a judgment that I dreaded having to defy.

  How did a woman actually go about walking out on the man she'd been living and sleeping with for almost three years? Would I ask Hadi to take me to the airport for a tearful and sentimental goodbye, a nostalgic last kiss? Or would I gather up all my things in a fit of anger and call a taxi?

  During my last week in California, I'd thought almost exclusively about how to initiate our breakup. At first, I assigned myself homework. I read through a stack of self-help books on how to save a marriage that were directed to people who'd had previous relationships and gotten married for love and who still complained of infidelity, boring sex, and falling in and out of love with their spouses and in love with someone else. And then I decided to sort out my feelings on my own. Maybe I was meant to lose the baby because God knew we weren't staying together. Now I could go back to school, and even if I never remarried, I could always come back to the internado and adopt one of the girls who didn't have a family. Maybe I'd even meet someone at school, someone who'd accept me as a divorcée. From there, I documented all the reasons I wanted to leave. They reached back as long as we'd been a couple and covered all issues from the big, “You Have No Ambition,” to the small, “You Need to Shave on Weekends.” And it was current.