There are good days and there are bad days. Some days you may come home from work and the dishes will be dirty and the laundry unfolded. Your wife will grumble a greeting at you as she walks by, still in her pajamas. There will be no dinner cooked and you will have to walk on tiptoes because the bebe, who was a grouchy little teething monster all day, has finally fallen asleep.

Also, no one will be able to find the external hard-drive, which you need for work.

Also, the curtains will fall off the wall, rod and all.

And you, tired from work and tired from sitting in traffic, and hungry from forgetting to take a lunch and sleep deprived from the odd hours the baby has been keeping lately- you will smile and take your wife in your arms and hold her, and tell her it’s alright to have a lousy day, and you will tell her to get dressed because it’s been a while since we went out for dinner.

And you will joke and make your wife laugh, and tell her to hurry up and NOT iron her clothes, and you will pile everyone into the car, wrinkles and all, and drive to a posh Irani buffet and have a fantastic time putting a massive dent in the barbeque and dessert tables.

And you will drive home and do the dishes as your wife hangs laundry, and you will pray and go to bed. And that will have been a very good day.

I love you HF.

HF has been internationally away for the last 11 days, and top of that, Khalid choked on a carrot today. Yes, these two are related.

Today Bebeface swallowed a huge piece of carrot at dinner and started gasping for breath. I picked him up, turned him over and slapped him on the back repeatedly before he finally coughed the piece up, vomited, and started crying. The whole episode took twenty seconds at the most, and we had guests over for dinner who, I am sure, probably did not notice anything beyond a baby coughing up a carrot bit and then being carried out of the room. Truth is that I took him out of the room so that I wouldn’t be seen holding him tightly and trying not to cry.

There was a friend of mine, a woman my mother’s age, who I always knew as being very flamboyant, very loud, very sparkly in the way she spoke and the way she acted and the way she dressed. She was the 50-year old with the perfectly blonde hair and the short skirt. I remember once commenting to a mutual friend about how cheerful she always was, and the mutual friend said, “Yes, it’s nice to see her like this now. After her son and husband died she went into depression for a few years.”

I’d had no idea. Her husband and only son had died only a few years ago in a car accident, and not only had she never brought it up, she seemed alright. She was colorful. She was alive.

(I later learned, she was lonely)

When I knew her, I was single and her story seemed like a tragedy. Now that I am a wife and a momma, her story seems like an apocalypse, an ending of life as we know it, a implosion of the universe itself. How does one recover from that? HF has been gone only 11 days, and I think about him constantly. Khalid gave me a momentary scare, and the tiny glimpse of worry, of fear for my child’s life that it caused has had me rattled this entire evening. What if I couldn’t get the carrot out? What if he stopped breathing. God, I don’t want to think of the what-if’s.

(I’ve been staying at the Chateau these past 11 days and last night I shared a room with Hemmie. “It was an interesting night,” she said to me this morning. “You woke up and asked me where Khalid was.” Actually, I’d had a bad dream, and when I woke up, I couldn’t find Khalid and started to panic. He was in bed next to me, right where I left him, but my sleep-heavy eyes missed his warm little bump under the blanket. )

As I read this over I realize it seems strange, maybe even pathetic to be so attached, or so afraid. The truth is that no one but a mother will know how this feels. Erma Bombeck once said that to have a children was “…to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

She was right, and when you factor in the husband you adore, then your heart is neatly halved before it is removed from your chest and sent on its merry way. There’s no way of ever getting it back. You will never stop checking on your child when you know he is asleep. You will pull the covers over your husband if you think he’s cold. You will fret when your husband is late, you will lose sleep when your child is sick. You will dance continually between worry and relief, but being worn at by concern for the ones you love is more sweet than bitter. It is part of life, and it is proof that you love them deeply, and thank God, you have someone to love. SubhanAllah for the pain, because it means you have someone to give your heart away to.

Better the ache of love fulfilled than the emptiness of lonely regret.

Me: (pointing to pile of shirts) The room is a mess and it’s all your fault, we live in squalor!

HF: No, we live in the UAE.

Update: HF has posted his version of what happened here, hehe.

HF: So, dogs like to stick their heads out of car windows, right? They like to hang their tongues out and go nyah and enjoy the breeze.

Me: Yes..?

HF: But cats don’t though, if you took a cat and held it out of the window of a moving car it would go rraoowr and turn and attack you and fly at your chest.

Me: Yes.

HF: It would kind of explode and fly at you.

Me: True…

Hf: See, that’s why cups of tea are like cats.

Me: Oh?

HF: I held this one out of the car window, and it exploded and flew at me.

Me: You held a cup of tea out of the window?

HF: To cool it. *big shiny smile*

Me: While you were driving?

HF: But then the wind hit it and got all shaky and then foosh!

Me: At a hundred kilometers per hour?

HF: And that’s why cups of tea are like cats.

Under normal circumstances, a pregnant woman with a bucket of ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other could not possibly outrun her well-intentioned but confectionarily cruel husband.

Under current circumstances, where well-intentioned husband is burdened by a plaster cast on his well-sprained ankle, the pregnant woman not only has a chance, but she also has 1.9 litres of cookies and cream all to herself. As well as gloating rights.

mwaahahahaa

So HF has suffered his first mortal wound. The building was burning you see… it was a charity hospital… for orphans… for umm, orphaned kittens. And it was on fire, yes. So he sprained his ankle while rescuing burning kittens from the burning building. My hero! *swoon*

(Really though, and this is just between you and me, habibtis- he called me from the gym last week and said, Mabrook! and I said, Wha? and he said he had sprained his ankle. Hai, kitni cute.)

So HF is on crutches and in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Bring me my sceptre, I can use it to serve ice cream.

Me: Do jellyfish wash up on the beaches here?

HF: I’m not sure.

ME: You know, when my sister was little she got stung by a jellyfish.

HF: So that’s how she got her powers?

HF: The table was dirty. There was this crunchy dry stuff on it.

Me: Oh?

HF: So I put some newspaper over it.

HF: Could I shave my head?

Me: No.

HF: Come on, what would happen if I shaved it all off, my beard too, and started over.

Me: Then you’d look like how you did before, but with a period of baldness in the middle.

*pause*

HF: Could I grow a moustache?

ME: No.

HF: Come on, just a little big one.

Me: A what one?

HF: I’ll just grow it on the left side, ok?

Me: No! You’re nuts! You can’t grow a mustache!

HF: Fine.

*pause*

HF: Can you grow a mustache?

I made HF’s glasses into the bed last week. Really. I tucked them neatly beneath the topsheet and the fitted sheet and then I threw the comforter over top of it all. Then I couldn’t find his glasses, because I hadn’t made them into the bed on purpose. No, because that would be foolish.

I searched extensively for his glasses before I decided to retrace my steps for that morning.

(Let’s see, I had your glasses in my hand and then I threw them on to the bed. Then I went into the kitchen, then I came back and made the bed.)

My poor husband (who at that point, realized that the lumpy bits he had been sitting on were, in fact, his nice glasses) shook his head and sighed. He dug his glasses out of their cozy hiding spot and put them onto his nose.

It serves him right I say. After all, did he not greet my cool new mandarin shirt with the iffy compliment, “Hey, you look like a Chinese assassin!” And has he not feigned seriousness, taking me quietly to one side of the hallway when there are guests in the living room, only to giggle into my ear and call out, “TROGDOR!” He has. And if, in exchange, I manage to make his glasses into the bed or make him rescue me when I get stuck behind the TV or make him sit through Monty Python skits on the computer late at night, I say he deserves it. This is what happens when weird people get happily married.

So the popular question for everyone who emails me these days is: So, how’s married life? I suppose I should eventually answer the question.

Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah, I have been blessed. Unlike most weddings in Pakistani culture, mine was not to a complete stranger. It wasn’t even to an acquaintance, it was to a person who became a good friend. That is probably why, when I try to describe things betweenMr. Abez and I, I say being married is like hanging out with a friend. All the time. Except when he’s at work and I’m home cooking and straightening up.

Yeah, he brings home the bacon and I turn it into pumpkin pies. Does that make me a housewife? It might, but I think there are too many negative connotations associated with that word. I prefer to use a different term. Allow me to explain. A race car has only one driver, but there’s a whole team of guys with power bolt-removers who go zzzummmzummmm and change the car’s tires real fast when the driver has made a pit stop. Could any one of them have driven the car? Probably. Could the driver change his own tires? Sure he could. But when you’re a part of a team, you do what needs done and you support your mateys.

I am the man in the red jumpsuit. I am pit crew. I could be the driver, I could bring home the bacon and HF could put some biryani masala on it, but at the moment I’m simply not. And besides, his masala bacon is terrible and if he did the cooking we’d all die of grease poisoning. Keep that man away from olive oil, he thinks it’s God’s Answer to the scourge of low-fat foods.

Do I mind being pit crew? Not at all. Especially since the pit has broadband internet access as well as the freedom to do as pit crew likes. And then there’s the stylish jumpsuit. And the power tools.

-ahem- I know that some people consider huswifery to be a downgrade, possibly even the waste of an intelligent female. Considering the path to academic over-achievement that I was once on, this may not seem like the fruition of all those ‘you can be something’ speeches that the guidance counselor gave me, and yet, am I not something? I make pit crew what I want it to be. I don’t wake up and drag my feet to the kitchen (I wake up and HF drags my feet to the kitchen for me, hehe) I wake up and think about breakfast creatively. Then I make eggs with too much salt, but I digress.

I don’t do household chores all day, I have a set agenda of things that need done in order to run a clean, smooth Formula 1 team, and I get them done as soon as possible so that I have time for the other things that are important to me. Do I still not have the time to blog properly? Yes, but that has nothing to do with housework and everything to do with chilling with my favorite race care driver.

The mutual give and take of a successful relationship doesn’t end on the emotional level, it extends into the practical. Would ‘I love you’ be worth anything if I refused to make my husband a cup of tea when he was tired, or if he refused to help me when I was tired? I find nothing degrading in supporting the person who supports me. I’m proud to be part of an efficient, enthusiastic team.

Got to go, HF will be making a pit stop soon and I need to put a radial tire, err, chicken in the oven. It’s the um, fuel for the engine, hehe.