Jonny and Yasmin got married on a beautiful day in New Plymouth, New Zealand. While hints of rain threatened in the morning, the afternoon was clear and sunny. It was perfect.
Yasmin is a kindred spirit and daughter of my dear friend Jenny. She is years younger than I am, but through background and personality we have a definite and unique connection.
Yasmin was first raised in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, an area known primarily because of Malala Yousafzai. Swat Valley is a ruggedly beautiful place with deep gorges and mountain streams that grow into rivers that run over rocks. Swaying rope bridges connect mountains together high above these rivers. Swat Valley — where the Taliban shot a 14-year-old girl because she was a threat and the United States droned innocent civilians with one click because surely among the many innocent there would be one who was guilty.
At the time, much of Swat was stunning untouched terrain and Yasmin’s family, the McGrane’s, were the only foreigners most people had ever met.
Our family would vacation in Swat Valley while I was growing up, staying in a sturdy family tent or a rest house. When my husband and I lived in Pakistan with our first child, we too vacationed there, recording the trip through pictures taken of the two of us holding a baby and a toddler, steady as only the young can be on a swaying rope bridge.
I didn’t meet Yasmin in Pakistan. I met her when she was ten years old and the family had moved to Egypt. Our families connected and developed a lasting friendship, challenged by miles of continents and oceans once we both left Cairo. I will never forget the night we left Egypt – a night when our hearts broke. The McGrane’s helped to pick up the pieces through a meal, talking, and a blessing through a hymn and a prayer.
Yasmin and I have both had the experience of learning to live well in places where we don’t always feel we belong. Though years and continents apart, her adjustment back to New Zealand in her teen years parallels that of mine in America during my college years. Both of us alternate between feeling at home and alien in our passport countries. After high school in Cairo and New Zealand, Yasmin went on to cho0se medicine as a profession and has already used her skills in resource poor settings, largely because of her background.
With this history as the background, it was a gift to be a part of Yasmin’s wedding day.
After a ceremony at a church, we went to an old barn that was beautifully decorated with lights, brass, and white linen. We ate curry and naan served out of large, brass dishes and danced until our legs ached.
Speeches were given by those closest to the couple, and one minute we teared up while the next minute we were laughing. Because that is what life is – the poignant and the hilarious, the sacred and the ordinary all mixed up in a speech. It was when Yasmin spoke that I knew she had truly found her partner in life. As she looked at Jonny with the eyes of a bride on her wedding day, she said this: “In you, my heart has found a home.”
“In you, my heart has found a home.”
For the third culture kid, global nomad, refugee or immigrant, home takes on a life of its own. We search for it, we get angry about it, we try to find answers that will satisfy the questions we inevitably get, and we write about it. We talk about going home, but when we get there we find that it is no longer the home that we knew, and we are disappointed once again. Home eludes us and place betrays us until we exhaust ourselves and others with our quest.
“In you, my heart has found a home.” Yasmin has known many homes. Swat Valley, Peshawar, different places throughout New Zealand – but her words echoed what I know in my soul, even as I try to pretend that this is not true: Homes are not places, they are the people, places, memories, and events that span the globe.
I said goodbye to Yasmin at the airport, honored that she wanted me to come with the family to see her off on her honeymoon. We waved goodbye from the terminal window, and my eyes were misty as she walked away with the man who has given her heart a home.
*****
I write this as I journey “home” from New Zealand. It has been a time of rest and warmth, and I am so grateful. I said goodbye to my friend Jenny outside security and felt the familiar choking in my throat as I said goodbye, both of us tearful. I know that I will arrive in Boston and feel alien. Alien until I am greeted by the man who has made his home with me for the last 31 plus years – and in him, my heart will be at home.
