Maybe the theme of today is that sometimes I am too quick to judge. My other American teacher here—whom I thought was pretty intelligent and responsible—skipped out on school this week (including the snow-day make-up day he should have had Saturday) to go on vacation. Which would be excusable maybe if he hadn’t then called me his first day away to ask me to wire him money from my account because he was running out. That, too, would be excusable—people make mistakes from time to time—but then today he texted: “Tell me what books you want from Tbilisi. Oh, and when does the marshutka leave.” I assume he means to ask when the marshutka to Oni leaves from Tbilisi. I’m tempted to tell him it left Oni at 8 this morning. That would be cruel, so I won’t, but I’m a bit frustrated. Clearly he didn’t bother to plan for this trip at all. How would I know when the marshutka leaves Tbilisi? He’s the one who’s there! I could ask people here, but he could have done that before leaving or asked his host parents to do it for him. The boy’s 27 and expecting me to mother him. I’m rather patient usually, but I don’t like being used.
Meanwhile, Matsatso and I went to Tatia’s shop today. We ran into the man who had been drunkenly harassing her a few weeks ago, and once he left we started teasing her. She startled us both by saying that he’s a good boy and she likes him very much. At first, Matsatso and I thought that maybe she was joking. But no. She really does like him, despite his being something of a crazy drunk. Well then…
The last incident of the day on this theme actually has me ready to cry. I was talking again to the woman I wrote about earlier—whose husband sold his father’s ring to buy her birthday flowers and now is most likely cheating on her while she is ever-loyal to him. She told me that she didn’t want to get married but that her now-husband was very “crazy.” I asked what she meant. When she was a university student, he and his friends kidnapped her off the street in Tbilisi. She escaped and ran home, but they kidnapped her a second time, that time in Oni. Again she escaped, but they kidnapped her a third time. This was in Oni, again, and this time she gave in and married him. She told me repeatedly that she didn’t want to be married because she was still a student. She was in her 4th year of university (she did finish university, and end up with a double degree) when she was married. She sighed and laughed and said “Everyone here knows this story. It’s ok, because now we love each other very much, but I didn’t want to be married.” She asked me what age people get married in the US. I answered that ages vary but that generally speaking they marry older than they do here. She nodded and said that she knows they have boyfriends and girlfriends when they’re young but that they aren’t married when they’re young. I reminded her that most Americans don’t want to live with their parents as newly-weds. We usually want (and most parents encourage us) to work for a few years first and save money because houses and families are expensive. She said that here some girls who were her classmates were married as young as 16 and that this is normal. She called them women and I said that very few people—if any—are women or men at 16. She agreed. She said she doesn’t like this tradition and that she thinks it’s bad. Just as before she’s told me that she thinks the traditions of wives living with their husbands’ parents and families holding expensive and exhausting supras when loved ones die are bad traditions. In the two previous cases I’ve been careful to point out that these aren’t necessarily “bad” traditions. I’m critical of them myself. I think that the first can be miserable for a wife if it isn’t her choice (although if she likes her mother-in-law and chooses to live in one homestead it can have many advantages for a family). I think that the second can be…well…expensive and exhausting for an already money-strapped and mourning family (again, if the family has the funds and the hands it can be a good thing, but their church mandates this ritual and so even those without the means are obliged to follow it). When we talked about these things, though, I point out that they are not inherently bad traditions. Maybe they’re just outdated and could be updated if an element of choice was introduced. With the question of child marriages and bride-napping, though, I have to agree that they’re bad traditions. I could argue about psychology and human rights and feminism and economics even, but I don’t need to. The state of many marriages here is evidence enough that this tradition doesn’t work.
I want to cry for this woman. For my friend. Usually, I’m not a fan of the “what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her” philosophy. Sometimes, though, the only way to stay sane is to pretend to believe things we don’t yet believe gulit. I’m going to choose to try to believe that her marriage is a happy one. She told me that her story is great. Maybe she really believes this. Her eyes suggested that she’s convinced herself of this so that the thought of what might have been doesn’t drive her insane. And since nothing is going to change so long as that’s the way she chooses to cope, I have to respect her and this one choice of hers.
I wanted so much to believe that I was imagining her sadness. That I was seeing in her what I, as someone from an outside tradition, believed I should see in someone who was married too young and by the choice of her family/society/culture/husband instead of her own. My liberal university had me convinced that my perception would always be flawed by a kind of (ironically super-traditional) original sin. I was born white, Christian, able-bodied, heterosexual and American into a caring family. Such a birth is, in some schools of thought, a sin which will forever damn me to consider the lives of those who are different from me with a patronizing colonizers eye. I’ve been taught to be aware of the concupiscence I therefore carry and to always suspect myself of being (even unwittingly) a psychological oppressor. Certainly, many of my viewpoints are related to my having grown up fairly privileged in a free country. Here especially there’s no denying that. But it was bitter-sweet today to learn for sure that my perception of my friend’s situation is not an occupier’s/oppressor’s/(blahblahblah) of an oppressed/victimized/objectified/underestimated other. Rather, I’ve been seeing her as a human with a beating heart sees a fellow human with a beating heart. This is sweet because it reassures me that I am more than my birth…that I am also a soul who therefore shares kinship with all other souls. It is bitter, because it means that the unhappiness of this woman I love is real. As is my helplessness when faced with it.
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