WHAT FALLOPIAN TUBES?!

Readers: I realize that my recent posts have been awfully lame. As much as I want to entertain you, those “Welcome-to-your-life-and-yes-the-joke’s-always-on-you-SabilaK,” moments have gone on hiatus. I can’t remember the last time I stepped in dead rodent, or played the role for which I’m perhaps most famous: bird outhouse. I have yet to trip and fall (knock on wood) this year and (wonder of wonders) my mother has totally stopped trying to pimp me off to strange men. While I’m admittedly relieved about most of these turns of events—one NEVER gets accustomed to tripping and falling—I don’t quite know how I feel about my mom giving up on me.

It sure as hell doesn’t make for good blogging.

For years, I’ve been trying to get her off my back about getting hitched. Now that one of my tactics has worked, I’m bored and a little offended.

Now, before sharing how I successfully (can I really call this success?) put the kibosh on my mother’s matchmaking endeavors, I must first warn you, dear reader, to attempt this tactic at your own risk. It’s nice to dramatically roll your eyes and act outraged, annoyed and eventually wounded while your mother is reminding you of your advancing age (27 in my case), your quickly shriveling fallopian tubes, and that nice boy (oh you know him [more often than not, you DON’T know him]: your cousin’s uncle’s neighbor’s sister’s oldest physician son who lives in Alaska) whose pic and biodata some random person is going to email to you before day’s end, but let’s be honest here. You love the comedy. You love feeling like the only sane person in a community full of melodramatic matchmakers. And you love blogging about it.

Here’s how I did it, reader. My mom and I were watching television when she started to tell me about another one of my cousins having found another prospective mate for me. This time our contestant lived in southern California (clearly, there aren’t any available young men on the East coast) and was (no big surprise here) a physician. My mother was very interested in pursuing this hot catch, while I came up with a dozen other ways to waste my life.

So, instead of rolling my eyes or sighing dramatically (it’s amazing how these rishta talks make me revert into a pre-teen) I very calmly told her the following:

“Amma, we’ve been down this “let’s-introduce-Sabila-to-random-people” road before and I think you know as well as I do that it hasn’t been pretty. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to get married but I don’t want to do it this way. I want to find someone on my own. If I find him, great; if I don’t, that’s just too bad. Not everyone gets married. People aren’t born for the sole purpose of getting hitched and it’s definitely not something that I’m going to force. If it happens: awesome. If it doesn’t: oh well. Marriage just isn’t for everyone and that doesn’t bother me.”

It wasn’t the best or most eloquent speech but it worked. My mother, without saying another word, started watching television. During a commercial break I asked her if she was upset at me and she responded with a terse, “No.”

She hasn’t brought up the topic of getting me hitched since.

I know I should be ecstatic about this change in my mother, but I’m not. I feel like my blog (dare I say my life?) has lost its oomph and its comedy. I need to find a way to spur my mom to action again while attempting to maintain the distance of an (unflappable) observer when she does manage to shake the rishta boat again with blind dates, biodatas, and airbrushed photographs of strange transplanted Pakistani men wearing tapered and faded mom jeans, penny loafers and tucked in flannel shirts. Perhaps I should take the initiative and attend desi (remember, “desi” refers to folks of Indian or Pakistani descent) singles events, deep undercover for this blog. Maybe I should draft a new biodata for myself and post it up here (not a bad idea at all, actually).

Or maybe I should just sit back and enjoy not being constantly reminded of my fast shriveling fallopian tubes.