Happy Life with a Russian Wife

Posted By admin on October 5, 2010

We decided to decorate our wedding cake with an edible map of both the Russia Far East and the West United States, with our cities marked and our family portrait in the middle of it. It was assumed that the Russian guests would have the American part of the cake, and the American friends – the Russian one. As far as our portrait is concerned, we decided to keep it and eat each other’s pictures one bite at a time in case we quarreled. Such a sweet revenge… An important idea came to me while searching for appropriate maps in the Internet. We found a site with a globe, which could rotate in any direction simultaneously changing the scale. When the prospect of the Arctic areas was shown, I could not find my native city of Khabarovsk, for it was in an unusual place. I thought then that it was very important to remember that if I could not solve a problem, I had to change the starting point, find another angle of view or change the scale, and effective solutions would easily follow.

There were so many similar wonderful gifts of lessons during our wedding preparations. They were learnt at the junction of two different cultures and our different ideas about life – when there was a choice to argue about whose idea of living had been more “correct” or to accept the partner’s vision as another angle of view, making the joint picture of our world more alive and hefty.

The hardest part was to create the ritual itself. As a Russian citizen, I was eager to skip the official part, but Dan and Jim (our minister) always brought me back to the American reality. As a result, we spent a lot of time pondering on our marriage vows so that every word would be meaningful. We also discussed the possibility of signing a marriage contract and our feelings on the matter. We agreed that this needed to be done, but never prepared the draft of the contract – perhaps because there was not enough time, but mostly because we had just learned so many different things about ourselves while our discussions that it had eliminated the need to address them in writing. Our trust in each other grew only stronger afterwards.

We decided to invite only close relatives and friends to our wedding (about 40 people). Of course, I wanted it dearly to have my children and their families among the guests – especially because I really missed my little granddaughters. However, it was really difficult for them to get to America at that time, for many reasons. So we made a picture stand at which my family (and my Russian friends) were presented in all their glory. We also made one video of all our children’s weddings – two Russian and three American. Dan himself has prepared the invitation cards and printed out the programs. And our Russian friends living in America served a magnificent table with the Russian food.

Everything turned out as we had planned, even better: the event was very significant not only for us but for our guests. They loved my wedding gown, which I had knitted myself investing a special meaning into it. The thing is, most of our guests were very creative people, and it was important for them to see that they accepted another creative person (me) into their circle. I was the person who could also be their new resource. We saw tears in their eyes when the video reminded us of important events with our participation in their lives – and we were grateful that they shared the joy with us then. We laughed together over the inevitable “soft failures” during the ceremony.

To be continued

Categories: Family Matters, Life Without Limits
Tags: marriage contract, self-made wedding invitations, wedding cake