Exactly 10 years ago you asked me to become your wife and I said happily YES!
Would I say yes again – absolutely!
These past 10 years were great – they made us strong, they were building a bond which is hard to break (so don’t even try it), they made us parents along the way.
We shifted from being carefree to being responsible for the best we ever made, our son.
Love comes and stays, this is how it’s supposed to be and you taught me that it’s not a fairytale but true.
It surely is work, I don’t deny that fact, but at the end of each day, if we are not together this day feels wrong. That’s what marriage is all about, being together and walk beside one another through this crazy life out there.
10 years and off to many more, my friend, my husband, my other half…I want to see us sitting next to each other on a bench under a tree when we are 99 and more.
Love stays, be sure about that, once you found it it can stay if both look in the same direction and support the dreams of one another.
…or better said the time when everyone is asleep besides herself.
When to relax and finally have just a little “Me” time?
When nobody wants something from me. When no child is tired or cranky or needs mommy. When my husband is completely busy like now on the phone with his Libyan guys or if he sleeps next to our son.
Time for me and instead of actually DOING something I’m laying next to a snoring toddler in a half dark bedroom and I type. I type my thoughts out of my brain and onto this blog (which started as a combined yoga/relationship/life wisdom blog and feels now like a one in a million mom blog).
I have so many things I would long to do but right here right now I’m too lazy to go back to the living room even if I know there’s some nicely prepared fruit on the table and that means what?
I am exhausted and tired.
Moms are sometimes exhausted and tired and yes, that’s ok!
Even more, it has to be like that!
I mean, seriously, let a man do what we accomplish day in and day out and hear what he will say.
I don’t doubt that there are some men out there who are able to handle our job perfectly, absolutely! But the focus lays on ‘some’. The majority will break down latest on the morning of day two (if not already after a messy day one).
Did I just mention my husband?
He came in and told me that he ate ALL the fruit while being on the phone and now he cuts a nectarine for me and I eat it in bed 😊
We need to be pampered once in a while!
People water plants day by day but they forget their spouses.
If your wife is having a warm dinner ready for you EACH evening, show her that you appreciate it – we need these things like plants need water!
I want to do some yoga since weeks and what am I doing instead?
Laying in bed eating nectarines. And should I tell you something? That’s OK! My muscles are sore anyway because I went the past two days with the bicycle to the kindergarten and as always last minute, so I simply deserve this moment now because I do enough!
I run through my life, from kindergarten to work, from work to kindergarten, from kindergarten to household to cooking to grocery shopping to playtime in between all of this and to being a wife in the evening when our son sleeps.
Isn’t that schizophrenia?
I understand each and every single mom out there who is about to shout a loud Stop once in a while.
We are no machines and we need time to be just ourself.
At least a few minutes. Please.
I go ahead and eat my nectarines now and just take this moment as a “that’s exactly what I need right now ” moment!
No regrets!
Take care of yourself my dear moms – you all are doing a fantastic job!
My husband and my best friend are one and only person.
I truly believe that this is the key for a good relationship.
We are not only husband and wife, we are also best friends.
There’s nothing I’m afraid of telling him. In good times and in bad times, I think that’s the most important part of it. Whenever there is something happening to him or to me we are calling each other and telling each other the news.
I want him to be the first person to know whatever is going on in my life, and fortunately he’s thinking the same way.
I not only love him, no, I trust him, I rely on him, I adore him, I laugh with him, I cry with him, I just want him to be around and to be the most important part of my life.
There are for sure many couple things we are doing together, grocery shopping, candlelight dinners in the evening, serious couple talking or future planning, building up our home, holding hands while strolling through the park, visiting the family and helping each other through tough times.
But there are on the other side also many friend things we are doing together, like sitting in a coffee gossiping about people walking by, chatting about nonsense the whole evening long, watching movie after movie and eating unhealthy things, clothes shopping (even shoe shopping although he is a man) or just sitting on the couch and talking for hours.
The time I spend with him is the most precious time in my life, even if we are fighting from time to time about stupid things, every second belongs to us and this is what I love most.
Whoever said that relationships have to be totally serious is wrong. Most important from my point of view is that you have to find the balance, the balance between being serious as a couple but also having lots of fun.
For sure if you’re tying the knot this is serious, but just because we are now husband and wife doesn’t mean that our personalities changed completely, we are still allowed to laugh out loud when we want to and to take life just as it is.
All facets of life should be displayed in a married life as well. We go through fun times and through sad times, we act serious and not serious, we behave like adults and we behave like children, and if you found the person where you can be all at once without getting a serious or a strange look, then you can be sure that you found it, the love you were looking for.
Keep it safe, hold onto it even if times are hard, it is a gift and it is so unique.
Many out there trying to search for it, they sometimes lose sight of the importance and search for something perfect and get frustrated because they’re not able to find it.
It will find you!
But it will only find you when you stop searching and if you get a way of wanting something perfect, it will never be perfect. It just can’t be perfect because we are humans. I’m truly convinced that these relationships happen by accident, accident in the best sense of the word accident. They hit you when you’re not expecting it. That’s the surprise of the meant to be.
Nobody ever told me that I have to go through so many struggles before this happens, but in the end I can say all these struggles were worth it. We found each other without searching and that was the best thing that happened to us. Now it’s our task to keep it going and we will give the best in us for the future.
Stay faithfully and never stop hoping!
There is so much to write about from the past weeks besides the engagement, the family visits and our islamic wedding that I don’t even know where to start.
Shortly after my love arrived from Libya he proposed to me and made me the happiest person ever. But after a proposal the planning starts and this is honestly not that easy. Two cultures, two countries, Europe and North Africa, Christian and Muslim, woohoo, lots to keep in mind and focus on. But some wise man one day said ‘love can handle everything’ so here we go on our journey to be finally husband and wife. For the legal part the first step was to ask just for informations about a wedding in Germany. To make it easy we choose the registry office in my birth town. It’s a small city and you don’t have to wait ages until they have a date for you but it quickly turned out that we have to check it in Munich as I’m officially registered there. The first sentence almost before the woman working there said hallo was – you have to pay before we start to review the fact sheet for a binational wedding. What a start, the first money already spent before we know anything. Next was that she was approaching my fiancé in German. And what a surprise, his German is not enough to consent to anything legal so even if he’s speaking clearly English and also is trusting my translations we have to bring a certified translator when we want to apply for the wedding. As if that’s not enough we got a full list of documents he has to bring translated and certified in Germany! It is not sufficient if the translation and certification was done in Libya and the German embassy there, no, we have to authorize a German agency. Sure we have because it is more expensive to do it here and my feeling is that the registry office is supporting local agencies but that’s just my thinking…
If we have all documents in place and applied for the wedding the documents will be checked at several departments. This hopefully won’t take too long as most documents will expire after six months, they cannot be older than that, otherwise we have to arrange again the whole paper stuff. If they agree within these 6 months, then the registry office in Munich will send everything to the small registry office of my home town and we can schedule a date with them.
This would be perfect as it is smaller, more intimate, located in a small park instead of a grey building and most important, we would have our families around. Belgium is not too far away from my parents, so his uncle could be there as well as my family.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it will work without major problems and we soon are also legally husband and wife!
Keep the faith and never lose hope!
What is that? Hadn’t I wrote just a few days ago that I’m so happy because I’m engaged? And now already a married wife, how quick is that?
It’s true, I married my fiancé, shortly after our return from the family visits but not in the way that we are now legally bonded husband and wife, we married in the Islamic way which is not legal in Germany.
Why did we do it?
The story started when I met him as I knew from the very first beginning that he is a Muslim and not only by birth, he’s living it. That doesn’t mean that he’s the super religious person as many think when hearing Muslim, but he’s sticking to his religion and believes in it by heart.
To go directly against preoccupied people, no, I’m not married to an extremist, Al Kaida member or self suicide Muslim, I’m married to a faithful person and to the greatest husband ever for me. And another no, he’s not putting pressure on me in any way, I am still free and still without religion.
I’m German and I know also persons around me who are Christians by heart and who believes in their religion just in a natural way, so nothing to even talk about but when it comes to Muslims you always have to justify and clarify and explain just because of the stupid extreme persons showing off something which has in my point of view nothing to do with religion. Sorry, I interrupted myself but that’s something I wanted to add.
So we did it in the Islamic way as it was important for my fiancé. You can consider it like kind of blessing. Similar to what Christians do when they went to a church. Gods mercy through the prayer and advise from an imam.
Ok, it wasn’t that easy to find an imam because I thought in first place we should choose a mosque with Arabic background but it was quickly proofed to be the wrong decision. I don’t know how often we went there in total and to how many persons we spoke but the bottom line was that a twenty something young so called imam started a speech about why he cannot do the wedding. He went so far to almost calling me ‘unpurified’, I don’t even want to write the words I heard unsaid about what he was thinking about me. My reaction was purely to say: honey, lets go, I don’t need to listen to someone like him, judging me without even being able to look at me while talking. This “imam” was looking at the wall behind me while trying to convince me that I have to regret everything I did in my life. I do not regret anything! I had good times and bad times and precious memories and memories which are not sunny and happy but in the end all this made me the person I am today. The person my fiancé fell in love with. Just later a sentence came to my mind which would have fitted: let him who is without sin cast the first stone. And I don’t even think that I have sins – I just lived, I never hurted anyone on purpose or lied about important things, I haven’t killed or stolen my neighbors husband, and so on, I just lived my life for the last thirty-five years and tried to be a good person along the way.
This is not worth talking about because we drove off and my fiancé was as angry as me.
Soon afterwards we found a small mosque nearby where people were almost enthusiastic to find the imam for us. Two old men were almost running stairs up and down to locate him for us.
A bit worried from the first experience I was waiting and then he asked us to come into his rooms.
A white haired old man with, which gave me a good feeling, a kind and calm expression on his face. The two others joined us as during an Islamic wedding you need two witnesses. It turned out to be good as the imam was only talking arabic and Turkish, so the witnesses were also my translators.
The imam was explaining what he will do, what’s the sense of agreeing on a wedding, that in their tradition a sum for the wife has to be written down and agreed on in case of the husband leaving the wife. What for sure is not a bad thing but what we – inshallah – will never need. He was so kind and asked me upfront if it would be OK for me to cover my hair for the celebration. I had a zebra scarf around my neck, maybe not the kind of cover he thought, and did it as even if I’m without a religion I have a deep respect before religious persons. Not only for the imam, also for priests, rabbis, whatever there is on the world, as long as they treat me with respect I respect them too. And he was respectful and even kind of funny as the wife has to agree three times that she’s willing to take the man as her husband and he told me that I have to say “OK” three times. He said OK, OK, OK and I repeated it.
The first time I have ever heard that as an agreement for a wedding, I know the “Yes, I do” but OK was not on my mind before. He said the prayer together with my newlywed husband and the witnesses and afterwards the three old men were congratulating us and wishing us all the best and a happy future together. The witness gave us our wedding documents and they led us out of the mosque. There we were, newlyweds, on a snowy Sunday afternoon in the middle of Munich and what should I say, I’m so happy that we did it.
It’s kind of weird as I never thought that it will change something for me but it is like the engagement day, when you don’t expect anything you will discover in the end, that these steps are changing your life. I’m called wife now from my husband and even if the legal wedding is more important for me as I will take on his last name on that day I feel like his wife already and am talking about my husband. And it has shown me another thing in life, be open-minded, don’t cut precious moments like this out of your life because you are pre-occupied. You never know how it would be unless you do it.
Keep the faith, it hasn’t to be religious but it could, just the way you feel comfortable with is the right one.
