Wedding Woes: “We Were Too Fat and the Wrong Kind of Brown”

My daughters didn’t fit neatly into their friend’s Instagram fantasy

Photo by Quilia on Unsplash

My 30-something daughters’ friend Bushra, a second-generation Pakistani, is finally getting married to her college sweetheart. The bride-to-be has already had a bachelorette party and is planning for three-day Desi wedding festivities.

My daughters, Stacy and Kristy, flew a thousand miles to attend the bachelorette party. Stacy bought supplies and planned and led activities, while Kristi booked reservations, drove people around, and kept everyone on schedule.

Thanks to my daughters’ preparations and support, Bushra and her other friends and relatives had a great time.

Kristy and Stacy, on the other hand, did not.

They felt excluded and unappreciated. Instigated by Bushra, the other women — all Desi — treated them as servants instead of equals. The appearance-obsessed bride excluded them from most of the pictures.

Stacy summed up their exclusion with this devastatingly insightful comment: “We were too fat and the wrong kind of brown.”

The first level of discrimination: fat phobia

Yes, Stacy and Kristy are significantly overweight. They’ve tried to lose weight before with varying degrees of success, but for now, that’s the way things are. They’ve been overweight most of the 15 years Bushra has known them. She should have gotten over the weight issue or moved on by now.

Maybe Bushra had gotten over it on the surface, but not at the deepest level. This wedding seems to have brought out the worst in her. She’s become Bridezilla on steroids.

I think that when Bushra looked at the other attendees — who, like her, are slim Desi women with lustrous long hair — she thought my daughters spoiled the picture. So, consciously or not, she staged the pictures to include them as little as possible.

Of course, the fact that my daughters were doing the work to keep this photo-shoot fantasy going also minimized their appearance in pictures.

The second level of discrimination: the wrong kind of brown

I found this accusation more troubling than the one about weight because it hadn’t crossed my mind before.

Bushra and my biracial daughters have similar café au lait skin colors. The big difference between Desi women and my daughters is the hair.

Unlike the Desi women, my daughters’ hair is on the coarser side. Kristy has curly-to-wavy hair that she often pulls back, and Stacy usually wears her hair in dreadlocks, locs, or whatever you want to call them.

In short, my daughters don’t have the shining, mainstream-American-culture type of hair that many Desi women come by naturally. Even if Kristy and Stacy straightened their hair, it wouldn’t shine. It’s the nature of the beast. My daughters’ hair texture brands them as Other.

Bushra has never given off any vibes that my daughters’ ethnicity is a problem, and she’s marrying a non-Desi man (who, ironically, isn’t the most photogenic specimen of masculinity). So I think this type of discrimination is, again, more about appearance.

The reason and the real reason

It’s becoming more and more apparent that Bushra thinks she’s the center of the universe. She never apologizes — why should she, when she thinks she’s the only one who’s right? She acts all sweet and innocent and girly to people’s faces, but she talks about them and sabotages them behind their backs.

When people don’t fit prettily into her picture, that’s Strike 1. But when they push back and disagree with her, those are two more strikes against them. Bushra throws a tantrum, picks up her ball, and goes home, never to play with those “rude people” again.

How everything shook out

After the bachelorette weekend fiasco, my daughters concluded that their friendship with Bushra was pretty much over. The only question left was whether they would attend the wedding. They were both leaning toward not going since they’d already blown over $1000 each on a bachelorette party where they’d been treated badly.

As it turned out, they didn’t have to make that decision.

In a post-bachelorette call, Bushra asked my daughters how she thought the weekend went. Stacy gave a vague, diplomatic answer. But Kristy, never one to put up with nonsense, answered directly. Although she wasn’t insulting, she didn’t pull any punches. At the end of the call, Kristy asked, “Do you still want us to come to your wedding?”

Bushra didn’t hem and haw. She said no.

Wow. It’s so easy to tear things down that took years to build up. But at least Bushra let Stacy and Kristy know now before they invested any more time and effort into this wedding.

At this rate, I’m wondering how the marriage will fare.

Bushra is treating her fiancé with the same rudeness and condescension she poured out on my daughters. If the groom-to-be had enough spine and self-respect, he’d get out while the getting’s good.

I hope Bushra’s marriage goes better than her wedding. But I’m not going to place any bets on it.

Thanks for reading! Here’s the first installment of the Bushra wedding saga:

[embed]A Cautionary Tale of Two Weddings I think one couple has a better shot at happily ever aftermedium.com