another eye opens

MARRIAGE

It’s so easy to point a finger and to ask, How could I, as a loving mother, have let my eighteen-year-old daughter, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, marry Osama bin Laden in 2000? Well, all I can say is she wasn’t getting any younger.

Maybe I wasn’t the best role model, because, after all, as a teen-ager, I went to my prom with Idi Amin. Of course, nowadays everyone remembers Idi only as a demented homicidal despot, but back then he was just a kid in a powder-blue tux, offering me a lovely corsage, which I thought was the sweetest gesture until I realized that it was made from a human hand. But Idi had such a crush on me and we ruled triumphantly as Prom King and Queen, after the other, elected couple disappeared; I was also voted Most Popular, Nicest, and Most Likely to Own a Slave.

The women in my family have always been attracted to powerful men. I once asked my grandmother if it was true about her and Hitler, and she got all misty-eyed and murmured, “That was a very long time ago, before the little mustache. But we had the best time together, taking long walks, doing watercolors, and talking late into the night about how someday he would rename Poland in my honor and call it My Really Pretty Girlfriend. He was such a puppy dog, but I have to be honest, when it came to writing me love poetry he was no Josef Stalin.”

My sister was in fact preëngaged to Saddam Hussein, and I hate to say this but she did once tell him, “I can’t marry you until you give me a diamond, a condo, and a nuclear warhead.” Things almost worked out until the United States invaded Iraq, Saddam went on the lam, and my sister threw up her hands and began seeing Kim Jong-il. “I’m sorry,” she told Saddam in an e-mail, “but I need some stability.” Personally, I always thought that Kim looked like a chubby flight attendant for a budget airline, but as my sister explained, “Every morning, he makes the entire Army chant, ‘We love our Supreme Leader and his fiancée is so hot!’ ”

When Amal first started getting serious about Osama, I cautioned her, saying, “But he already has two wives,” to which she replied, “You mean two fat wives.” As a teen-ager, Amal had covered her walls with posters of Fidel Castro, Manuel Noriega, and Justin Timberlake, because, as Amal put it, “Justin is the tyrant of all media.” We would watch “Friends” together, but when I swooned over David Schwimmer, Amal scoffed, “Sure, he’s cute, but where are his ruthless bodyguards?” My mother’s favorite program was “The Golden Girls,” because it portrayed an ideal fundamentalist household, starring, as my mom would sigh, “that handsome Bea Arthur and his many devoted concubines.”

When Amal began thinking about marrying Osama I begged her to keep her options open and so she began dating Muammar Qaddafi. I was wary of Muammar because, with his curly dyed-black hair and his glittery wardrobe, he reminded me of a storefront psychic. But Amal insisted that, when it was just the two of them, hiding out from rebel forces in a culvert, he could be quite the charmer and that sometimes he’d let her shoot coffee cans with his solid-gold revolver. “It was so romantic,” she confided. “I felt like Lynne Cheney!”

But the heart wants what it wants, and Amal eventually returned to Osama. Her bridal shower was a dream and Amal received Kevlar lingerie, some racy photos of women driving, and a gag apron printed with the phrase “Tell your other wives to cook.” On her wedding night, Amal wondered aloud, “Do you think that I’ll ever get to meet him in person?” But a few weeks later she was flown to an undisclosed location and at last began her married life. I felt just like Kris Jenner, the mother of all those Kardashian girls. I recently contacted Kris and I asked her, “When your daughter Kim made so many mistakes and the entire world turned against her, what did you do?” And Kris responded, with so much warmth and wisdom, “All the morning shows.”

— Paul Rudnick