I know I posted this over at the Cafe a long time ago. A friend of mine who's a matushka sent this to me quite a while ago, & I found it while going through old e-mail. Enjoy...
You might be married to an Orthodox priest if:
1) You routinely answer to names that Americans cannot pronounce.
2) Your best black dress has wax on it.
3) You have at least two head coverings stashed in your car, just in
case.
4) The parking lot guy at the local hospital knows you.
5) You own an emergency outfit (mine is a lovely kaftan) to put on over grubbies when someone stops by unexpectedly, because, people stop by unexpectedly.
6) Even with caller ID, you never, ever know what's going to happen when you pick up the phone. So you make your cross on the way to answer it.
7) At the end of a piano concert, when the pianist bows to the audience, you piously cross your arms and bow back.
You can say "Christ is risen!" in at least three languages which you do not speak.
9) Your hands are red from dye for some portion of Holy Week.
10) The closet your husband uses smells faintly of incense.
11) At a monastery, your small children become confused because from their vantage, everyone looks like Daddy.
12) Your spouse has at least once been compared to Z.Z. Top.
13) People have tried to arrange marriages between your children and theirs.
14) Your son has at least once had too much communion wine.
15) Your daughter begs to take the day off of school for funerals, and knows how to arrange flowers around icons so they don't fall.
16) When you fold clothes, your toddler censes the house with an undergarment.
17) Your children have tried to bless the house with a toilet brush.
18) Your child could sing "Alleluia" before he could sing the alphabet.
19) And he blesses the livingroom with videotapes. And bows.
20) Before leaving for school or going to bed, the kids sometimes forget and come to YOU with their hands cupped for a blessing.
21) That towel your son has is sometimes Superman's cape. But sometimes it's a phelonion.
22) For weeks after seeing the bishop, your son blesses people with two hands.
23) When people talk about televions shows that are on Saturday night or Sunday morning, you stare at them blankly.
24) In order to have Mother's Day breakfast in bed, you have to get back in there after church and after trapeza.
25) Your husband knows the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox for the next five years, but forgets exactly which day you got married.
26) Your kids do not buy aftershave for their dad for Father's Day. Nor do they buy a tie.
27) When there is a day with no church and no work or school, everyone is a little puzzled. But it means that there IS a parade.
28) Driving alone together to a distant hospital with your husband is a date.
29) Friends know what you take in your coffee, but good friends know what you take in your coffee on fast days and what you take in your coffee on non-fast days.
30) You have more than five tofu recipes. Even if you hate tofu.
31) Even if at first you didn't like being called by just your title, after a while "Matushka" or "Khoria" or "Presbytera" acquires all the penache of "Cher". Or so you hope.
32) You just pray that it doesn't have all the connotations of "Roseanne."
33) Spell checking your e-mail to parishioners is cause for myrth. (Today they wanted to change Popov to Poop.)
34) Even if he practiced it on you all week, your husband's sermons always surprise you a little on Sunday. God sends him things.
35) As you stand manning a plunger in the church basement on a major feast, it occurs to you that there's a REASON they don't give us a job description.
36) For your husband you buy only black socks and mostly black pants.
37) Parishioners who see his pajamas on the clothesline are momentarily perplexed.
38) You may not have ever seen your husband's bare chin.
39) Your heart twists into knots when the child who was trying to kill his brother an hour ago is now, at church, listening patiently to an old lady discussing her pets and plants. He asks polite questions that show that he's been listening, and may even offer suggestions.
40) You have prayed for the "person that Father says needs prayers but he can't tell me about."
41) When your son answers the phone, before his voice changes, people say, "Matushka?"
42) After his voice changes, they say, "Batiushka?"
43) You have experienced the holy hush that comes over an empty church as the subbeams show the lingering puffs of incense after everyone has gone downstairs for lunch.
44) Your children know the silent signals you flash for "stand up straight," "make your cross," "Tuck in your shirt," and "turn around -- NOW."
45) Your child has read a Little Golden Book like it's an epistle.
46) On the rare Sunday that you're not in church, everything seems.... off.
47) Sometimes you really, really want to defenestrate a Reader.
48) When you read "The Godfather," the only part that was familiar was the way that people tried to send messages to the Don through his wife.
49) Someone in the parish has considered buying you a "She Who Must Be Obeyed" coffee mug....
50) But he very prudently chickened out.
