Nine years
Jan. 19th, 2015 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistAfter my mom handed the phone to my dad, I heard her say something in the background.
"Oh, and Mom says happy anniversary," Dad said. "Seven years it'll be now, right?"
"Nine!" I said. "It was 2006..." I smiled that he seemed so surprised at this. I kind of am, too.
"Time flies when you're having fun!" Andrew said, having discerned enough of the conversation from my half of it.
Our anniversary's Wednesday. I think yesterday or today marks nine years since my parents first met Andrew. Circumstances dictated that they planned their daughter's whole wedding to a stranger, and had only my word for it that this was a good idea. And they never caused me a moment's trouble over it: never raised even the slightest concern that this could be a good idea, never quizzed me about what he was like or where we'd live or what I'd do.
For all they frustrate and confuse and worry me, my parents have been unbelievably supportive of my odd life trajectory, my valuing of things they don't understand (within reason...and I get by without telling them the rest).
I wish I remembered my wedding more fondly, but it was an awful day for me. I was grateful to the friends I had there, who had traveled great distances and driven in bad weather (with a broken foot, in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kmusser's case!), and while Andrew and I were glad to be married...neither of us enjoyed the process of getting married.
Which is sad I guess, but mostly I think it's sad that there's such a narrow cultural understanding of what weddings are like that anyone who feels it was anything other than the best day of their life -- and any woman who didn't "feel like a princess" -- is lacking.
Well, I did feel like a princess, I imagine, in that I was doing this to please other people, some of them strangers.
My wedding was possibly the only day when I felt like I had a public life and a private life and the two were very different. My family don't know the locket I got from my girlfriend, which I usually wore as a bracelet on a watchband, was tied around my ankle with a piece of lace for the wedding. They don't know about her tears at the thought of me moving away.
They don't know that the first words I remember Andrew saying to me as we held hands and walked to where the reception would be were "You're my wife now, Dave," which I knew as a line from a show I don't like.
They don't know that my wedding night was spent playing Apples to Apples with Andrew's and my friends until four in the morning, at which point I cried all over Andrew in the wedding-bed which in our case was a pull-out sofa in my parents' basement because the rest of the house was full of our friends, staying because we're miles from any hotel (though I was secretly thrilled as it was lovely to spend as much time together as we could).
They don't know that I had to explain to Andrew that when people banged their forks on their glasses, they wouldn't stop until we the happy couple kissed. I'd been just about to get up to pee and he had a mouthful of pulled pork, so we kissed quickly and then I went to extract myself from my dress (which luckily I could just about do on my own, one of few concessions I'd gotten on the wedding dress). As soon as I unzipped it, it fell off my shoulders and slid into a puddle around my ankles on the bathroom floor, so I was sitting in just my bra when I heard a knock on the bathroom door and my mom's voice. Apparently people were worried that I was upset. I assured her I was fine -- is a bride not allowed bodily functions on her special day?! -- but the word evidently didn't get around enough because there was no more banging of forks on glasses that day, and I knew from other weddings I'd been to to expect a lot more than the once we escaped with!
My family don't know that Andrew didn't write the song that played at the end of the wedding ceremony. He tried to explain but he talks so fast and sounded so foreign that probably only I could understand what he was saying. He didn't write the song; he had it commissioned as my wedding present. He was rightly proud of it, as it's very good. But if facts were decided democratically, he'd definitely have written it based on what all the people at that wedding thought.
I didn't mind at all that my dad was a couple of years off in how long we've been married. Maybe he's thinking of someone else's wedding.
"Oh, and Mom says happy anniversary," Dad said. "Seven years it'll be now, right?"
"Nine!" I said. "It was 2006..." I smiled that he seemed so surprised at this. I kind of am, too.
"Time flies when you're having fun!" Andrew said, having discerned enough of the conversation from my half of it.
Our anniversary's Wednesday. I think yesterday or today marks nine years since my parents first met Andrew. Circumstances dictated that they planned their daughter's whole wedding to a stranger, and had only my word for it that this was a good idea. And they never caused me a moment's trouble over it: never raised even the slightest concern that this could be a good idea, never quizzed me about what he was like or where we'd live or what I'd do.
For all they frustrate and confuse and worry me, my parents have been unbelievably supportive of my odd life trajectory, my valuing of things they don't understand (within reason...and I get by without telling them the rest).
I wish I remembered my wedding more fondly, but it was an awful day for me. I was grateful to the friends I had there, who had traveled great distances and driven in bad weather (with a broken foot, in
kmusser's case!), and while Andrew and I were glad to be married...neither of us enjoyed the process of getting married. Which is sad I guess, but mostly I think it's sad that there's such a narrow cultural understanding of what weddings are like that anyone who feels it was anything other than the best day of their life -- and any woman who didn't "feel like a princess" -- is lacking.
Well, I did feel like a princess, I imagine, in that I was doing this to please other people, some of them strangers.
My wedding was possibly the only day when I felt like I had a public life and a private life and the two were very different. My family don't know the locket I got from my girlfriend, which I usually wore as a bracelet on a watchband, was tied around my ankle with a piece of lace for the wedding. They don't know about her tears at the thought of me moving away.
They don't know that the first words I remember Andrew saying to me as we held hands and walked to where the reception would be were "You're my wife now, Dave," which I knew as a line from a show I don't like.
They don't know that my wedding night was spent playing Apples to Apples with Andrew's and my friends until four in the morning, at which point I cried all over Andrew in the wedding-bed which in our case was a pull-out sofa in my parents' basement because the rest of the house was full of our friends, staying because we're miles from any hotel (though I was secretly thrilled as it was lovely to spend as much time together as we could).
They don't know that I had to explain to Andrew that when people banged their forks on their glasses, they wouldn't stop until we the happy couple kissed. I'd been just about to get up to pee and he had a mouthful of pulled pork, so we kissed quickly and then I went to extract myself from my dress (which luckily I could just about do on my own, one of few concessions I'd gotten on the wedding dress). As soon as I unzipped it, it fell off my shoulders and slid into a puddle around my ankles on the bathroom floor, so I was sitting in just my bra when I heard a knock on the bathroom door and my mom's voice. Apparently people were worried that I was upset. I assured her I was fine -- is a bride not allowed bodily functions on her special day?! -- but the word evidently didn't get around enough because there was no more banging of forks on glasses that day, and I knew from other weddings I'd been to to expect a lot more than the once we escaped with!
My family don't know that Andrew didn't write the song that played at the end of the wedding ceremony. He tried to explain but he talks so fast and sounded so foreign that probably only I could understand what he was saying. He didn't write the song; he had it commissioned as my wedding present. He was rightly proud of it, as it's very good. But if facts were decided democratically, he'd definitely have written it based on what all the people at that wedding thought.
I didn't mind at all that my dad was a couple of years off in how long we've been married. Maybe he's thinking of someone else's wedding.
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(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 02:09 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed reading this, so thank you for sharing this part of your life. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 05:44 pm (UTC)I dislike that banging forks on glasses thing; it's not part of my culture and the few times I've seen it it's made me feel uncomfortable because I don't like the implied attitudes about consent, really.
Many sympathies on the private life / public life thing. My gf was one of the officiants at our wedding, which was lovely but not something we talked about publicly or mentioned to our parents.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 07:13 pm (UTC)I suppose it became a tradition in the time when a newly-married couple wouldn't have been previously able to show affection in public, and would be expected to be eager to kiss and not want to sit through a meal with all eyes on them before they got to be alone together. Being "made" to kiss by their friends and family must have seemed like a relief to some, a way for their prudish culture to condone such a display of affection. But the tradition's long outlasted the culture; Andrew and I were living together for a year before we were married, for heaven's sake... (But that didn't stop my mom insisting he stayed in my brother's bedroom, so soon after he died that the sight of it as I hugged Andrew goodnight made me cry, until the night after the wedding.)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-22 12:56 pm (UTC)Often these "monumental" occasions (weddings, graduation ceremonies, etc.) are not the undiluted sources of joy for the persons most directly involved that they're supposed to be. Not least because of the pressure exerted by the expectation that they're supposed to be!
I'm glad you've managed to extract a good deal more happiness out of the ensuing nine years than it seems you did out of the day itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-28 05:27 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing this. Occasionally I consider succumbing to pressure and marrying my sweetheart (we've been together for... goodness, 13 years now). This post reminds me of all the reasons I've resisted.
I'm glad the being married part has brought you far more joy.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-29 07:44 pm (UTC)What made mine difficult was how little I had control over -- basically, I felt that stopped with choosing the person I was marrying! Everything else was dictated by the expectations of the society I grew up in, filtered through my parents (who not only were paying for it (because I made it clear that if they didn't I'd just go to the courthouse in my jeans and sign the papers and there'd be no wedding, and they didn't want that) but also had just lost their other child, less than two months before, in a car accident.
So when my mom spent the whole day crying, it wasn't for the reasons mothers might usually cry at weddings. And it made me desperate to do anything I could to make my parents happy, especially because I was emigrating a few days after this! (My mom has since described this as "we kinda lost both our kids at once," which is, to say the least, a bit harsh in my view but does convey how profoundly complicated a situation my wedding was.) So I don't think most weddings would be awful in the way mine was, and I don't want people to think my experience is likely to be similar to theirs!
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-31 08:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 05:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 07:32 pm (UTC)Well done on getting an Andrew out of it though!
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-19 07:57 pm (UTC)a more shallow friend writes
Date: 2015-01-20 01:01 pm (UTC)Re: a more shallow friend writes
Date: 2015-01-20 06:07 pm (UTC)