Leaving and Cleaving

Love, Longing, and Foreboding Joy

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

A family wedding is more than a mere event, it is a season. Even those who have little or nothing to do with the preparations themselves feel the tug of the current that has swept up their family members and draws us all, inevitably, towards The Day. And then, finally, it dawns on us—ready or not—that we have reached both an end and a beginning.

Considering the reluctance with which I allowed my mother to sit me on a stool at the local Merle Norman retailer and be matched with wedding-appropriate foundation, blush, and eye shadow, it felt distinctly surreal to spend the morning of my sister-in-law’s wedding day “making up” the faces of her bridesmaids (most of them, anyway) and—most surprising and most fun for me—my mother-in-law. But it was with great satisfaction that I watched them pass me, one by one, as they came down the aisle. And, though I really had little to do with it, they looked damn good. Then the bride herself, my de facto little sister, glowing with the full-body smile I knew from her childhood, but with the wriggle that always accompanied it then replaced with a graceful progression into her new life. I saw the pride and love as she registered her almost-husband’s reaction to seeing her, when he had to look away because he was on the verge of dissolving right there in front of his grandma and everybody. For the next half hour they didn’t take their eyes off each other for longer than absolutely necessary. And why would they? This was their day, we were all here to celebrate them and the life that they were starting together. That up-welling of joy found release later, for many of us, on the dance floor. I embraced the season of Maying and just. let. go. It felt so good. All the anxiety of preparations, the hope for their future, the bittersweetness of another change in the family relational dynamic, all of it poured out in collective movement and jubilant noise. When the light faded we held glow sticks aloft to form a tunnel and cheered them to their car, and then out of the parking lot. The newlyweds pulled away from their old lives under a fragile sliver of new moon, a wonderfully auspicious beginning. And, just like that, the season ended. We stayed for a while to help clean up before collapsing into our own car, as mentally and emotionally exhausted as I was jelly-leg tired. I wanted to cry, but I never cry without a reason, and I couldn’t put my finger on the why. I watched the new moon as we drove, my feelings a tangle, too worn out to try following the individual threads.

That has been the work of the days that followed. Each night the moon is a little fuller, presiding over a chorus of frogs: the buzz-trill tenor of tree frogs and the reverberating bass of the bullfrogs, all singing like that’s the only thing keeping the moon from falling into their pond. I still feel like crying. Everything seems so achingly beautiful, and so impermanent. The season is progressing at a dizzying pace, each blooming of flowers fading and giving way to the next. I feel my soul reaching out like protective arms, wishing to wrap around my sister-in-law, to preserve her bubble of bliss for as long as possible. I want to do this because I know too well that the bubble breaks, much sooner than you expect. Life becomes a new normal, with a few comfortable old rhythms and many new ones to adjust to. Your passion cools; and without the blinding blaze you see your new spouse as a human with many annoying quirks and habits. Life happens to you without the cocoon of childhood and family. Years go by. One day you look in the mirror, and you are not who you expected to be at all; you look around at your life, and it isn’t what you expected, either.

I am talking about myself, here, of course. So many of the same people who celebrated with my husband and me on our Day were also there to celebrate my sister-in-law and new brother-in-law. It couldn’t help but take me back to when I thought the word “submission” belonged in a woman’s wedding vows, and hadn’t really thought farther than the immeasurable bliss of actually being alone together. That day, I shed my old life, my old self, like a crustacean who had outgrown her shell; I spent the next year feeling tender and vulnerable. I didn’t know then how to do to otherwise. I had not yet developed the self-compassion necessary to love myself through transformation, and to look back at caterpillar-me with gratitude instead of discomfort. The past several months have been a long exercise in reconnecting with my caterpillar selves, but the voice of myself as a young wife is not one I have been able to hear until now. Only nine years have passed, but she seems so painfully young and naive. Perhaps it is really her, not my sister-in-law, that I am reaching for. I want to tell her…what? What could I possibly say that would have prepared me for this decade? Would it have helped to know, then, how many times I was about to have the floor of my life crumble beneath me? That I was destined to lose my sense of self, then my childhood home, then my daughter (and, simultaneously, my trust in my body and in my fitness as a mother), then my relationship with my brother, then the community I grew up in, then my understanding of God, then my youngest sister, then my religion, then all hope of ever belonging in my family again. Would it have helped to know that, even though it would be a long slog through deep mud at times, I would survive all of it…and like myself better afterwards?