Happily Ever After

"Weddings are tough, huh?" I whispered to my flaccid four year old as I tried to pull her purple princess nightgown over her head.

She didn't answer, hand through sleeve... out.

Last week we went to the pool and the yellow squirter fishy married the purple squirter fishy, oh, 8 or 9 times in the course of an hour. The green one functioned as the wicked stepmother, evil witch, and monster keeping them from each other, over and over. Our sitter informed me the next day that my daughter "got married 4 times". Her dollies all have wedding gowns. You get the picture. She has an undying fascination with marriage.

It's not so much the superficial fascination of weddings, but the little glimpses of what getting married means to her. My husband and I had an argument and before our bath she asked "Mommy, when are you and Dada getting married again?". Her four-year-old mentality simplifies it into something about "true love". Go figure, she's got ALL of the princess movies, something I said would never happen, something that crept its pretty little stereotypical head through the crack in the door one day–and never went away.

Really, it's not that silly. It's the reason I still cry at weddings, or in the case of today, balled uncontrollably in my place as "matron" (god I hate that word) of honor. We idealize it. Through the ceremony we listen to the words about perfect love, listening to one another, and giving ourselves fully to the one standing before us. Nobody does it with the thought of "my god, the odds are against us. 50 50 we'll get divorced".

About two years ago, the bride who's wedding we were at today gave my daughter The "Paper Bag Princess". It had been stepped on and spilled on, pages sticking together, and finally found its way, unreadable, into the trash. So much for the independent woman. She can do it all, so why not just use her and abuse her, and throw her to the side to deal with her own mess?

Bitter? Maybe. Independent and taking it a day at a time... or even as pages stuck together melding into one big blob of continuum. Yes.
I was at the wedding by myself with the two kids. 7-and-a-half hours from home.

My daughter wore her "Belle" dress to the wedding. The bride said she could wear anything she wanted, and I figured that if this would make my life easier, then it was worth it to allow her to be in her fantasy of what a wedding should be–Fancy, magical, star-lined, with singing birds and mice, and flowers that bow to the bride's every move.

In this wedding though, the bride was barefoot, holding a bouquet of wild wheat grass, tied with twine, drooping daisies in her hair. She looked beautiful, but not in the sense that my daughter might think of a bride looking beautiful. The "minister" wore shorts, and married them in a circle of stones on the rim of a large green field. A big sheepdog was the ring bearer.

I keep looking through the tears to see what my daughter's reaction was. She was in and out, running off to play with the other kids, and color in her Princess books, not entranced, not even really entertained. She didn't like the cake, the sitter I had watching her was "okay", and the other kids "messed up her coloring books".

The night culminated with the sheep dog almost biting her face, and her wetting herself because she got scared. I rushed crying blindly into the bathroom, looking to see if she was hurt. (Thank freaking goodness, she wasn't and I will knock on wood a thousand times for that one!). I thought that she was crying because she was scared. Through sobs, she said that "no", she was feeling "shy" now. I introduced to the word "embarrassed" and I made her laugh by putting her wet underwear in the front of mine, under my dress (so we could hide them from the crowd). "Just hold me" she said and I carried her out, hiding her face, trying to deflect well intended comments.

"Just hold me", my broken little girl, exhausted and embarrassed.

Tonight I carried 50 pounds of human beings through the hotel lobby, up the elevator, and down the hall to our room. 50 pounds of sleeping baby and sleeping child, settled into beds, sleeping soundly, after a long day. A day of ceremony, a day of joy, a day of love and hope, and a day of embarrassment.

Again, "weddings are tough".
That's all I have to say.