On Producing a Wedding

I'm (we're) getting married in 13 days.

As much as this past year has been about writing and teaching, it's also been about getting ready to step across the (figurative) threshold, about reconfiguring our lives and our kinship structure, about (as a wise pastor friend commented at a recent barbecue) "acknowledging in the presence of our friends what God already knows, that we're married."

Most of the time, and maybe I say this out of the naiveté of the still-engaged, most of the time I feel married to K already.  We've lived together for two years.  We've negotiated The Major Holidays with our families.  We've figured out money and planned our next three moves based on each others' careers.  I can imagine life without him, but it's the same kind of imagining that sends me down a rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios and then scrambling to the page.  I imagine I've got a few plays in me where a woman loses her husband...all of them will be the funhouse-mirror-nightmare of "please don't ever let me lose him."

Anyway.  A friend asked me yesterday whether I'm getting excited for the wedding.  And weirdly, but truthfully, I'm not.  I'm INCREDIBLY excited to be married, to have our titles match what I already feel like is true.  But in some ways (in many ways), the three hours thirteen days from now feels, to me, like a show.  A self-produced show.

We found space and a date, found a budget, sent out PR materials, have had to make compromises about costume and set in order to meet our budget, we cast (and, unfortunately, in a couple of cases RE-cast) the supporting roles, we negotiated with our designers (my dad, on cake, his mom, on rehearsal dinner), we wrote (and revised) the script, we rehearsed (the dance).  Sound familiar?

I think for a lot of women who are on the verge of marriage (aka "brides") the wedding feels like a once-in-a-lifetime event.  And while I sure as hell hope this is once-in-a-lifetime, it also feels like everything, so far, I've been asked to do many, many times before.  Including find my light and remember my lines.  And it *does* feel like putting on a show, since the true part of marriage, the part that matters most to me, is the part that happens at the kitchen table, just me and K, or the part that happened when we called our circle of loved ones to tell them (waaay before we ventured near Facebook) that we had agreed to cross the threshold together.  Sort of like that moment when you sit down with a director and decide to produce a show together.