Fit to be Tied

Let me give you a picture of how my wedding day began.

You see, my husband and I aren’t much for tradition, so we spent the night before our wedding in the same hotel room. I high-tailed it to bed right after we arrived at the Westin North Shore, tired from our rehearsal dinner and the previous night of poor sleep. My husband felt the need to socialize with our guests, so he headed upstairs to our hospitality suite. He must have asked me 67 times whether I cared if he went upstairs without me. I reassured him I didn’t, and that my only requirement was that he re-enter our shared pre-wedding chambre quietly and without flipping on lights. I was determined to look refreshed and well rested on my wedding day.

With that, my husband kissed me and headed to the hotel’s 15th floor with a napkin full of mini donuts - leftover from the rehearsal dinner - tucked deep into his palm.

I fell into our well appointed bed at about 11:30pm and was asleep within minutes. Upon drifting off, I remember thinking: how lucky am I? Most brides have trouble sleeping the night before their wedding and here I am, so exhausted from the day’s activities that I couldn’t keep my eyes open if I tried.

And then . . .

And then about an hour later, with a crash, my husband ambled into the room. With the lights off, I could hear him shuffling around slowly, step by step and trying not to trip on anything. I squeezed my eyes shut. I was determined to ignore the bear rifling through the treats in our hospitality box and just. fall. back. asleep! Which I did, at least for a short while.

The next thing I remember is waking up to the extremely bright bathroom light shining directly into my eyes. You see the bathroom in our hotel room was situated directly opposite the bed, so an open door in the night lead to a kind of “sweat it out of him” beam of light straight to the face. I seemed to remember requesting that this exact circumstance be avoided at all costs. Which is probably why I turned my head away from the excruciatingly bright light and proceeded to yell something to the effect of: “What the hell are you doing?! Shut off the damn light!” To which my husband replied: “Ughhh, I have really bad heartburn.” Why this required sitting on the toilet like a chair, with the lid closed and the bathroom door wide open, I have absolutely no idea. I requested, yet again, and politely of course, that he close the damn door. Finally, he complied. And I spent the next hour or two attempting to fall back asleep. By the time my ailing husband returned to bed, I grudgingly turned toward him and wrapped my arm around his belly (you see, I am the big spoon in our relationship, which I assume looks pretty funny because I’m 5’3” and my husband is 6 feet tall). It was a wordless promise from me to my groom that I would no longer be a little gremlin upon awakening; that he could be assured he would face a lovely human bride walking down the aisle towards him.

I awoke to my alarm the next morning at 5:45am.

My husband slept like an absolute log through me jumping out of bed and brewing coffee in the noisy and inexplicably complicated one cup coffee machine in our hotel room, through me pouring my usual cereal (toted with me from home, because who wants to switch up her routine on the morning of her wedding?) very loudly into a glass cup and clicking away at the keyboard of my old Mac laptop while I checked my emails. I thought about leaning the hotel lamp towards his head and flipping on the light while gently shaking him awake, but figured I’d best preserve the tentative truce we reached the night before.

Luckily my husband is blessed with that wonderful ability, which some men possess, to look just like a little boy in his sleep.

I’m just saying, this may or may not have factored into my decision to let him slumber.

At 6:40am, just before I walked out of the room to meet my mother downstairs, I kissed my soon-to-be husband on the forehead and whispered “We’re getting married soon!” And even through the lacey fog of sleep, he smiled and squeezed me.

My mother was waiting in the circle drive in front of our hotel, sitting in her car crying. Of course. My bridal trousseau occupied the entire back seat, looking regal even slung across the leather upholstery. I fretted over whether the dress would be wrinkled when we finally pulled down the zipper on the garment bag. And while the hotel coffee and my prenuptial nervous energy worked their magic, I talked at my mother a mile a minute. And like all new brides, I said things to my mother to the tune of: “Can you believe this is actually happening? Can you believe the day is here?” as if no one else in the history of marriage had ever felt exactly what I was feeling at that very moment. As if I was the only young woman to have ever felt her heart pound at the thought of walking slowly down the aisle toward her future, while the very moment when she will actually do this races towards her at unbelievable speed. Your life is moving forward, it is unstoppable. This is both wonderful and terrifying.

What I felt is indescribable, but you know I will try. I felt cracked open; joyous and full of something important, lonely and nervous and excited and very ready.

When we pulled up to the circle drive at Twin Orchard, the truck from Ronsley carrying our floral arrangements and other décor was unloading its contents into the club. My breath caught in my throat. You know, I don’t know why, but I didn’t cry much during the year of my wedding planning. I didn’t cry when my husband proposed or when I found my wedding dress. I didn’t cry when I found the perfect pair of wedding shoes. But the flowers. When we walked into Ronsley’s warehouse for the floral mockup and were given a little peak into my wedding day, that’s when I choked up. Maybe it is the force of the flowers’ beauty that gets to me, all the more jarring for its ephemeral quality. Flowers are so intensely gorgeous, opening their secret fertile centers with complete audacity. And then soon, within days, they close up. They are gone. It is like your wedding day; it arrives with an explosive crash of colors and sounds and tastes and smells, it is the most beautiful celebration of love, and then it is over. In any case, I saw those flowers and a feeling of optimism washed over me. This was my wedding day and it was going to be more wonderful than I had even imagined.

I spent the next 3 or 4 hours in hair and makeup. My makeup artist explained to me that having the eyelids touched tends to relax people greatly, which is probably why I found myself almost snoring in her chair more than once, my head colonized by a small army of Velcro curlers. And so the bridal party buzzed around Twin Orchard’s women’s locker room, a pin here, an application of mascara there, while I tried not to lose my shit and explained to the photographer for the millionth time: “The schmoozing is what terrifies me!” Oh the schmoozing! The horror of it! It was 11:30am by the time I was ready to get into my dress and to, once again, luxuriate in the experience of allowing someone else to dress me. One woman held up my hair while another buttoned the dress and snapped my great grandmother’s diamond watch closed around my wrist, while yet another lifted the skirt of my dress to help me into my beautiful wedding shoes.

What can I say? I was a natural bride. It came easy to me.

And then.

And then I was ready to gather the hem of my heavy dress to my knees and climb the stairs to the main floor of the country club and to my groom. When we finally saw each other, we were like nervous children. We kept kissing each other lightly and staring into each other’s faces, awkward around the cameras snapping pictures of such a strange, overwhelming moment (I still have yet to see the professional photos and I wonder what our faces will look like). And even during the ketubah signing, I was too busy figuring out how to breathe in my dress and shoving my face full of grapes and crackers in order to prevent myself from fainting during my trip down the aisle to really absorb what was happening. And when we were finally under the chuppah, technically already married from the moment we signed the ketubah with our witnesses, my husband and I gripped each others’ hands desperately. The public nature of it all, magnified by the fact that we had decided to do the ceremony in the round with faces staring at us from ALL directions, was . . . daunting.

It wasn’t until the rabbi pronounced us husband and wife, and my husband stomped on the glass with a satisfying pop (after one botched attempt where his foot just kind of slid off the side without doing any damage at all) that I was able to throw my hands up and yell “woohoo!” Which I did, embarrassingly, at full volume.

Moments later my husband and I were secreted away to a private room so that we could absorb the enormity of what had just occurred and, yet again, eat our way clear of a medical emergency. And that’s when the magic happened, but not in the traditional sense (this is for all of you who are familiar with the tradition behind cloistering a new Jewish husband and wife in a private room immediately following the wedding ceremony – for those of you who aren’t familiar with this tradition, well . . . just use your imagination). It was in this room, finally left to only one another, that my husband and I were able to settle back into our own skins and see ourselves as family. That is when the tears came and when I kissed my husband’s face a thousand times and forgave him for every wrong I ever imagined he had done me, and some of the future ones too. I was able to look at him and see his sweetness and his strength. And I realized, with total force and immediacy, what my body already knew. He is my heart.