Wedding Day - Prelude

            Wedding Day - Prelude

Fiona and Maggie playing ball before the wedding

It’s 1:30 am, and I can’t sleep. I’ve been a relapsing/remitting insomniac since college. I didn’t expect to sleep much the night before my wedding, anyway. My bladder awakens me. After tiptoeing to the bathroom, I pad to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea and bowl of cereal. That’ll quell the rumbly tummy. Afterwards, I creep upstairs where Pete is sleeping.

“How come you’re up here, Hon?” I ask. “I didn’t want to wake you by coming into bed late,” he responds.

I curl into him, feeling his warm, bare torso. I wonder if he’s being traditional by sleeping away from the bride-to-be the night before his wedding. It’s okay. We have a lifetime to sleep (or, in my case, sleep and wake…) together. We cuddle ten minutes before I return downstairs. My alarm is set for 6 a.m.; the wedding’s at 10.

I finish reading Anne’s Lamott’s ‘Thanks, Help, Wow’ on my Kindle. I love her quote from Thomas Merton: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me… “  Maybe I can use that as part of my reception toast to Pete. That’s reason enough to read at 2:00 a.m.

I drift off and wake up at 6:30 after hitting snooze once. I brush my teeth and return to the master bedroom in my friend, Piper’s, family beach house. I’ve never stayed in this room during the three or four times I’ve come here for writer’s retreats. I sit cross-legged on the queen-sized bed and stare at the ocean, just 100 feet from the house. A storm has been roiling the sea all night; sideways rain streaks the window. February in our part of New Zealand normally features sunny, pleasant weather. Not today. This will not be the beach wedding we’d planned.

Little is going to plan: the lamb we’d ordered was missing in action at the supermarket for about half an hour; we were denied custody of pre-cooked chickens for the wedding day after the deli manager told us it would be dangerous to keep them warm all morning (she required us to get the chooks the night before and cool them); seven-foot-long tables in the reception hall initially refused to budge from inside a tightly-framed hot water closet; a server cancelled on us two days before the wedding, necessitating a last-minute replacement; eight-year-old Finley forgot to pack underwear and would stand commando in his tuxedo. Also, I have two zits on my chin.

Despite this, I strain to plod the path of no resistance. To do what Anne Lamott suggests, which is surrender, to release myself from the madness of trying to be my own – or anyone else’s – higher power.   I remember what my friend, Jackie, the upbeat running captain at Mount Joggers told me about her wedding day, “I felt like a child on Christmas morning, I was so excited.”  

Maybe instead of allowing project managing to ensare my mind in a spider web of details, I can focus on love. Focus on excitement about marrying my best friend, my children’s stepfather, the guy with kind eyes and bulging biceps (Dear God, Thank you for Pete’s arms. I love them. Amen.) and chah-ming accent. My Petey.

So, at 6:40 on the morning of my wedding, I close my eyes while perched on the bed, listen to wind and rain and think about Petey. Think about the fact I get to host a wedding (much like Jackie says, “I don’t HAVE to run up the Mount; I GET to run up the Mount.”) I allow myself to ignore, for ten minutes, lists and fears and more lists and even the fact I’m hungry again. Just be. Listen to the waves, because the ocean always has something to say. Today it says I am enough. Enough to host a wedding; enough to marry a second time; enough for my family, my friends, my community…

Fiona and I eat breakfast together before starting to get ready. One of my Joggers friends, Paula, arrives around 8:00 to style my hair. I haven’t made up my face yet, so I ask her to curl Fiona’s hair while I try to cover two small welts (zits, dammit) on my chin and spackle the rest of my face with makeup in the dim light of the beach house's only bathroom. I finish at 8:30, and Paula starts twisting my hair into loose spirals using a slim ceramic rod. 

Paula, my rock star stylist

My friend, Louise, has brought my bridal bouquet and Fiona’s rose petals, plus the corsage for Pete’s mum and Pete’s boutonniere. She asks what she can do to help and I tell her since we’ll have to hold the ceremony inside to please start pushing aside furniture so our guests have room to stand. Shortly after that, my friend Deb, (a doctor from Spokane who’s living at the Mount with her three kids for a year), comes with her nanny, Jamey, who’s agreed to replace our missing third server. Deb carries two bags of potatoes we forgot. I ask her to bring them to the reception hall two miles away. She’s so chipper, it’s like I’ve just offered her a hundred dollars, “You betcha, anything you need…” She does this all day.

Louise brought the flowers I'd ordered

For the first time in weeks, I’m hands-off. Bridal paralysis affixes me to my chair like seagull crap adheres to my van’s windscreen. It’s time to delegate. My friend, Jacinda (Jac, with a hard ‘c,’ for short) arrives to take pictures. She used to own a photography business and obviously knows what she’s doing as she checks the light and asks me to drop my shoulders. Oh, right. I’m supposed to look relaxed….

I’m nervous. Not nervous about marrying Pete. I’m about as sure about Pete as you can be about another person. Which is to say, mostly sure in a we’re-flawed-and-human kinda way. I’m sure we’ll face hardship. I’m sure we’ll compromise. I’m sure Pete will order steak 80% of the time when we eat at a restaurant. I’m not nervous about the relationship, which we’ve built over two years of living together and nearly three years of knowing each other; no, I’m twitchy about details: is my hair gonna fall flat in this weather? (probably) Will I be able to see the two zits on my chin in all the wedding photos? (probably not). Will Finley do something silly or infuriating during the wedding  or reception? (most definitely).  I can’t control those things. So, I focus instead on what I can control, such as careful application of makeup, practicing of vows, inhalating and exhalation of breaths.  Let go and breathe...