Do You Believe in Miracles?

My mother once told me that every marriage was a little miracle. Quite a statement. She was married for almost sixty years so she witnessed her own little miracle. Any marriage of that length has its ups and downs and to be able to ride them out and have a happy enough final decade of marriage that you are bereaved when it's over, well, that's a miracle in my books. Unlike many widowed women, my mother was anxious to get right back into another relationship, she missed her marriage. I know of other older women who were griefstricken at the loss of their husbands but when that passed they had no desire for another one.  None. Life was much easier with only one person's needs to take of and no one trying to control you. I can see that but it does not mean their marriage wasn't a miracle while it lasted. It was.

I was at a celebration of life for my dear uncle on the weekend and he had had a long and happy marriage to my aunt. She predeceased him by more than a year and a half and he longed to be reunited with her even if it meant death. That's a commitment to your marriage! While at the gathering I chatted a bit with my cousins children who are at the beginning of their adventures in miracles. One is married, two are engaged and one lives common law. My niece and nephew recently had marriages of their own. It comes with the age bracket I am in now, children of friends and relatives are getting married for the first time. It starts one to pondering.

I believe that living together and marriage are not the same thing. I have done both so I know what it feels like, and that being said, I admit that living together for a long time with someone with or without the label of marriage is quite a feat. I don't know of as many lengthy common law relationships as I do marriages but that is changing and I will be interested to see if common law marriages last as long as often as the old fashioned kind. We humans can go through some pretty profound changes as we mature and keeping a relationship humming along through all that is challenging. Throw in the destabilizing factor of children and career changes and well, it really is a miracle that the divorce rate is only about 50%.  Are you the same person you were ten, twenty or thirty years ago? Some parts of ourselves never change but our opinions, tastes, interests and health certainly can. The challenge is to keep subtly reinventing a relationship as each party in it morphs and becomes more who they really are. Age strips away some of the willingness to please, to accommodate, to make the glass slipper fit by cutting off a toe. We just want to be ourselves and be accepted as such. Many, if not all couples see rocky patches in their marriages and often it is that fragile but binding thing called "marriage" that keeps them together until they can find their balance again. Sometimes it works and the marriage continues, often it doesn't. When a marriage falls apart it doesn't mean that marriage was a failure, it just ran its course and ceased to be a miracle. For some the marriage was never a little miracle in the making, it was just never going to work.

Watching the young couples around me marry and start down the road of trying to create their lasting miracle makes me think what an optimistic lot we are, us human beings. I mean, really, the divorce rate has hovered around the 50% mark for decades now, higher for second and third marriages. Some of this young love is doomed to fail when it comes to adapting to living with another person and yet the institution of marriage is still there and a whole segment of people are clamouring to get in on it. Gay marriage is a growing market showing again that marriage and living together are different animals. For some people living together is just not enough. And just as surely as the horse gets followed by the carriage, gay divorce will follow gay marriage for many couples. Divorce lawyers are thrilled as a whole new demographic is being added to their practice. Miracles are hard to create, gay or straight.

Marriage is so full of compromise. And what is compromise but a state in which neither party gets exactly what they want. Sort of a fine/fine rather than a win/win or win/lose. And yet we continue to marry and to stay married, and to remarry after divorce. But then people keep opening new restaurants on the site where others have failed so there is that unbridled optimism again. You have to hand to us, it takes a lot to keep us down sometimes.  I am traversing my thirty fourth year of marriage and at this point feel I will stay married until the "death do us part" thing happens but it's not totally up to me, it takes two people to make each little miracle happen. In these times where miracles feel far and few between I will take what I have, consider it miraculous and wish the same for those just saying their vows. Good luck to you,  and believe in miracles.

It's Not About the Cake

My older sister, Jill and I were talking about weddings the other day. Jill had just attended a wedding over the weekend and it happen to dovetail with a packet of pictures that ended up at my house due to my mother giving back photos she could no longer store. Going through the old photos with my sister we came across a few from my wedding. Jill grabbed one from the pack and starting laughing so hard she could hardly breathe. It was a picture of my wedding cake, a cake she had made for Ted and me.  I didn't remember either the cake or that she had made it so it was of great interest to me to see it. She shared the photo with me and we both laughed until tears rolled down our faces. OMG! At the time I'm sure I was delighted with the cake, and I must say, I still am. It's perfect. Jill is a creative person, an interior decorator, an artist, a fashion designer but baking may not be her forte. But the love and the effort was there and its always good to see something that she is not so good at, there isn't much. Compared to the cakes at weddings we have been attending this cake looked like something offered up during the Great Depression. You decide.

My parents, who had three daughters and one son, figured they would have to pony up for some weddings in their lifetime so they told us three girls that we could each have $3000 for a wedding, to be spent however we chose. We could elope like they did and take the cash for other uses or spend it on a wedding, adding to it from our own pockets as we felt necessary. Ted and I had full-time jobs, we didn't consider ourselves poor but we had not saved for a big wedding as we were marrying only nine months after we had met. No, I wasn't pregnant! Neither of us came from money or a tradition of big weddings so we weren't at all perturbed to be planning a wedding on $3000, we were grateful. Nowadays that might be the dress budget for a bride. Maybe.

My dress was bought wholesale through connections we had in the clothing business, I think it was $75. I did my own hair and make-up, I know, impossible to tell, right! There was no diamond ring, just gold bands. Ted bought a new tie. Jill was my bridesmaid and only attendant and she made her dress and did her own hair and make-up. Voila, a bridal party was created!

We were married a December 17, 1983, in the living room of my parents home and with some catered food, a full bar that was tended by a friend, and some music tapes lovingly compiled by my husband- to-be (way before iPods), we had a party.  It was imperfectly perfect and I have not regretted a thing. With the overblown media attention to celebrity weddings these days and sites like Pinterest offering unending ideas for novel themes and add-ons, the weddings of today are an expensive exercise in perfection. Exhausting for everyone involved.  It shouldn't be so much about the wedding, it's about a marriage. 

I've pinned the picture of my cake to my bulletin board in my office as a reminder of my sister's love and of the almost 33 years of happiness that my $3000 wedding has brought. Who could ask for anything more than that?