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Wedding Bell Blues
Today, July 23, I turned 55 years old. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken time to reflect on my life on each of my birthdays since the 40th. I think about what I might still need to reconcile, or what regrets I may have. And, on this birthday, I find I can only reflect on one regret. I didn’t dance with my wife.
We traveled last weekend to Pennsylvania for the wedding of one of my wife’s nieces. This is an area where the population of the three neighboring towns in which my wife’s family resides does not exceed 3,000 souls. Fiercely and strongly conservative, it is, in every sense of the word, small-town America.
While Lisa is out to her family, many (including her parents) have taken the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” approach. “You can do whatever you want with your life, but that doesn’t mean we have to TALK about it,” was what her mother told her. A couple of years back we sent flowers to Lisa’s 90-year-old grandparents via the Web. There was some mix-up and the card indicated they were only from me. Lisa’s grandmother wondered aloud to Lisa’s mother why I would send her flowers. Later, Lisa’s mother would tell her to not do that again, as it “confused” the grandparents.
Don’t get me wrong, Lisa’s parents love Lisa with all their heart and I know that her mother loves me – I feel it every time she hugs me. She’s just not ready (nor do I believe she ever will be) to truly face who her daughter is by having any sort of dialogue about our marriage, or the work we did to bring marriage equality to New York State.
Zip back to the wedding. This particular niece (Kelly) is the younger of two girls born to Lisa’s brother and his wife. Some 12 or 13 years ago, their mother went out to check the mail and was hit and killed by a drunk driver.
It was a very bittersweet wedding and the dry eye was the exception. As a mother, I found myself choking back a lump the size of a watermelon in the back of my throat. “How proud her mother would be of her today,” I kept thinking. I was aware of the tears in Lisa’s eyes and I longed to reach across and take her hand in my own, for comfort, for strength. Aware of her mother on the other side of her, I suppressed the urge and focused on the vows that were being exchanged by the young bride and groom.
I remembered our own wedding in Niagara Falls, Canada, six years ago. The youthful feelings of love, infatuation, excitement, and passion belied my almost-fifty body. Josh Groban’s mellifluous voice seeped into my brain with lyrics that spoke of the entire world standing still for that moment in time when Lisa looked into my eyes and vowed to love me until death do us part.
As the bride and groom exchanged their own vows, I moved my leg and foot until it met hers – it was the closest I could physically feel to her at that moment. I felt a sort of loss at my inability to convey to Lisa at that very moment what other heterosexual couples were conveying to each other with a look, a touch, a smile.
Later, at the reception, Lisa danced and whooped and hollered with her family members. We did the twist and the cha-cha. When the first strains of music of some sappy love song were heard, my heart ached with the desire to just hold her close and sway with the music. But, it wasn’t our day and it wasn’t about us. It wasn’t the forum in which to make a stand.
A couple of days later I was chatting with the bride’s older sister on Facebook. I confided to her that my only regret was that I had been unable to dance with my wife. Her response was, “It’s sad when two fantastic people like you and Aunt Lisa, who are in love and happy, can’t dance in public. It is shameful that that is the society we have today.”
I honestly believe that our hope is our youth – a generation of people who accept everyone. They don’t “see” the same things our generation sees – fat, acne scars, too-small boobs, a large scar from an old injury.
And in the not-too-distant future, another woman like me will be at a family wedding and will dance with her wife, and nobody will gawk, cluck, stare, or otherwise make issue.
I was reminded that day at the wedding to always seize the opportunity to dance with my wife.
