Interlude: Wedding Week
Interlude: Wedding Week
A short-ish post for a ginormous occasion
It started out being a short post — but that’s not how I do business. Similarly, there might have been some fear about what the writer would do when she presented her vows during the ceremony. More on that later. If you’re listening to the voiceover this week, there is a little gift in the recording.
I’m giving myself permission myself to postpone posting Chapter 8 this week because Christopher and I are on our very short — Sunday-Monday — honeymoon. There are a lot of things I’d rather be doing right now than writing and editing :)
I process things after the fact. I need time and space and distance to be able to take all the richly colored threads in my hand and weave them together into a tapestry. For me, writing is the loom.
A day and a half after our wedding ceremony, I have a few initial thoughts. Thank you for being here with me as I process.
If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read (or listen to) previous sections of my story, Ten Times I Said No To Love here:
|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four || Chapter Five
|| Chapter Six || Chapter Seven ||
Love
Many people have remarked about how much the day was filled with love, which got me thinking. This isn’t my or Christopher’s first marriage, but it’s the first time we have approached every decision and every action with love at the root. The day was truly about us coming together and merging our lives. That’s it. The wedding was about love. I hope we can lead the way for other people to be vulnerable and messy and unapologetically, imperfectly/perfectly, and ridiculously in love. It’s so much easier and more comfortable than that other madness we all do to each other.
Generosity
Jennifer Walker reminded me at the beginning of the proceedings that she was an advocate of the Irish Goodbye. Free to leave whenever she wanted, my only request was that she take a pile of cupcakes with her because there had been a cake fiasco.
We ordered a neutral-colored cake from a grocery store because we put this wedding together in a month and originally hadn’t planned on doing a cake at all. My aunt picked up the cake a few hours before the ceremony and when we opened the box to set it up — we realized they had forgotten to place a buckle on the leprechaun hat.
This cake was green.
I hadn’t had a bridezilla moment yet, but I cashed this God-given right in and called the store and cried. They agreed to make a quick brownish-beige cake for us to cut instead.
So at the end of the day, we had two cakes and a bunch of cupcakes, and Jennifer and I said a brief goodbye. I mentioned in last week’s chapter of my story how Jennifer adopts people on her daily walks, picking up litter and bringing joy to the Atlanta metro area. One of these people is Roosevelt, who she met one day when she went down a street she’d never walked before and found a man sitting in a wheelchair in his garage.
Jennifer has never met a stranger and she yelled, “Hey! How are you doing?”
And he answered back, “I’m blessed.”
She carried his words with her and went back the next day, and the next, and the next. Now Roosevelt is the first phone call she makes every day. She started traveling with Roosevelt to doctor’s appointments because he wasn’t able to tell her why he was in a wheelchair — no one had ever taken the time to explain his diagnosis to him. Jennifer began taking Sunday lunch to Roosevelt and his friends. She takes care of him, but they really take care of each other.
Jennifer sent me a message the day after the wedding:
When I left the house yesterday, I took six, SIX, of your reject cupcakes. And I saved two of them for Roosevelt and I lied and told him that you sent them with me especially for him, and he just lost his shit, crying, telling me that he can’t believe how good my friends are. He says thank you. He says he loves you. He says he hopes to meet you one day. He says congratulations.
I told Jennifer that even her lies serve the common good. And I wanted to put this here because even that stupid green cake ended up being the best kind of mistake.
Vows
We were married in the forest at the farm because we figured that anywhere we go in the world, we can find some woods and remember our connection and promises to each other. In a lot of ways, Christopher and I became who we are because of the forests that shaped us.
We didn’t have seating amongst the trees and the ceremony was very short, but we decided early on to create our own vows. The acoustics were very woody, so not everyone could hear the words we said to each other. For the sake of posterity, we’re writing them down here. And we get to speak them to each other again as I record this post. I can’t wait to capture Christopher’s voice so I can listen to it over and over.
Christopher to me:
The first time I saw you so many years ago, when I first saw You, your smile, the way you carried yourself, your drive, You were the girl of my dreams. Over the decades, watching you from a distance grow to the person that You are now, and overcoming my fear to finally say something about it, You became the woman of my dreams. I promise that you will never not know that you are loved, wanted and desired.
Me to Christopher:
From the minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. We didn’t finally meet somewhere, we were in each other all along. (Rumi)
You are my best friend, my soul mate, the love of my life, and from this day forward, I will be your other half.
I promise to show you how much you are loved more and more every day.
I promise to always see you.
I promise to always put you first.
I promise to trust you.
I know that we knew each other before we came down to this earth, and I know we’ll know each other after. I promise to spend the long time we are together in the forests and fields and seas and cities beneath this sky learning and growing and exploring with you. We are two souls bound by pure recognition of each other’s essence and love.
Our roots will grow down into God’s love and keep us strong. (Ephesians)
I vow to hold our love carefully and to honor the genius of your mind and the purity of your spirit as the truest things I know.
My love for you is never-ending and receiving your love is the greatest treasure of my life.
I promise to guard the gift of you forever.
From this day forward I promise to never stop writing my vows to you.
I am so grateful to be your wife.
I love you.
Overcoming Fear
In the couple of months that I’ve been getting real and posting chapters of my love story here every week, I’ve also been seeking answers for a medical mystery that came to a head during our monthly subscriber Zoom and ended up with me spending an evening in the ER.
I have a few more tests coming up and I’ve had more office visits than I can count, but I’m finally in the hands of a brilliant PA (thank you, Ashley) who has taken the time to actually listen and put the pieces of my medical history together.
I’m a complicated mess of genetics and a lifetime of ripping my nervous system to pieces with anxiety. Being honest about anxiety is a double-edged sword. Doctors see that diagnosis on my chart and take the easy way out. Like so many of you battling partitioned medical systems, it takes a lot of navigating for us to be heard.
But anxiety and I have a beautiful marriage. She’s super honest with me and makes it clear when it’s about her and gives me many red flags when it’s about my body. I know that it’s ALL about my body inevitably, but I’ve stared anxiety in the face for so long that I know the difference between feelings arising from thought and symptoms occurring in my skin.
The day before Christopher and I were married, I had my worst crash yet. My blood sugar vacillated between Everest and the Mariana Trench. I felt gutted, aching, and terrified. I pleaded with God and asked to: please not feel like this tomorrow.
And instead of hiding what I was feeling and pushing through, I was honest with everyone around me. I asked for what I needed and was listened to — no pushback, frustration, or anger. No one took their personal feelings out on me because they needed me to be back to top form.
Christopher, who had the most to lose from me not being fully functional, just gave me love, space, or snuggles — ready to flow like water and change when needed.
I had no doubt he was my person, but damn, he intuits my formula. Same with The Jennifer Walker. It wasn’t easy for her to make the trip from Atlanta for the wedding, but she messaged at intervals, asking nothing more than for me to describe what I was feeling. “I want to know and understand,” she said, willing to change plans, accept what was happening, and let go.
The world needs more of this.
I want to be more of this for the people around me. Our nervous systems, already wired for flight, read the urgency of people’s expectations as potential abandonment. I vow to back off from needing people to be anything more than what they are. I’m a perfectionist. I like to push back. I’m going to stop this.
I’m describing all of this body/mind/nervous systems stuff at the end of a post about marrying my one true love this week because Chapter 8 is about love, but it’s mostly about the dragon of anxiety. She’s capable of ripping our flesh to pieces, but when she’s calm and sleeping, she’s the coiled serpent of kundalini, living at the base of our spines — a dormant, creative, powerful creature of our priceless essence.
Let’s harness her magic together.
September Subscriber Zoom
We won’t be doing a workshop or topic this month, but we are meeting for a creative hour of just being together and sharing space while we read/write/draw this Friday, September 27th at 6:00 PM EST. Subscribers can log in and keep their screens black, or join by video, whatever works best for you in this little human herd. Login details should be in your inbox, in this post, or you can find them in the chat thread. If you’d like to subscribe and join us, here are all your options.
About the Cake Topper
After we ordered the cake, I googled rustic cake topper and went with the first option that showed up because it was — irreverent, funny, truthful, and totally us. I worried about what my family might think (they didn’t care). I worried about what our officiant might think (he didn’t read it). I worried about what the one person with a child present might think (they use a language pass system in their household). And finally I realized that I wanted it and didn’t care what anyone thought.
I’ve had more people talk to me about the cake topper than any other detail of the ceremony. It says Fucking Finally and I think that speaks for itself. You can find it on Amazon and it’s in a nice rustic wood, perfect for farm life and immensely suitable to many things like— breaks in the weather, the end of a colic, the close of a hard session, the sense you get as you come down the barn driveway, or maybe, like me and Christopher — the relief that comes at the end of many long, hard roads leading to a wedding and sense of safety in our new life together.
For all of you prepping for the upcoming hurricane’s path through the southeastern US, may it downgrade and miss us all totally. But for the first time in my life, I know that I’m not going to be weathering the storm alone, and for that, I am immensely grateful.
I’ll be back next week with Chapter 8.
Love,
Kim
