Consider this the antidote. In my last post, I blogged about a mother of the bride who was distraught that her daughter was breaking all the traditional rules of a wedding (no bridal gown, no attendants, no celebratory dinner reception plus the father banned from walking his daughter down the aisle--the latter not an easy break to accept). The parents of the bride threatened not to attend the wedding.
On her substack, Deborah Copaken (author of Ladyparts, a book and a blog) takes her daughter's upcoming wedding (low on the usual trappings of tradition) and writes of the joy she finds in planning the wedding with her daughter and how that joy--any joy in our lives--should come before the deep distresses we may currently be experiencing.
Here are a few quotes from the piece, "Planning a wedding during the apocalypse," that parents (not just moms) of grown children might find relevant and comforting.
If I told you how many hours my daughter and I each spent searching every corner of the internet for the right “vibe” of tablecloth over these past several months, you might wonder, as she recently did, why bother? Why bother to care about whether or not we add a runner to a tablescape in a hellscape? Why create a DIY wedding canopy out of seven-foot birch logs and a piece of fabric from our former ally, France, when the protective canopies of NATO, Medicare, healthcare, and social security are being strip-mined from the fabric of our lives? ....how can you even think about what fabric of tablecloths should be at a wedding?
But think we continued to do. And do. And do. Until we suddenly landed on a solution.
...Burlap: the fabric of both the people and potatoes. ... The fabric that says, I’m not trying to make a fuss here at my wedding, okay, I just want to be free to live, work, and love, is that too much to ask?
Copaken leans into religious tradition to unspool her feelings about the upcoming wedding and its rituals:
In Judaism, the Talmud teaches us that if a wedding procession meets a funeral procession at an intersection, the wedding revelers must always be given the right of way. And if a death in the family occurs on the same day as a wedding, the celebration of love takes precedence. Simply put, happy, future-looking events should always eclipse sad, backward-looking ones.
And here is how she acknowledges the importance of tradition, even if it's not celebrated in a traditional way:
So, this May, as spring flowers push through thawing soil, and Earth asserts its resilience while it still can, we will gather among her trees. And we will smile for the camera. And we will cover our tables with burlap and fruit. And we will don dresses and suits and comfortable shoes—my daughter’s encouraging all of her friends and family to wear sneakers to dance—to bear witness as two humans profess their love for one another, out loud, under a cotton cloth supported by thin logs held up by their best friends: a canopy that represents their home, the strength of their loving bond, the importance of community to help them uphold it, and an open-sided fragility to elements beyond their control.
painting: Renoir, Dance at Bougival
