1990s Bride
This picture of me – a 1990s bride — was taken 23 years ago today. My father performed the wedding ceremony. March 9 will always be a special day to me even though the marriage ended in 1998.
I have never posted a picture from my first wedding. It’s painful for me still to look at this girl. I say girl even though I was 23. I was too young and naive to being getting married. I like to pretend it never happened, really, but how can I? We had a child together and I love and adore her with every fiber of my being.
But, still.
Anyway, when I posted this picture to Facebook, a guy I hardly know left the best comment ever. He said, “Let it be your anniversary of looking awesome or your anniversary of being with your dad and looking awesome.” It was something like that. It meant a lot to me…
It was also the anniversary of planning a wonderful event complete with lots of 1990s silk flowers and inexpensive table runners; gunmetal archers and candelabrums; Oneida made my wedding cake and Ingrid’s bakery did the groom’s table. I loved all that. My mother wore a green dress she made herself. I wanted more for her, but she looked beautiful. My bridesmaids wore navy blue.
I’ll close with Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet, which came to mean so much to me after my divorce in 1998. It means even more to me after 12 years of marriage to my husband Robert.
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
***
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