Mother of the Bride

My spouce and i are sitting across the table from our daughter mother of the bride dress australia, Teal, and her fiancé, Bennett. Around us, the restaurant is busy, with servers sliding between tables hoisting fresh pan-Asian dishes while customers scream delightedly at one another. Noise aside, this will be the last calm moment the four of us have together for a while. Bennett’s family will arrive in Austin texas the next night, accompanied by a hundred and eighty of the couple’s friends for the testing dinner on Friday, wedding Sunday, and brunch Saturday.

As the mother of the bride, I will probably be losing my mind right now, but I completely lack any Martha Stewart gene history, and my standards are low. Still, we’re all a little jumpy. Unique change is in the air, along with a lot of garlic cloves. Bennett finishes his helping of brussels seedlings and leans forward. “Is there any advice you can give the two of us about marriage? ” he asks. He and Teal look at my hubby and me expectantly. Teal is our firstborn, strong-willed and charming. She and Bennett met and chop down in love four years ago while working on Obamacare (not the website, they always point out). They are both 32, smart, and ambitious, and they fit so beautifully together, bantering constantly like a thirties screwball funny, that it makes me happy just being around them. But significant other advice? My mind freezes. We were a decade younger than they are now, just a few months out of college, when we endured before a Methodist minister inside my parents’ small stone house on the messy edges of Midland. We were so young we didn’t realize how young we were. We had met in high school, where we’d ignored each other, then been thrown together on a shockingly successful date that survived till small hours. I loved his endless fascination with the world and his sly humor. Halfhearted hippies, the two of us had big, gauzy dreams we couldn’t quite articulate, and the future expanded before us endless and blank. In the photos, he looks fearful and I look modern.


 The minister lace mother of the bride dresses, who counseled us before the service, told us our agnosticism was just a phase. He also suggested we sit down every year and record what we liked and disliked about each other, so we could observe how much we’d grown. My spouce and i thought that was the funniest thing we’d heard. Many years later, we learned the minister had been delivered to the penitentiary for embezzling church funds to support his girlfriend; we never found out what happened to his wife. Now, in the restaurant, looking at my daughter and her husband-to-be, I struggle to consider some pithy wisdom to offer. The truth is, after all these years, marriage strikes me as the craziest institution around. It creaks under towering heaps of cultural and personal expectations. We all complain about it, but we keep going after it. We celebrate it, we revere it when it works, you want it for our children. My hubby, probably remembering precisely how semi-formed he and I were when we exchanged vows, breaks the silence. “You’re both already better equipped to handle marriage than we were, ” he says, which is true. From there, he and I talk in fits and starts. Laugh as often as you can, we counsel them. Be as mannerly toward each other as you are to guests. We mention children, the slow shift of the years. Our speech isn’t what anyone would call a finished or coherent performance.