Setbacks and Responses to Same

Wherein Our Heroine Ponders a Metaphor.

In one week, it will have been a year since John and I got married. I don't say this to remind John, or to start anniversary celebrations early, or for any other reason except that lately I have been trying to apply lessons learned from the experience of our wedding.

Weddings and marriages are vastly different things, though it is common for many young newlyweds to forget about the latter in the chaotic run-up to the former. Marriages are everyday things - both in the minutiae of living every day together and the massive impact that is all of those bits of minutiae added up. Weddings are, at their heart, big parties. The wedding celebrates the change in your everyday circumstances, but it is not the change itself. However; it is easier to focus on a single day rather than trying to think about the rest of your life, and so a great deal of stress and anxiety comes to bear on that one big blowout of a lifetime.

Knowing this, John and I opted for a small, restrained wedding in the garden of friends. Smaller size meant fewer things to worry about, which would hopefully leave us room to remember what was truly important to us - the marriage itself.

Thank goodness for that, because fate and mother nature conspired to throw several choice potential disasters in our way. First of all, our minister was ill and we had no rehearsal. Luckily, she was well enough to do the ceremony on the day, and we eased through the small bits of confusion which resulted from the lack of a run-through. Secondly, last year was the rainiest year on record in 100, and June the twenty-first was not spared. We moved the ceremony inside the tent (which arrived mere hours before the ceremony, rather than the day before as promised) where we had tables set up for a late luncheon - in other words, John and I got hitched in front of what was later the buffet. The area under the tent ended up a sodden, muddy mess as we squelched about during the reception. Smaller, silly things went wrong - I put the ring on John's right hand instead of his left.

Result? The wedding was glorious. And among the hundreds of photographs are many cozy shots of umbrellas - silly mugging under a very girly umbrella by John and my father, parades of guests braving the rain and venturing out to look at the gardens under umbrellas of various sizes and colors, and a series of end-of-day shots featuring two happy, tired, ready-to-get-out-of-the-formalwear newlyweds under a giant red umbrella.

The point of all this? I should be as flexible about current setbacks in my job search as I was about setbacks at my wedding almost a year ago. Move the chairs under the tent and get on with it. Because this situation is only a part of my life, not the rest of it.

Posted: Monday - June 14, 2004 at 08:26 AM | |