The Silver Anniversary

Today is my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. As if this week hasn't been filled with enough grief.

Twenty-five years ago, I had no idea what I wanted or what I was doing. I lived life hoping to figure out what I wanted by ruling out what I did not want. I did not want to live anymore as a subject in the kingdom of my mother, so I moved. Physically, that is; I remained a loyal subject for years. I did not want to work my ass off in a big law firm, so I left that dirty work to my soon-to-be husband. I loved him; at least I thought I did. And I did not want to risk the loneliness and uncertainty of giving life on my own a shot.

It was a beautiful day in Chicago twenty-five years ago, just as it promises to be today. That's pretty much all I remember. My wedding day, mostly a blur, seemed to have had very little to do with me or with us. It was, at least as I saw it, about pleasing my family. It was their first trip to Chicago, the faraway place to which I had escaped less than a year earlier. It was, at least as I saw it, a day to get through as I repeatedly sought silent penance for doing this to my parents -- for marrying a Gentile and living in a place only reasonable accessible to them by air. It was a day filled with little things going wrong; I was as ill prepared to plan a wedding as anyone, and nobody had stepped in to help. What I lived for, that day, was the honeymoon. I had given precious little thought to the lifetime together that lay ahead.

The honeymoon turned out to be as inauspicious as the wedding day itself. I spent a good part of it sitting on the toilet and puking my guts up into the little bathroom garbage pail. It was as if my mother had placed a call to Montezuma to exact revenge on her behalf. We cut our trip short, scurrying back to the apartment we already shared, to begin the life we had already, in theory, begun.

Sure, we had our ups and downs, like all married couples, but through it all (with some glaring exceptions), we remained best friends and close confidantes. We knew each other better than anyone ever did or ever could -- certainly better than we knew ourselves. Still do. And we were often better together than we were as individuals, able to finish each other's thoughts and pick up where the other left off. We could actually be quite entertaining, when we wanted to be.

My mother, who has come a long way since that day twenty-five years ago, just emailed me to encourage me to do something nice for myself today. I assured her I would. No parties, to be sure, but I will celebrate all that was good, all that is good, and all that promises to be good in the future. Maybe I'll even buy myself a silver trinket. After all, we technically made it to the twenty-fifty, so someone should honor the tradition.

Twenty-five years ago I had no idea what I wanted or what I was doing. Plus ca change....