Last week, I sold some of my mom’s chunky jewelry and dropped off my vintage wedding dress to be sold online. “It’s a good karma dress,” I wrote in the notes, imagining someone else laughing in it, dancing in it, feeling themselves elevated and down to earth at once.
Looking back, I don’t feel like I was a good candidate for marriage. I was resistant to everything surrounding the institution … I didn’t want an engagement ring, a symbol of exchange and ownership, so Jed bought me my first computer instead. I didn’t want a fancy dress, or a big wedding, or a tiered cake, but in the end, I succumbed to all of it.
I had sworn off marriage, and then I visited my grandmother, on the way back to Charlottesville for my second year of graduate school, and she insisted I give the one she called “the doctor” — “his name is Jed, and he’s a medical student,” I corrected her — she insisted I give him one more chance. So I did. Here’s that story.
The rest happened very fast, and two years later, with seven lilac-sheathed bridesmaids and seven groomsmen in matching black tuxes, in front of 200 people, we spoke the vows we wrote ourselves and then had our friends say the traditional “seven blessings,” English and Hebrew. Looking back, it still feels dreamy and out of time.
I found our wedding photos to submit with the dress, and asked myself out loud, “How did you go from the feminist so opposed to marriage to the feminist married and living in the suburbs?”
A friend and business mentor said, “Some of your current writing feels too attached to old ideas of yourself. Maybe it’s time to cut the thick cords that bind you to those old ideas of yourself and free yourself to see what springs up instead.”
That idea struck a chord. You might say I remain in rebellion against that role of wife and mother that defined me for so many years, that it chafes against my skin like the veil that surrounded me on our wedding day. Where does that come from, and how might I cut those cords and step out into my life in the present today?
I’m listening to Mark Wollyn, It Doesn’t Start With You – for the second time – and thinking about intergenerational patterns and stories that run under my family, silent and repeated, like frozen earth waiting to thaw.
On my mother’s side, the moody and creative entrepreneurs, there were at least two generations — my grandmother and my aunt — who wanted to be healers, but landed elsewhere. My uncle married a doctor, and I went to college imagining I’d be a doctor too.
I wake from a nap remembering how my body contracted in the first meeting of Organic Chemistry my freshman year of college. I closed my notebook with a snap and left, almost running out the door, before the class was even halfway done. I didn’t even know them, but felt, deep inside, that I didn’t like those people — mostly guys — who wanted to be doctors. Looking back, I want to say it was the sense of entitlement those guys exuded, but at the time it was just a feeling, wordless, about what I could or couldn’t do.
Jed was not like the other pre-med guys. He was very quiet, governed by simple principles, reluctant to visibly lead. He listened to his friends and helped them figure things out. It was not against him I was rebelling, but the idea of marriage and all it represented about women being subservient to men. All of that was embodied in the fancy wedding dress my mother helped me pick out, watching as it was fitted to my small frame in the boutique six or maybe seven floors above 57th Street in New York.
My mother and step father walked me down the aisle. Since my mother died last summer, and I’ve been sorting through her things, I’ve said many times that her second husband was “the great love of her life.” They were married only a decade, my wedding smack in the middle of that wondrously happy decade
My father and mother had an unusual marriage for the sixties and early seventies. They were in business together, and very much equals. When my father got sick, my mother took over the advertising business they started in the basement of our house two years after I was born. Both sets of my grandparents worked together in grocery stores they owned. This idea of the sturdy immigrant mother, who works side-by-side her husband to help provide for her family, runs very deep in my veins.
Those same grandmothers cared for husbands who lived long lives with chronic illnesses that could not be controlled or contained. My mother’s mother went back to work, learning to drive for the first time, after her husband died when she was 55. My grandmothers were sturdy, partners and providers at once, into their later years. That is where I find myself now.
In the later chapters of It Didn’t Start With You, Wollyn describes the healing process of exploring where you are stuck, gently voicing it to your descendants and freeing yourself and them. I’m stuck in all sorts of ideas about money, and the importance of “making money” to secure your family’s survival. But my family are no longer immigrants struggling to survive. If my deeply felt sense of tending the next generation through honest healing and forward repair still resonate, my survival wounds around marriage and money have lost their usefulness and yearn for further clearing. I’m curious to explore that thread around marriage and money in a future newsletter. If you think that would be useful for you, please let me know!
What is an idea you hold onto about yourself that has outlived its usefulness? Where does that idea come from? And what are the cords you need to but to be born into the parts of life that call you next?