June 22nd: It?s June, Let?s Have a Wedding?????
The first wedding of import in my life was my sister?s. She had graduated from high school, gone off to college, and returned home to live with us while she was engaged to her boyfriend of several years.
To be perfectly honest, I don?t remember much about the wedding, except that my sister made a beautiful bride. I must not have paid attention, because my long-term memory is generally fairly good. But I do remember how I felt about Betsy getting married and leaving home.
As I have already admitted, my sister and I were not very close as children. That doesn?t mean that I didn?t love and depend on her. But we missed out on making those years a solid basis for a lifetime relationship. That would have to come later.
So I was surprised?to feel vaguely disturbed about her impending marriage. I wasn?t all that comfortable with her husband-to-be, but I had to dig a little further to find the nugget of my real concern. I found that I was worried about the direction everyday life in our house would take without her.
There were tangible things: Betsy did most of the cooking, she shared household chores, and she was a lightning rod?for parental interest. Would we starve? Would I inherit her chores on top of my own and most importantly were Mom and Dad?going to pay too much attention to me? The answer to all of these questions was, ?pretty much?. But aside from these obvious questions, when the wedding day was set?and I knew she would be going to a new home with her husband, I was shocked to find how much I was going to miss her.
Relationships between two people can be?compared to two horses?used to working in tandem to pull a carriage. Walking on, side by side, they pay little attention to each other as they are put?through their paces. Oh sure, if one stumbles the other chuffs, and when one slacks off, the other may nip a shoulder, but for the most part they keep their eyes forward, plodding along. But the day that one of the pair cannot join the team, the remaining horse finds she is alone and pines for her missing partner. Alone, in her stall, the second mare is missing the comfort she derives from standing shoulder to shoulder with her teammate, too. ?
Now, my sister would kill me if I compared her to a horse, but in some ways, as she prepared to leave the barn, eh, the house, I felt like the teammate being left behind.? Becoming an only child was a daunting challenge. Hiding would no longer be an option. All eyes would be on me. Yikes!
A little part of me hoped she would change her mind, a sentiment she would later share. But for the next two years I became a personal testament to the line from the song, ?You Don?t Know What You?ve Got Till? It?s Gone.? When her big day finally came and went, I found myself missing my pesky big sister much more than I anticipated. Somehow the silent bond we had shared could not be bridged long distance.
A wedding can feel like an ending to everyone except the bride and groom. That?s the real reason friends, parents, and siblings cry at weddings. Not that they aren?t happy for the couple, which they are, but more for the changes wrought by this new, stronger allegiance. As sad as I was to see my sister leave I was sadder still when our first attempts to reconnect seemed awkward and strained. But ironically, when I married some years later, we found each other again.
I was reminded of this because I am reading a book, The Big Girl, in which the central character is preparing to leave for college in a distant state. She, too, was leaving without establishing a solid basis for lifetime relationships with her first family. Suddenly I remembered in vivid detail how I felt when my big sister went away. If instead of all those years, months, days and hours that we trudged along shoulder to shoulder, we had invested in face to face bonding, I would not have missed out on twenty years of knowing, understanding, and loving my sister.
But, that is the past for us.? It may not be too late to secure a deep bond with your first family before you leave home. ?The effort will yield valuable interest in the years ahead, I promise. That said, though now Betsy and I now live 1000 miles apart, we are never really farther apart than two tired mares sharing a bag of oats after a long day of lugging our families around.?
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