hitched, etc.
I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that it irks me when people blog about milestones in their lives, say, their birthday, with an air of reflective melodrama.
I also wouldn’t be lying if I told you that it irks me even more when said bloggers start posting about their birthday with a disclaimer that they don’t like talking about their birthday but nevertheless continue to vomit out an entire post pregnant with pensiveness, meandering with mindfulness, and spewing self-awareness of everything save their own bullshit.
I tell you this because you must know that it pains me to find myself blogging about getting hitched.
And I tell you that because you must know that it pains me in a specific way to be starting a blog post about getting hitched with a disclaimer that I hate melodramatic blog posts about life milestones.
Alas, I’ve learned that without explicitly sharing this kind of info, friends may misunderstand other friends to be withholding information. I’d like to consider you, Reader*, a friend. And I’d like you, Reader*, to consider me a friend… and NOT the enigmatic type! So let’s get this out of the way so I can starting writing book reports and making banal observations again, haha.
For what happened and stuff, I think we have a pretty decent breakdown here:
As for squishy things like feelings and such, I suspect many of those details will come out organically in upcoming posts.
For now it suffices to say that I anticipated that I would be irked by the excessiveness and meaninglessness of the formalities–which I am–but I also wasn’t prepared to see just how much love there is. Seeing all the people who reached out to help, ask about donations, make donations on our behalf, save us their second hand tools and construction scraps, renew passports to come, tell each other “see you in Toronto”… we were deeply touched by all of it.
We anticipated that we’d probably never witness more loved ones gathered under one Google Maps pin and haunted by the responsibility of making it worth their time; but we were not prepared to accept how rare and special it is to be in the presence of the densest gathering of loved ones under one Google Maps pin.
The depth of gratitude I feel is something I constantly seek to describe:
We love and cherish the privilege of being tied to each of you with our own unique and relationship-appropriate knots. We are knotted with each and everyone of you who have contributed to who Tim and I are now and will become together. By extension, we celebrate all the knots tied over all time and space that make you uniquely you. In a world that celebrates “no strings attached”, we consider it grace to be knotted to each other in marriage and to you as family and in friendship. Afterall, a stitch in a tapestry is just the right knot in the right place, and what an absolute privilege it is to be knotted to each of you in this tapestry we call humanity.
Yet if there’s anything I’ve learned from co-authoring what one might consider my most important “blog post” to date for the first 7 months of the year and writing thank you notes for the past 4 months, throwing words at gratitude can’t document it.
I’ve gotten hand cramps from writing this on many thank you cards…
We’re so blessed to be building our marriage on a foundation of love and support from our loved ones and community–it inspires us to pay it forward and challenges is to love fellow humans beings and the earth we inhabit as fiercely and generously as we’ve been loved.
…and I still get heart cramps every time it’s read.
It feels both enough and not enough.