Countdown to a Motherless Wedding

(I wrote this before the wedding but have just updated it--wedding=no blogging time!)

Okay, the title is a little morose. I don't really feel that way, like my wedding is defined by her. Except that I do and to say otherwise is lying. I lie because it's supposed to be about us, me and my fiancé, and I want to believe that it is, but very often it is actually about the giant black hole that was blown through my life nine years ago. Sometimes it's on the hazy outskirts, and I don't notice it so much. But in the two months I have left as a single girl, I feel suddenly like she's everywhere but here. In my dad's misplaced afterthought--ohhhhhhh, we should have had the rehearsal dinner here--after a family friend offered to throw it. In trying to explain to him that I would end up being the one to plan it, arrange it, stress about it. A mother wouldn't have asked these questions a few weeks before the wedding. In the beautiful and thoughtful engagement gift my fiancé's parents got us (the palpable absence of a card or gift from my dad, though he did offer to pay for the wedding), in my brother reminding my dad that I am getting married in the first place. Or the opposite; he's skipping the fiancé bit entirely and asking how my husband is, as if the whole ritual is a sneeze, best blessed and then forgotten.

I want to know how she felt about what it takes to stay married, to bring a child into the world and not hate yourself for adding to the joy but also to the climate change, the overpopulation, the great plastic garbage dumps, the social unfairness, and the fastness of everything. Is it right? How do you know when to let that self go, the self saying what about my life. I suppose though, she wasn't thinking as much as I am about losing her grip on her twenties and early thirties since she didn't spend most of hers mourning her dead mother. Or worrying about being bitter and jaded because of it. Or getting angry at people because they don't follow the protocols and small niceties of living in a civil society; letting people off the train first, walking with an umbrella in a way that avoids poking eyes out, saying please and thank you, waiting your turn. I was always older than I was, and now especially I feel like I've lived lifetimes without being able to look back on something and be proud of it.

I'm the age she was when she had me. My friends all have babies. Are they happy? I have an overwhelming desire to go out into the world and experience things. Go to Mykonos, interview old people about their lives, start a city garden, go back to Australia. Be young and free and in love with my husband without the complicated mess of adding to our family. Having children is the greatest thing many people experience, but there's so much to experience before that becomes my/our only experience. I'm not in the mood to spend all my free time raising an egocentric, needy, weak, yet fast little animal that prevents me from sleeping and causes me to gain weight. Will I ever be? All I can think is that I have not been salsa dancing in over a year, how I am not in a choir but wish I was, how I wear tennis shoes with arch-support insoles on the walk to work because apparently my feet are 60-years old, and I worry that everyone thinks I'm a middle-aged throwback to Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Her absence (mother, not Melanie) imbues these dark April days with, well, her absence, and I wish the mundane and clichéd wish of motherless daughters everywhere; that I had her here to hear my questions, to advise, to comfort, and to accept.