If You're Getting Married & No One Cares But You.

I recently attended one of my friends-since-second-grade's dads funerals.

She used to think he was kind of an asshole. He was a big, burly, do-what-he-wished kinda guy with a loud carefree imprint when walking in the room. I guess to a kid, that can feel invasive, but she always knew he loved her.

He told her she, along with her mom and sister, were pretty enough to be models, and that they were literally the most beautiful women he's ever seen, and they believed he meant it.

This was her grieving day.

I sat in the back of the room watching the slideshow of his 66 year life pass along an hour long reel. He smiled. All the time. He's the kind of guy who walked his daughters down the aisle after sorting out whose boss with their husbands.

Pictures of her wedding day, dancing with her dad, had me strangely grieving in a way I feel ashamed came up, but I'd like to touch on for the many folks out there like me that will never be touched by it.

"She was a girl who had that," I think, as I feel reprieve in knowing he left her with ALL he had. At least she got that. And she knows it.

She knew she was loved. She was allowed to celebrate with her family. She had fun with, hung out with, laughed hysterically with her parents on weekends, and called them just to tell her a part of her day during the week.

To some people, that's "normal" life. A kind of normal that makes my kind of person feel lonelier than many of our other reasons to feel lonely.

There's a deep lonelieness that girls that have dads that kiss them on the cheek, or moms that make their daughters feel amazing about who they are, will never know - of which, I'm grateful they don't know it. Yet, seeing that they don't, and I do...is complex.

That's a part I don't have, though I have tons of parts that other people don't.

My father has never told me he loved me. Bought me one gift in my entire life. Quite sure he wouldn't know my birthday.

When I got engaged and showed my mom my wedding ring she scoffed and said, "what's that?" My smile turned to forced facial movements..."we're engaged."

"It's not even real," she said, and that...was it.

Actually...it is real, it's just really...not a diamond, by choice.

That was over three years ago, and guess whose not married yet...

I asked my mom if she wanted to go wedding dress shopping with me. She literally laughed and declined.

Set aside that my mother used to place bets on me not being able to get married, I had my own reasons not to want to do it.

The silence. The dread I feel when they give zero fucks about something that normal people in healthy relationships, celebrate. That's EXACTLY the feeling I thought marriage was.

And the reason I've been with my partner for almost a decade and haven't married. I've never felt that terrible dragging sensation in my relationship with him and don't want a marriage certificate coming in and turning on some psychic switch in us that that's, what we become.

I've obviously had a lot of reasons and opportunities and programming that taught me to be questionably cautious in areas such as marriage and family and "blending" lives. I was a result of that blend and I felt twisted up...constantly.

But still a girl can dream of her chance to one day magically appear in a family, life and body in which she completely and comfortably wholeheartedly....belongs.

Until she's 37 and sees her friends dad die, and she realizes...she's just dreamin'. That'll never be her.

To see people's families not only initiating planning, excitedly engaging and contributing to their ceremonies, and to do it in "that" connected way that people from normal families seem to do it...is hard.

When that sense of belonging to a healthy system is all you've ever wanted, seeing it as the years go by among friends who've had it their whole lives and coming to the realization that not only did you not get it, you likely never will...is hard.

When hope settles and acceptance sets in, faith appears somehow. Faith that there's deeper, more beautiful meaning than I'm giving this, rises. Something more beautiful than a day wedding dress shopping with my mom which would likely be abso-fucking-lutely miserable (love ya mom!).

I'm never gonna be the girl that's got those pictures of me and my dad dancing on my wedding day, all cute and comfortable. But I AM the girl who'll have pictures of me and my HUSBAND dancing on my wedding day, all cute, and more comfortable than I've ever been which is more than my mother told me I was capable of.Besides social media, no one congratulated me. Besides two friends, no one has asked me when we're getting married.

Neither of us has close family. We ARE our close family, and as much as I want that to be enough...the extension of inclusion I've always wanted to feel safe in, a family that wraps their arms around me and celebrates me...is missing. It's the thing that's always been missing. The thing that I knew "those" families that had it...had, and mine didn't.

So, I got off the phone with someone this week whose story in this sense, very much parallels my own, and as she was telling me the he said, she said of her amazing news, I stopped her and said..."Congratulations on your engagement!" knowing exactly what it's like to make a huge scary, vulnerable and right decision for yourself and want support to move forward in the soft webbing of, when what you get is...a hard wall of...nothing.

So if this is resonant with you in any way…

Congratulations to you...who are NOT alone among the very many of us who don't have a person in the world on the ground with us outside of that big scary decision that's saying...congratulations on your big, crazy, amazing, scary, uncertain and perfectly right for you move.

Celebrate because you can, regardless of if they won't.

I know its not easy, but you can let it be.

I see you.

Congratulations.

You deserve to celebrate.

Obviously, so I just want to say, if you're about to make a big, bad ass, terribly risky but super necessary decision for yourself, and not one person who "should" care, does....

You may not be supported in "that" way, but you are supported by the invisible forces of Source that got these words from my hands, to your eyes right now. Let's honor that.

I'm gonna get married. 11.11.22. That's the date, which is the only part of the plan we've got thus far. There, I said it out loud.

I have the healthiest, nourishing, juiciest relationship I've ever known. For years I've resisted marriage for my beliefs in the trappings of it, and then years still, when people not only didn't care, but slyly disapproved of a very healthy, normal and natural decision.

Because they didn’t care, all these years, neither did I. But guess what does care…my marriage.

So guess what…I’m gonna care for what cares for me despite that meaning giving up some allegiance to my family-of-origins programming that tells me not to.

You can too. You’re allowed.

Congratulations my love!

It’s REALLY happening and it’s your REAL life! Wahoo!

All my love,

Stac

PS If you’d like to contribute to our celebration I’m open to financial flow seeped in gratitude @ Venmo and Paypal