Awesome Wedding, Disaster Honeymoon, and our "Insert Almost Any Adjective Here" Marriage.

Last week, we had our 20th wedding anniversary. Our wedding was lovely. We had beautiful engraved invitations, around 300 guests, two priests, and amazing flowers (Like a Laura Ashley store exploded all over the place.) We had piano, a string quartet, drums, base and acoustic guitars, and professional vocalists during Mass. We had simple flower centerpieces on so many lovely tables in a hotel ballroom, a nice dinner, and a lovely traditional cake with a bride-and-groom Lladro on the top. We had a DJ and fun music. It was a beautiful day.

But most of our wedding pictures are terrible.

This one's not terrible. I like this one. See the Star Trek communicator? We were nerds before it was cool. I guess that makes us hipster nerds. That sounds way less cool though.

The above picture is one-third of the sum total of photos we have from our wedding that highlight just the two of us. The other two are not the not-exactly-posed type pictures: one of us outside after Mass, and one of us arriving at the reception. We're squinting and looking pretty awkward in general in them. We spent very little on photos, and it shows. It didn't occur to us (or to our photographer) to actually, oh I don't know, take a few shots of just the two of us. And we didn't even notice until we'd been married for like three years.

Also, our honeymoon was basically a disaster.

This is a super windy spot at the top of some mountain on Oahu. I don't remember what it's called. I like this photo. It reminds me that we had a few happy moments on our "honeymoon," which is a term that can only be applied in the loosest of terms to our visit to Hawaii.

Seriously. I once had a friend who literally sent our story to Oprah for a honeymoon do-over episode: "Tell us why someone you know needs a second honeymoon!"  No. We didn't win. I guess that means it could have been worse!

Some family members gave us airline tickets, and happily informed us that Jason's great aunt and great uncle, who lived on Oahu, would be in California during the week after our wedding. So, all we needed was to get over there, and they were going to let us stay in their house and even let us use their car for the week.
Sounded amazing, right?

Then a couple of days before the wedding, we were told that Aunt and Uncle Hawaii weren't actually leaving right away- they might be there for a couple of days- but that they would still be leaving...probably.

Um. well, ok. That's fine. After all it's so very generous, we're certainly not going to complain about not being alone for a couple of days...on..our..honeymoon but whatever. It'll be ok.

So then focus on wedding, etc., etc., we didn't worry about it.
We left at 6am the day after the wedding. Too early. Very rushed.
Flight to HI, had a lovely greeting with the aunt and uncle, had a small argument in the cortisone aisle at the first pharmacy we saw (thigh high nylons+ roasting hot Arizona August wedding day+ a limo driver who wouldn't turn o the A/C because our reception site was "so close to the church anyway" = a wicked heat rash, soon to be immortalized in any and all honeymoon photos where I am in a bathing suit. Purty.)

So we arrived at the house and are presented with  twin beds in a lovely guest room. Um. well, ok...
We saw there was another guest room down the hall with a queen bed- why couldn't we have that one? But we said nothing.

My charming new husband asked them what their schedule was- you know, for when they were, uh, leaving? for uh, California?

...chirp...       ...chirp...       ...chirp...   (those are crickets.)

"Oh," said Hawaiian Uncle the Cheerful but Quite Puzzled, "We're not leaving. No no no, we weren't planning on going anywhere. Be ready at 1800 hours for dinner at the Officer's Club! We have a really full week ahead of us!"

Oh uh, ok. Then we were finally alone behind closed doors for the first time all day.

It hit us:

WHAT???? Seriously, what??? They're not leaving?  Why on earth would we be told they were leaving if they're not? Obviously they're not loaning us their car either- this is a mess! How much money do we have? Yeah- that's not going to cut it for a hotel and a car!! We NEVER would have come all this way if we knew this was going to be a chaperoned honeymoon! WHAAAAAAAT??????

We gathered ourselves. When trapped on Hawaii, one might as well try to enjoy Hawaii. Aunt and Uncle Hawaii are lovely people and we have the rest of our lives to be together, so oh well. No private romantic honeymoon for us after all. We'll be ok.

Uncle Hawaiian Guided Tour himself made sure we saw every bullet hole in Hawaii. I swear he showed us every cemetery, every memorial. There are a LOT of war memorials in Hawaii. Eventually we rented a car for the last couple of days and got to run around by ourselves at least a little during the day, but I can't tell you we had a disaster honeymoon without including this next part:

Aunt Hawaii wore a wig. She served us raisin bread in a skullcap. She wore a house coat. I'm not making fun of her, I just want you to picture this. I went down to the kitchen one morning without Jason.
Now, I was 21 when I got married, and very, well, new to the whole "married" part. ok? So I cannot begin to describe my horror when Aunt Skullcap and Housecoat inched slowly toward me, to tell me about their walls...

Apparently, the walls are very thin.
Apparently, the aunt and uncle hear every little noise in this house.
And every little noise in the bathroom.
They can't possibly have guests in the room above theirs (aha, that's the one with the queen bed) because of their sensitivity to noise, and apparently, it's not much better in the way back bedroom; they just hear everything!
Every
Single
Sound

(She was pretty much right in my face at this point.)

Got it?

My head was spinning. I turned beet red. Did she just say what I think she said? Straight to my face? I was too new, too young, too polite, to respond; I just wanted out of there as quickly as possible. And then I had to find a way to explain this lovely exchange to my husband.
Get me the hell off this island!!!

All I can say is I was so glad it was over when it was over. We spent literally every last dime we had, we had been totally unprepared, and we were as naive as it gets. (Not to mention the fact that we thought we'd been quiet too! Guess not!)

I had a meeting to attend literally the hour after we stepped off our return flight, and was prepping my classroom for my first teaching job the next day. Back to real life, fast. And no, we never informed the people who gave us the airline tickets about the little misunderstanding over the arrangements.

We had this ideal honeymoon arranged, we thought, and it was not what we expected at all. Sometimes it feels like we've been chasing that ideal for the last 20 years. Chasing time together. Chasing security. Chasing predictability. Chasing peace. Sometimes we find it, just for a moment or two, and it makes the madness of living together and raising four children together all worthwhile.

Our priest says, "On their wedding day, the couple doesn't actually know what true love is. They're just signing up to find out."

I love that description. That really is what we did that day, 20 years ago. We signed up to find out. We've dissolved a lot of illusions. Our substandard wedding photos and chaperoned honeymoon were just the beginning. We don't live in a fairy tale. We knew marriage and family would be hard work and it is. We've discovered truths about love and being a family that we wouldn't possibly have known until we'd had 20 years of failures and successes together. Think of an adjective, any adjective will do, and I bet we've had between one and one thousand days of that kind of day. Amazing, scary, wonderful, awful, inspired, bored, incredible...yep, just keep going.

Yesterday was a really crappy day. We had tons of running around, a throwing up preschool-er, and our two-week post op daughter fell in the bathroom, breaking quite a bit of the bathroom but fortunately none of  herself. At the dinner table, things were tense. We slowly unwound enough to joke around a little, and at some point we were comparing who could do the "live long and prosper" Vulcan thing with our fingers. All our kids and I can do it on both hands. My husband can't do it on his left hand.  Our oldest daughter laughed and said, "His ring finger is just not capable of moving. It's like, it's taken on attributes of your marriage or something, and is staying there, unmovable and rock solid."

haha! That was it. Crappy day melted away. We laughed and started to get ready for another day together. Every day might not be a day on a Hawaiian beach, but it turns out that's not all it's cracked up to be anyway.

Aloha!

Yep. Pretty terrible photo quality, as usual. But we're happy! This is at a Hawaiian fusion restaurant where we went on our 20th anniversary, and the food was better there than anything we had on actual stupid Hawaii.