Monthly Archives: August 2009

The Wedding Crasher


Dee officially crashed her first wedding this last Sunday evening. Her father and I are so proud.

Our dear neighbor Char generously opened her home as locale for the wedding of a niece of a woman with whom she works. The bride is Canadian but the groom is from Mexico and there may have been residency issues in play prompting the haste behind the ceremony. We found out about it the weekend before this last when Dee came home from a visit with Char overflowing with wedding preparation news. There is nothing more interesting to my Cinderella story in any guise loving daughter than a real live wedding.

The ceremony took place in the early evening on the front lawn. It brought back memories for Rob who was also married on a lawn.

“Both of your weddings have technically been on lawn,” I pointed out.

“Best kind.”

It’s also best to be “foreign” too he concluded later that evening as he overheard the a conversation among the groom’s friends about the importance of not being “from around here” when picking up women.

“I was exotic both times too,” Rob said, “so there might be something to that.”

Dee attended the ceremony and the dinner as she somehow fanagled herself an unofficial invite from the bride’s father during the dry run a few hours before the wedding. Curly hair, wide blue-gray eyes and a smattering on freckles on one’s small Who-like nose will take a little girl far.

She had it in her head to attend the dance. Cinderella at the ball is hugely significant in her current understanding of love and marriage though she’s now also added pinata’s to the “must-have” list.

At dinner Sunday night Dee had questions about marriage.

“Why can you only get married once?”

And I tried to explain the importance of “once” based on current understanding of what making a promise is but her eyes glazed over with incomprehension. Rob’s explanation later included a treaty on divorce and a reminder of the fact that we were in our second marriage, but I don’t think she was satisfied.

In Dee’s mind, a wedding is such an incredibly wonderful thing that it’s silly not to have one more than once. Perhaps she is right. It might be a better world with longer lasting and stronger relationships if we went hog wild and partied to our unions more often than just once or twice, if we are lucky enough to reach one of those vaulted milestones of 25 or 50 years. Maybe we should don finery and have a ball every year?

The wedding dance took place in the driveway which was lined with evergreens awash in white lights. The happy couple tripped their first married lights fantastic to Aerosmith’s Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. Dee huddled in a sheepskin jacket atop a folding chair watching the scene as though it were a Disney princess movie. I sent Rob to retrieve her at about 9:30.

“I’m missing the candy,” she announced as she got ready for bed.

“I’m sure Char will save you some,” I said and she was mollified.

As I tucked her in she asked,

“Why don’t girls dance with girls and boys with boys?”

“Well, they can, ” I told her.

“But not like this,” and she placed her cheek against mine.

“Well, people who dance like that are usually dating, ” I said which is mostly the truth and all the truth a girl needs at seven at any rate. “And girls can date girls and boys can date boys if they want to.”

I added the last part because it is true and because it’s never really too early to introduce your child to the idea that love doesn’t recognize gender boundaries.

Dee made a face.

“I don’t want to date girls,” she said. “Ju’stn likes boys though.”

Ju’stn is the fourteen year old down the street who Rob thinks might be “special” and who Dee had a wild crush on at the beginning of the school year.

“He only ever plays with boys,” she said.

“I’ll send your dad up to tuck you in,” my teachable moments credo will only carry me so far.

The Bloggess Vs. Captain Kirk: The Tribble with Tweeting


The Bloggess is the web persona of a Texas blogger named Jenny Lawson. Her posts run the gamut of oddball humor which her readers respond to in kind via comments. Everyone’s tongue planted firmly in cheek, The Bloggess is the kind of naughty, gross and irreverent humor we engage in as teens and young adults and sometimes, it’s fun to lose the adult outer layer and revel in that again.

Jenny has parlayed her Bloggessing into a popular Twitter feed, a gig as an advice columnist and various other kinds of web fame. Good for her. She doesn’t take herself too seriously – also good for her – but others do. Others who don’t seem to get the joke, or maybe they don’t appreciate being the joke.

Recently Willam Shatner found his Twitter feed was the repeated tagline on a Bloggess  stream of consciousness ramble for which she is well-known. The Shat, who has a gazillion followers* – though not as many as Ashton Kutcher  – did not appreciate the attention. Maybe it was the hookers? Regardless, he blocked The Bloggess. Which only gave her more material because the best way to cut a comic off is not handing them more ways to goon you.

The followers of The Bloggess, which number thousands more than mine but still less than Ashton Kutcher’s, being game and having too much time on their hands took to the hashtags and what was just a little joke at Mr. Shatner’s expense exploded on the twitsphere into an “on-going incident”.

Social media is interesting. Right now, Americans are in real danger of having Obama’s health care “reforms’ neutered into being a moot point and what inspires people to arms on the Internet is a “feud” between an Internet humorist and an aging celebrity.

Wow. Life in the lower 48 must be worse than the news up here makes it look, and they make it look bad.

 

*Unsurprisingly Shatner is on Twitter simply to self-promote because he follows only 9 people and one of those 9 is himself.

Remarriage: What Do The Kids Think?


There is a fascinating dialogue over at ye olde widda board right now dealing with remarriage and children. What’s fascinating is not the fact that the dissenters are invariably not remarried at present (or even interested in anything remotely heading in that direction like say, dating), but there are two camps of thought that butt heads regularly for the entertainment, more than the enlightenment, of others.

Camp Dissent believes that remarriage cannot take place without the full and unreserved blessings of one’s children – regardless of their age or agendas. This camp goes so far as to believe that any parent who doesn’t co-parent with their own kids shouldn’t have become parents at all. A child’s “happiness” is the measure of one’s parenting skills. Things like being smart, well-mannered and progressing towards full status independent adulthood are of lesser merit than a child who is pleased with life and his/her parents role in it. There is also a sub-set of this group that believe remarriage in general reeks of personal desperation and grief denial and that suffering – sometimes loudly – is the true mark of a good widowed person.

Camp Hitched is actually divided in their stance. Both believe that parents should be the ultimate decision makers in a family, but some believe that children’s discomfort with recoupling should be given full credence until they turn 18 – a magical watershed moment – while others believe that blending is a process that time, love and elbow grease can handle.

Like most charged discussions, this one quickly devolved into a dogpile on a single poster. Not that I feel much sympathy for the victim because she is someone who confines herself these days to posts on remarriage and never misses an opportunity to call out remarried widows as desperate settlers who don’t love their children, probably didn’t have good first marriages – hence their remarrying, and are just a divorce away from enlightenment, but the original topic of the thread – the tendency of extended family and friends to expect widows to stand still in time until they are ready to let go – got lost.

The one thing about marrying again I have discovered is that it highlights the disparities in the grief time-lines of all parties. Spouses and parents grieve daily. How can we not? Children are blessed with the gift of grieving in spurts – like they grow – but they are still in touch more often than extended family and friends who only have to confront loss occasionally. Family gatherings are excellent examples of occasional grief. Weddings, holidays and reunions highlight the absent sibling or auntie/uncle/grandparent who is little remembered on a daily basis because of distance and the tendency we all have to be caught up in the life we are living.

I have mentioned before that Rob’s in-laws have been wonderful. Though I hear about the difficulties they had and still sometimes have with his remarrying just short of the first year of Shelley’s death, they have been kind and welcoming to Dee and I. Shelley’s auntie, as an example, invited us to Christmas dinner that first year, and we have a standing offer of lodging whenever we are up towards Grande Prairie  or out Vancouver way from a couple of Shelley’s cousins. They have never let their grief get in the way of Rob’s journey or imposed their opinions about what he should or should not be doing in terms of the course he took.

Our kids have gone through various stages where our remarriage is concerned. The older girls expressed concern at the “haste” with which we moved from dating to engaged to married”, but they never acted out. They voiced their feelings to their Dad only and they listened respectfully to his answers and he in turn reassured them about their concerns. In the end, they were the generous and wonderful young women I have only ever known them to be. They trusted their Dad, which goes to show that laying a good foundation with your children as they are growing up is really that important.

Dee never had a father in the active sense, and she was very young when Rob came into her life. She took to him immediately but theirs is still a relationship in progress and we’ve had tense times as they’ve adjusted, as I have gotten used to co-parenting – something I never had the opportunity to do with Will.

How do I feel about needing my children’s permission to make decisions about my life? I don’t need permission. I’m an adult. An adult weighs the options, looks at possible and probable outcomes and does the deciding based on what is best long-term for all. That’s how my parents did it. That’s how, I believe, all grown-ups do things.

The kids are alright in our family because the adults are adults who think and consider and act as a unit. A family is not a democracy. It is the out-growth of a marriage.