I tried not to get drunk at my wedding...

17 Years Later

My husband and I are celebrating our seventeenth wedding anniversary today. We are spending this milestone and Memorial Day weekend up in the mountains in New Hampshire, a drastically different backdrop from our oceanscape wedding all those years ago. Celebrations this year include entertaining our children while simultaneously keeping them from killing one another or destroying their grandmother’s house.

Seventeen years feels like forever and a day, for some reason. And suddenly, my age is really hitting me. Perhaps it's the increasing difficulty of concealing the gray roots that now prominently frame my face. Or maybe it has something to do with our 14.5 year old son telling us last night over dinner that he will be learning to drive in a year, causing me to nearly drop my fork.

Remembering our wedding day, I try to comprehend the person I was back then. I was so young, just twenty-five when we married.

I distinctly remember needing everything to be perfect that weekend and obsessing over so many tiny details. And looking back on that day, it was rather lovely. We still have a DVD buried somewhere in a box to prove it.

Our wedding day was on a Sunday, just like today. I woke up that morning thinking we’d hit the wedding jackpot with the weather. It was an eighty degree day, sunny and not a cloud in the sky. And on Cape Cod in May, that forecast is pretty unbelievable. I remember feeling like I was the luckiest bride ever, because I had the best weather.

In retrospect, I now know I was the luckiest because I was marrying an incredible man. That, I now know.

As the bride, I told my soon to be husband that I had some traditions I needed to uphold, and I wanted the first time that I saw my husband on our wedding day to be when I walked down the aisle. Now, looking back on it, this seems so silly, since we already lived together in the city for a year. But instead I made my fiance sleep on the couch in my sister’s room the night before our wedding, refusing to see him for half the weekend just so we could have “our moment” of me walking down the aisle towards him with the ocean as our backdrop.

Because our ceremony was at 6pm at night, we ended up spending the entire day apart. I sat indoors, nervous as can be, in my bridal suite with an upset stomach, away from most of my family and friends. It all seems a little frivolous now. And worst of all, because the ceremony was so late in the day, practically all of our friends, which made up about half the guest list, showed up extremely drunk for the service.

But as the bride, I remember desperately wanting to remember my wedding day. Because I knew that for me, I was always one of those people that got way too drunk at other people’s weddings. I would have been one of the guests day-drinking my face off in the sunshine, showing up wasted for a 6pm ceremony, likely on my way to blackout city.

So at my own wedding, I was terrified of getting too drunk. I didn’t consume anything that afternoon leading up to my ceremony. I was scared to even sip on a mimosa.

Looking back, drinking was always how I soothed my angst, so not having that to lean on for one of the most stressful days of my life only added to my anxiety. I am happy to say that I achieved my goal though. I did not blackout on my wedding day. I don’t have any horror stories to share about falling asleep in my wedding cake. I have plenty of those tales, they just didn’t happen on May 25th, 2008. For the most part I enjoyed the evening as much as any bride ever really enjoys her big day.

Although I've tried to hold onto those youthful memories, even the recollections of that wonderful weekend are starting to blur. Despite the passage of seventeen years, the profound fear that took root at the age of twenty-five remains vivid. It was the unsettling realization that my relationship with alcohol was beyond my control. Alcohol dominated my thoughts, and so much of that weekend, I had focused intensely on “not drinking too much.” If only I could have understood then what that struggle truly signified.

I cannot change what has happened to me. Or the things I’ve done. As we say in the recovery rooms, I do not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. The experiences and lessons of the last seventeen years have molded me into the wife and mother I am now. And I know that acknowledging the immutability of my past is a crucial step in moving forward. Acceptance can be difficult, but I’m learning.

While the path may not always be smooth, my effort remains focused on finding a greater sense of inner peace.

Even as my children fight over the last roll at dinner.