The Wedding

The Boston Herald

The rhododendrons bloomed on her wedding day. The front yard was pink with them, big, bright, showy flowers everywhere you looked.

Call it luck, chance, happenstance. I know better. Those bushes were woody and straggly for years before, the flowers few and pale, nothing you’d notice. Nothing that would take your breath away. And in the years after, they were worse, so bedraggled that we had them dug up and replaced with different plants last summer.

But five years ago when my daughter stood on the front lawn with her bridesmaids posing for the photographer, those rhododendrons couldn’t have been prettier.

I thank her grandmother for this. I don’t know how prayer works or faith informs or what people do in the afterlife. But I know that a bunch of dead, ugly bushes grew lush and lavish and transformed a yard into a garden five years ago tomorrow. And it was not because of any Miracle Grow.        

 Or maybe it was.        

I didn’t know it then, but that day was the start of another transformation. Not that the bride and groom needed to transform. They were perfect just as they were. She was an apple blossom, lacey and lovely. And he was an oak, sturdy and strong. Alone they would have been fine. Each complete. Each with it’s own purpose. Each a thing of beauty all by itself.

But together they have grown into something else – something better, happier, braver, wiser, tougher, but tender, too. 

Marriage is hard. You walk down the aisle as “I.” And you walk back up as “We.” And it’s here, right where all the good love stories end, that the real work begins. As parents you know this. You’ve been there. So you worry.

I worried because a wedding is a day and a marriage is a lifetime. Because sometimes, more times than you like to think, married couples who seem perfect together grow apart. Because way too often when the first fresh blossoms of love fade, they never bloom again. And I suppose I worried most because I thought it impossible that anyone could know and love my daughter as much as I do. How can someone just walk into a person’s life and know that person when it’s taken you a lifetime to figure her out?

Dave did. For him it was love at first sight.  It took her a little longer but she got there. And his love transformed her and her love transformed him.  I’ve been witness to this. 

I’ve watched them now for five years stretch and bend and stand strong against the cold and the wind. I’ve watched them support one another and be each other’s comfort and shelter. And I’ve watched them continue to bloom.

The best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother, my friend Father Coen repeatedly said.      

The best thing a married couple can do for their parents is to love each other.

Because it isn’t easy to let a child go. For your whole adult life you are the guide and the mentor and the person who’s privy to everything. And then someone else is.

 Your daughter walks down the aisle one person and walks back another, part of a couple, no longer yours. And all you can do is hope that the guy she left you for loves her as much as you do. 

Dave does. And she loves him.         

I thought the rhododendrons on her wedding day were the big miracle. But the big miracle is the love that inspired them. That love came from a place I can’t see. But I can see the love between my daughter and her husband every day.