Time and Tied

Despite the officiant looking suspiciously like David Koresh, Don and I made it through our wedding vows to be introduced as husband and wife. We ate fajitas and cake, dumped our wedding clothes, tossed the garter and the bouquet, and headed off for our wedding night. Which was almost as ill-fated as my attempts to stay dry-eyed during the ceremony.

A couple who drove in for the wedding from another town were staying the night at our house. As were we. Shared quarters do not an intimate honeymoon make. As we unpacked my assorted toiletries on arriving at our first official residence (with our first official house guests), I discovered that something was missing. So I called my parents, and asked that they bring me the small plastic case left in the bathroom so we could avoid celebrating a honeymoon pregnancy a few weeks later. Mother said she would finds the missing pills before I was missing pills.

Except she could not find them. So she sent my Dad and his good friend (the father of the flower girl) over to the drug store connected to the home health agency where I worked. My father and his pal requested a refill of my prescription and explained the circumstances to my co-worker. (Oh, Privacy Practice laws how I love thee...) Dad and his friend delivered the by now much-discussed birth control pills to our house. We have wedding guests, and fathers of the wedding party all along on our wedding night. At which point the doorbell rings.

One of the nurses I worked with had been in the pharmacy and overheard my Dad broadcasting my birth control needs. Which she found very funny. So she proceeded to purchase every other method available in the store, tossed in pamphlets on everything from pregnancy to certain indelicate diseases, and came right on over to join in the fun. In case you are counting, there are now five more people involved in our wedding night than there ought to be.

Which brings me back to that study I joined a few years later hoping to find a cure for an all too common marriage and my husband's lack of attention and interest. Beginning to learn what Scripture had to say about marriage, I discovered that the pattern we set on our wedding night was still the one we were reproducing--- and that it looked nothing like what the Bible said our relationship could be. There were too many other people involved in our marriage. We needed to cleave--- both away from other people and to one another. While our children were directly affected by our marriage (and we remain responsible for loving and teaching our offspring), they were not participants in this particular three-legged race. And the race was bound to be smoother once we cut ourselves loose from our friends and parents. They were likely to have opinions, but not one of them was tied to the quintessential unit of one comprised by Don and I.

The long process began of trying to learn how to put Don in a place of higher priority than every other person. More challenging lessons came as we walked, ran, limped, and sometimes crawled along together. Sometimes we struggled against the ties that bound us together, but eventually we began to understand how to support one another while developing a fairly smooth gait by working together. Everyone else in this marathon is a spectator, coach, cheerleader, even companion, but none can be tied to us without hobbling our marriage by throwing off our rhythm or introducing a lack of harmony.