Recently, I went to a wedding. It was the first time that I celebrated one of my friend’s own children getting married. Up until this point I had only been to weddings because I knew the bride or the groom. This time, while I knew the bride, I was there for her mother. We had been close in high school, but she met her husband shortly after graduation and we both went to different colleges. I then went in the Peace Corps shortly after she married and was not there for the birth of her daughter, the now beautiful bride. However, we always stayed close; while I moved around she chose to stay in the town we grew up in and raise her family there. I continued on to graduate school and had a few marriages, and eventually, kids of my own.
We checked in with each other often: birthdays and Christmas were always a given. Her children were older than mine but we could still bemoan teens together and the ups and downs of raising kids while laughing about our own high school antics.
When I got the wedding invitation, it struck me that this would be the first time I would celebrate the wedding of a friend’s child. My older daughter and I flew home for the wedding and got in a college interview for her while there. When we got to the church, I anxiously awaited seeing for the first time not the bride, but my friend. It was surreal. For the first time, I realized that we were now the MOBs and her parents, the ones we would wait for to go out so we could sneak in some fun, were going to be great-grandparents. Where did time go? It was just yesterday that my friend and I were driving around out boring small town laughing and looking for something to do. Now, I watched as my gorgeous friend pulled out her reading glasses for the hymnal. Who were we?
In midlife, we can’t deny the realities of the reflection in the mirror any longer. The lines are there, the grey hairs don’t stop coming and the change in our body chemistry becomes undeniable. Yet, on the inside we are still 18, free and full of life. How do we even begin to reconcile this? While I was full of joy for her and for her family, I was sad that time had insisted on dragging us along. Our parents were now the older generation and we were stepping up as caretakers. As a good friend said, we start to notice that at each wake, we take one more step to the right in the receiving line and pretty soon we will be the ones standing next to the casket.
Yet, I could see in my friend a level of joy that I had not seen before. Perhaps it was the culmination of pride and love and fulfilment that comes with watching your child grow fully and finally experience that love that only newlyweds can feel. Perhaps there is a mature joy that comes with knowing you did a good job raising another human being and lived a great life yet still have time, and now freedom, to explore life again in a new way.
Whatever it was, it was new for me. It was a new venture. It was a midlife moment. I don’t know where this takes us, but watching my friend and her husband hold each other a little tighter and wipe tears from each other’s eyes made me realize that love doesn’t age and doesn’t contract, it expands. I kicked of my shoes that had been killing my feet and got on the dance floor to celebrate the bride, her family, my family and life. And to feel like I was 18 again for just a few hours.