My daughters’ recent weddings have been among the most joyful events of my life so far. But the marriages that follow are what really matter.
I speak from experience. My first wedding, under a chuppah (wedding canopy) with three rabbis officiating, was beautiful. But I got married too young for all the wrong reasons, and the marriage didn’t last.
Which is why my three daughters grew up hearing, “Don’t get married too young for the wrong reasons” almost as often as they heard “Is your room clean?” and “Did you finish your homework?”
Decades later, I am proud to claim a .333 overall batting average on the right answers. My oldest, despite seeing many of her friends pair off and subsequently start families, has not settled for just anyone, although I know she would love to find someone special.
And she was a joyful maid of honor in June and honored guest at her sisters’ recent weddings. (On the Jewish calendar they occurred toward the end of 5774 and the beginning of 5775, but around our house, 2014 is going down in history as “the weddings year.”)
There are parents who dream of nothing but weddings and eventual grandbabies from the moment their little bundles of joy emerge from the womb. Bringing your child to the chuppah is one of the prayers in a bris (ritual circumcision) or naming ceremony.
I am not one of those parents. I got married and had babies because I wanted to. But I was definitely not mature enough to be a wife when I stood under that chuppah in 1981.
And I saw enough friends — wonderful people who weren’t able to find someone compatible and chose contented singlehood over a bad marriage, or were not heterosexual and couldn’t tell their families, or who were married but had fertility issues — made miserable by well-intended parents.
Therefore, I made a conscious choice to do my best to make sure that my girls knew that my approval of their life choices was predicated on the way they treated others. Their relationship status or how many grandchildren they gave me — not so much.
I feel like a success, because those weddings could not have been more different.
One was a Jewish wedding, one wasn’t. One was rooted in ancient tradition and the other only recently made possible because of a legal decision and a cultural transformation.
But both shared important commonalities. And I’m not just talking about the flowers (Gerbera daisies for one and hydrangeas and delphiniums for the other) and stringed instruments (harp for one, violin and cello for the other).
My daughter Alex Frolkis and her now husband Tevie Lipton got married in June in a formal event in Canada that took more than a year to plan. There were 200 guests and a handmade chuppah. An Orthodox rabbi officiated and the reception was supervised by Calgary Kosher.
Alex wanted all her sisters and sisters-in-law as bridesmaids, so there were 14 attendants. There was a playbill, table cards, a band, a sweet table and a weekend of activities for out-of-town guests.
Abbi Huber and my daughter Talia Frolkis got married in October. Twenty-three people gathered in a restored beer baron’s mansion on Highland Boulevard, within two weeks of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on marriage equality on Oct. 6.
Talia’s bandmate was the best man and Abbi’s sister Liz was the maid of honor. Abbi’s uncle, a municipal judge, officiated. Afterward, we all went out for dinner at Beans & Barley, where we ordered off the menu for dinner and had a specially designed wedding cake for dessert.
Both my daughter-in-law and son-in-law are kind, bright, lovely, decent and accomplished people with strong family values and good hearts. Their parents and siblings have become part of our extended family circle. They are people we’d want as friends and we feel extremely lucky to be able to claim them as family.
Both Tevie and Abbi are college graduates with good jobs. But most important, they are the best things that ever happened to my daughters.
The right words have not yet been created to describe what happens inside a parent’s heart when they see their adult children with a life partner who respects them and challenges them in the most nurturing ways to be their best selves.
The right words have not yet been created to fully describe what a parent feels watching their children do the same for someone else’s beloved adult child.
And it is also heartening to see your unmarried child not rush into marriage to keep up with her siblings.
A wedding is a wonderful occasion. People gather in joy to celebrate love. But it’s what happens after that matters most, and all of my children have shown how well they understand that.
Which is why, thinking back on those two lovely weddings and letting the future take care of itself, I smile, as content as a Jewish mother can possibly be.
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer, retention alert coordinator at Milwaukee Area Technical College and winner of a 2013 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.
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