My second-chance midlife wedding

There's something so seductive about the idea of a do-over.

I got married for the first time twenty-six years ago this July, just shy of my twentieth birthday, and about five months pregnant. The wedding details were pulled together primarily by my soon-to-be mother-in-law and stepmother. I didn’t know anything about how to plan a wedding, and as a knocked-up bride, I felt too sheepish to make many requests.

I shopped alone for my (maternity) wedding attire, a white, column-style dress decorated with delicate white embroidered vines, that I bought off the rack at a Mimi Maternity. In 1997 there were few options for maternity clothing available at the local mall. And while I did like the dress I wound up with, it wasn’t anything like the frothy, princess-style wedding dress I’d always assumed I would wear.

It wasn’t just the dress that didn’t match up with my youthful vision of what my wedding would look like, either: neither did the the ceremony, the reception, or if I’m being honest, the groom. But we loved each other - or if we didn’t really yet we would, eventually - and a quickie wedding felt like the simplest answer to a complex problem.

Of course, I know now that nothing is that simple, and that jumping to marriage as the “solution” for an unexpected pregnancy just created lots of other complications. Still, un-doing that decision now would mean un-doing everything about the rest of my life, both the hard and the wonderful. So I wouldn’t change anything now - except perhaps to engage an elder relative (preferably a generous one with lots of cash) to help me dress shop.

Still, the disappointment over that thrown-together wedding weighed on me, like a sad, dull, heavy little weight in my stomach, for many years.

Through most of my twenties and into my thirties, as one by one my friends, siblings, and cousins got married, I enviously regarded the bride’s gowns and coordinated wedding-party wardrobes; the overnight bachelorette parties and open-bar receptions with all the trappings.

It wasn’t even, necessarily, that I actually wanted a destination event, dollar dances, or a DJ. And by 2007 or so, I was completely over my childhood fantasies of taffeta and tulle. By that point I was deeply and wholeheartedly in the throes of young motherhood, and my schoolgirl nuptial dreams seemed outdated and irrelevant.

But those planned-for-at-least-a-year weddings seemed to me like evidence of those brides having done it all correctly, and in the right order: finish college, date the right guy for the right length of time, give yourself plenty of time to plan the wedding, have kids later. They did it “right”, and their weddings were evidence of that.

My wedding, on the other hand, had always felt like the slapped-together, somewhat embarrassing public proof that I’d gone about it all wrong and in entirely the wrong order; and when my marriage felt hard - as it often (usually?) did - I’d wonder if that precipitous start was partly to blame.

Maybe, if I’d done it “right”, things would be easier.

And when that marriage finally ended six years ago, I told myself that, should I get married again, I would give myself a real do-over: the wedding I’d always wanted.

On Monday, I will get married again. This time around, I suppose you could say, I did it the “right” way. For one thing, believe it or not, I am not pregnant!

My fiancee, Eric, and I have been dating for nearly three years, and since the very beginning, our relationship has moved at a slow and deliberate pace (mostly thanks to him, since ‘slow and deliberate’ are still concepts I wrestle with.) We know so much about each other, and have had plenty of time to go on adventures as a pair and try on stressors and adversity to see how we ride out hard times together.

When it comes to the wedding day itself, I have a lot more options than I did back then. For one thing, I have more money now than I did at 20, making it easy to order, try on, and deliberate over half-a-dozen dresses before deciding which ones to return. (Confession: after spending three weeks convinced I had identified The Dress, I’m now waffling again. Call it my version of cold feet.) Given enough time we could plan a serious nuptial blowout.

And yet, despite the perfect setup for an epic Do-Over, the wedding we’re planning doesn’t look much like my youthful fantasies.

In the end, Eric and I gave ourselves only about six weeks to plan the ceremony: a small, outdoor gathering at a state park in northern Michigan, which we’ll follow up with a larger reception in the fall.

My dress is pretty, but barely more expensive than the one I bought off the rack from a maternity store 26 years ago. And it’s definitely not frilly or frothy. No one will mistake me for a princess.

We aren’t having a cake. There will be no church in sight. No bridal party at all.

But this time around, I’m not mourning the loss of those traditional trappings. We have other things we’d like to get moving on that sound more fulfilling, like planning travel, working on our businesses, and dreaming of an eventual empty-nest future that’s just a few years away.

We chose this carefully stripped-down version of what, these days, often feels like a bloated affair - and the lighter load feels like freedom, not lack.

There’s something so seductive about a do-over, isn’t there? And yet, a wedding is just one day - something that I wasn’t able to clearly see at the age of 20, 25, or 30, while I was still feeling pangs of disappointment over my first wedding.

It’s a meaningful day, yes, and an important day. It’s one that I look forward to and know I will remember forever. But whether it’s a destination blowout or a backyard barbecue, a first wedding or a second-chance midlife wedding, the wedding day itself is only ever a preamble to the main event: marriage.

The truth is, I can’t do-over anything about my first marriage now. From the day it started until the day it ended, every moment, memory, and mistake I made in those two-plus decades is now frozen in time.

Looking back I want to give that scrappy-yet-secretly-scared girl a hug and tell her it’s all going to be okay, and that there will be things to salvage from every single part of her life that feels like a failure: the first baby who came sooner than ideal, was still, after all, a baby, for goodness sakes - how wonderful is that! The marriage that ended despite so much hope and work was still, after all, a marriage, that created both a family and many moments worth remembering.

And even the wedding that felt so disappointing when compared to my childish expectations, was, when I think back clearly, actually quite a lovely day in the end.

Maybe we don’t get “do-overs” in life or in love. We simply get opportunities to do the next thing, carrying forward whatever hard-won wisdom we’ve earned from previous struggles into the thing we’re trying to get right, right now.

We won’t ever get it all the way right either, will we? But we’ll get there, somewhere, anyway…wherever it is we’re going. One foot in front of the other. In taffeta or in denim. In sickness and in health.

Showing up for this day and the next and the next, just as they are -no do-overs needed.

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Want to hear eight wise women share their own thoughts about wedding-day “do-overs” and midlife marriage advice? Check out the latest episode of the Mother of Reinvention podcast.

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I’m off for my marriage and a short honeymoon, but will be back in your inbox soon, friends. I’d love to hear your thoughts on “do-over” weddings, second-chance love, or midlife marriage in the comments below!