The Vibrating Part
Everybody wants to talk to me about how much work it all is.
The tent, the flowers, the whole enormous production of putting hundreds of people in one place to watch two of them promise something to each other. How much there is to do. How exhausting this season must be. And then, because I am the luckiest of the lucky, there’s a second one right behind it — Will’s wedding, coming up almost as soon as I’ve caught my breath from Hannah’s. I nod when people say this to me, because it isn’t wrong, exactly. But it isn’t the whole of what’s true, either.
Sure it’s work. But it’s so much more.
It reminds me of my high school track coach, who used to run us through interval workouts that I hated with my whole body while I was in them. The first 400. The second. The third, when your legs stop being legs and become some kind of argument you’re losing. You would have paid money, in the moment, to stop. And then the whole set would be over, and the joy — I mean actual joy, chemical and undeniable, legs shaking, lungs on fire — was indescribable. Nobody warns you that the thing you’re dreading and the thing that will make you feel most alive are, very often, exactly the same thing wearing a different jacket.
Hundreds of people for Hannah, hundreds for Will — two weddings within a few months this year is my current interval workout, and the second lap is the bigger one. Which is maybe why my actual workouts have become the closest thing I have to company lately. My Peloton girls. A weightlifting app that yells at me kindly. A yoga video I’ve done so many times I could teach it badly myself. I’ve never leaned on them or craved them quite like this — it turns out the fastest way to take the chill off all that excitement and nerves is to physically burn through some of it, endorphins doing what my nervous system can’t do on its own. I already suspect I’ll be the fittest, most depleted, happiest woman in Rhode Island by Thanksgiving.
What’s actually true, underneath the lists and the tasks is that I am vibrating. Not from stress, though there’s some of that. It sits right alongside me like a roommate I’ve learned to live with. I mean the other thing — the constant hum.
I know this feeling from somewhere real: thirty years of standing in front of rooms as a brand builder, writing speeches for CEOs, drafting press releases during big announcments, hosting galas, events and working to sell some of these companies - there were high stress moments.
These were challenges I liked, where I rose to the occasion, where the adrenaline surged, where I practiced, and where it went well. It mattered to me. I became good at it.
I have felt my heart do something slightly too fast before a client presentation the exact same way it’s doing something slightly too fast now, practicing my toast out loud with Dan in the kitchen. My voice trembling is good practice — the wrong note before a piano recital, the false start at a track meet, the moment before you have to talk off the cuff to a reporter who wants an answer you haven’t finished thinking through yet. I got very good, over thirty years, at winging it. It became a kind of quiet confidence, knowing how to do your job really well.
This is the one time in my life it is absolutely not the moment to wing anything, and I can feel my whole nervous system reminding me that this is not what I have done for 30 years. Celebrating the love of your child and their new spouse-to-be is not something we practice much. Sure, we did it ourselves, and some of us with more abandon than others. (that’s me).
Nobody prices any of this into the work of a wedding. Nobody puts “5 weeks of walking around mildly electrified” on the to-do list, though it might be the most valuable thing anyone gets out of the whole season, including the people getting married.
We all know Carly Simon’s song, “Anticipation , is making me late, is keeping me waiting.” Then there is Jane Austin referring to such anticipation as ‘the sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself.” Both of these women touch on the highs, lows, unknowns and joy of thinking about such exciting times ahead. And then there is John Green, whose books, podcast and way of thinking I just love, says, “the pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, it’s in planning it.”
Both Austin and Green ran straight through Hannah’s childhood — Pride &Prejudice on one shelf, which we watch endlessly still, and The Fault in Our Stars, a book we devoured and still think about. Both women craved certainty and the ache of wanting something before you’re allowed to have it. These stories fed us the kind of romance we craved - hard won, honest and with devastating consequences.
I know how this ends. It will actually be over the weekend of Thanksgiving, just after Will’s wedding — which feels like the universe having a small joke at my expense, handing me a holiday built entirely around gratitude at the exact moment when I get mine in spades.
I know that once the last guest leaves, I will feel the particular flatness that comes after any enormous, long-anticipated thing — the same flatness I’ve felt after every event ended, every trip we came home from, every finish line I crossed. The weddings will be over not once this year, but twice. The flowers will be taken by late dancers, the band will wrap up, and everyone will go back to their regular lives. I will sit down at a Thanksgiving table amid the wreckage of ribbon and seating cards I haven’t yet put away, and feel, for a day or two, strangely empty-handed, and also — I suspect — more thankful than I have ever been at that table in my life. That part is coming. I can’t stop it and I’m not going to pretend I can.
But I can do something about it right now. I can notice that I am, this week, in the part where everything is still ahead of us — where the dress still hangs unworn, where the vows are still being drafted and deleted and drafted again, and where the whole shape of the day exists only as possibility, which is the shape a thing is in right before it becomes a memory. That in-between state has its own weather. Its own particular light. And most of us spend it apologizing for how much work there is, instead of noticing that we are, for a few precious weeks, allowed to want something this much. What a privilege, actually, to have two.
So here is what I am trying to do, badly, the way I try to do most things: I am trying to stop time on purpose. Not the whole day — just small pieces of it.
Sitting at my dining room table this week, as the AC went out on the floor where my studio is, I noticed that I was painting one last piece for the wedding. I practiced my toast one more time with a shorter, tightened version, voice catching less, imagining the friends and family smiling.
I make myself notice that this time is ours to have. It doesn’t stop the season from being a lot of work, or stop the countdown from counting down. It just means that when I’m watching my daughter marry the love of her life in a few weeks— and then, not long after, watch my son do the same — I won’t feel like I skipped the best part trying to survive it.
The best part for me might be right now. And I am loving being here for it.
MJ