Modern Love: I'm going to get married, mom.Please cry

During lunch at a French restaurant, in the neighborhood of Glover Park in Washington, I told my mother that wedding planning made me feel alone.

He nodded to express his understanding, but showed no interest in helping me.

The wedding cost with my father had been divided, and of course it was useful.

Although more than once, in my moments of worst tantrums, I had asked me if it would be more useful not to have money for the wedding and, therefore, not have a wedding.

Not organizing the wedding would also relieve the pressure we felt about enjoying my commitment as a mother and daughter, because there was an alarming number of parties and rituals that forced us to face our relationship.

At our lunch, I analyzed my mother's face to see if I was going to pronounce an introduction, a passionate speech about how you would have to help with planning or explain how much I felt so disconnected.

But his expression did not change.

Lately, I had been customary to analyze his face, in person and by facetime.

My mother and I had been fighting all year after three decades of relative peace, including an childhood in which I obtained perfect qualifications and never broke the rules, and she took me by car to the swimming classes, accompanied me in eachExcursion and cooked dinner every night while becoming a successful entrepreneur being a birracial woman in a sector dominated by men.

We started fighting because a year and a half previously sold his company, he separated from my father and moved to England with a ex -boyfriend of the University.

It was a series of shocking events and, although several reasons were revealed that made their decision more digestible, we were just beginning to repair the bad step in our relationship.

She and the boyfriend had just returned back to the United States, to the city where I lived, but in all the conversations she had with her - interest in which the intensity seemed to increase more and more as my great day approached - we arrivedAt a point of dead because of the fact that I wanted to talk about my feelings all the time, and she simply was not reciprocal.

Constantly, I was talking about new perspectives about what I felt about my childhood, his marriage to my father, his evasions about what was really happening (even if he did not hurt me) and his move abroadIn the middle of a pandemic.

My goal was to use my self -awareness and my talent for emotions as weapons that would make it surrender and do the same.

He did yield, and he told me that I felt it again and again but, although I begged to show me more emotions, all she told me was that she simply was not like that.

I did not understand why I could not learn to be more emotional;After all, I had learned it.

At university, I had hidden my emotional life in order to obtain good grades and extracurricular success.

However, in the later decade, after having digested a thousand Instagram publications about the importance of self -care, limits and vulnerability, I had become stubborn by refusing to repress my feelings or judge any emotion.

While we expected to serve us food that day, he took out a neutrogen solar blocker from his bag and began putting it on his face.

We were sitting outdoors in a sunny street and, although he had his new straw hat, he had just undergone dermatological treatment and said it was important to avoid direct light of the sun so that his skin would heal better.

I had some ideas about that skin treatment, things that I kept because it is sexist to embarrass people for their beauty routines.

But it was not the vanity that bothered me (my mother is 60 years old and an hour before lunch, the seamstress of the wedding dress had asked us if she was my sister, making us proud to both, because I thought that at least I haveGood genes to age, even if you don't have them for marriage).

Rather, when he called me a few days before to tell me that he had just returned from his appointment at the Spa, I had to think about how much he had organized to program the procedure exactly 30 days before my wedding.

The wedding and the preparation of it were very present in their mind, but their list of slopes was different from mine, which included a series of logistical and emotional tasks.

I needed to review the organization of the tables, not to ask me casually how planning like any other foreign person.

I needed to explain to me with tears in my eyes how much his heart had broken his family, not the dispassionate details of the healing process of his pores.

When we finished eating, I returned to my apartment and my lists.

I kept avoiding desserts and reviewing the weather obsessively, long before the prognosis could be necessary for the wedding date.

I breathed deeply many times, reminding me that no one would realize the errata in the seat plan, that all the confirmed guests were vaccinated, and that the things that were under my control were in good condition.

I stopped trying to understand my mother and decided that emotional work would have to wait until after the wedding.

When the day finally came, I kissed my fiance and headed to the hotel, where I was preparing with family and friends.

I was dying to see how all the details that had obsessed me during the previous months came to life.

I couldn't wait to say: "Yes, I accept" in front of all my loved ones.

I couldn't wait to go from honeymoon and to sleep finally.

We managed and groomed all afternoon at the most elegant hotel suite in which I had ever been, paid with the money that my mother won selling her business, the business she had built throughout my adolescence, almost secret,Well, a single minor or greater milestone was lost in my life.

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— MsSavino 🤠 Sat Oct 26 20:09:56 +0000 2019

It was not until the last years that she held the position of general director that the entrepreneurs and the empowerment of Twitter and feminism in the office became fashionable.

In one of our fights of the last year, I asked my mother if I believed that Internet had empowered her to leave my father.

She seemed confused, and then responded with her favorite enigmatic phrase:

"I do not know".

When we arrived at the enclosure, I got the makeup in a dressing room while my mother and my sister fluttered around me.

This was the time when everything was going to be good ... or not.

But none of the disastrous scenarios I had feared occupied my mind, I couldn't even remember them.

I had worked to get here, and now I was getting carried away.

When my mother asked me how I was, I said:

"Very well".

Later, I walked towards the stunned altar of happiness and cried when I said my votes.

The evening was full of intimate moments, not only with friends and family, but also with my husband, who illuminated my world as I had done during the previous six years.

Throughout the evening I felt happy, my feelings were simple and pure.

My mother and I had not gone through a magical cure process during wedding planning, as I expected, but I felt completely well.

Finally, the somewhat annoying concept that this was "my day" felt real.

And I realized that, despite our differences, my mother and I seemed in this experience.

Because, almost eighteen months before, without fanfare or celebrations, his day had also arrived.

He had to have had a million feelings and fears while considering whether I should leave my father, but when the time came, he knew he was fine and that it was right.

He had worked in our family all his life and, for her, to leave her did not am equivalent to surrender, but at the beginning of a new stage.

I saw my mother turn on the dance floor, happier than I had seen in years, perhaps more free than I had ever seen.

And although I was entering my marriage while she left his, I felt that our joy came from a similar place: to be in the right place, at the right time, safe from ourselves.

All of that looked a little for forgiveness, to move on.

I also felt that I was adult again, separating my happiness from the complicated network of my family's relationships.

It was not the right time to separate my mother and have a conversation about it.

The band was playing at full volume, the cake was about to cut and I put my attention on everything I could.

But there is more than one way of sharing feelings and even with my mother away from my sight, I felt that we were finally in perfect tune.

Kath Right is a writer in Washington D. C ..

C.2022 The New York Times Company

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