Bride’s nuptial mutiny on a sea of green, yellow chiffon

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2023 (914 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wedding season begins in April, peaks in May, and runs its celebratory course through the summer months. That’s the season’s known trajectory. Many of us have married within it; many have superintended in advance every detail of the overall wedding vision only to encounter the unsettling yet sometimes revelatory interplay between the planned and the unplanned, the expected and the unexpected.

I had one such wedding in the spring of 1972. I lived in a smallish northern Ontario town. There was a smallish synagogue and a largish hotel, the town’s skyscraper in fact — nine entire storeys. My mother — though less than thrilled by my choice of future husband and overwhelmed by the prospect of such a marriage — nonetheless decided the wedding was to be a big one, for me, the only daughter.

The synagogue could not accommodate her guest list. The hotel could. All my brothers’ bar mitzvahs had taken place there. It had a ball room. I didn’t qualify for such a coming-of-age ritual for I was a girl and in my time girls were mostly inconsequential. I could assist in the preparation of lunches, let’s say, refreshments that took place in the multi-purpose room after some kind of synagogue event, but I was not to be initiated via any religious ceremony that would acknowledge my official worth as a voting member of the congregation.

This has changed with the emergence of more egalitarian approaches, but in my day, my learning was limited to how to make egg salad sandwiches, and as I matured, how to carry trays of sweets. I was once asked by a small group of men who were taking sweets from my tray what I wanted to be when I grew up. For some reason I said rabbi. The men laughed. I had made a mistake. I did not understand the nature of my mistake. I wish I had, but I did not have the words for chauvinism at the time. I was wordless and embarrassed. I went back into the kitchen. I did not even know how to ask my mother about what had happened. I don’t know why I said rabbi. I knew rabbis were meant for men and boys (Didn’t I?), but the word spilled out. I carried the apparently comic impression my response engendered well into the years that followed where my confusion found clarity in various evolving forms of feminism.

My wedding was difficult for my mother for many reasons. Yes, I had decided to marry someone she did not take to. She felt that if I had been sent away to university, I should have at least improved my prospects by “marrying up.” My self-chosen husband was immigrant and poor. My mother could see no benefit in the alliance. She had wanted what was “best” for me. In that, she was like many women of her time who wanted their daughters to struggle less, to have more. I had never been asked seriously what I might want to “become” when I grew up, but if I were to acquire a degree, it was to be but a decorative bit that would accompany me down an aisle toward an appreciable upgrade.

Besides announcing my intention to marry this man I had met on the very first day of university four years before, I also chose my own wedding dress. I had not intended to do so. Initially, I told my mother I would like to wear hers: drop-waisted, satin, seed-pearled. She seemed to warm to that idea, but then one day, at the tail end of my university career, I walked into a bridal salon, and found, yes I did, a wedding dress. It was all Elizabethan with puffed sleeves and a Juliet cap, and while I did not like Shakespeare (struggling through his plays during required English courses), I LOVED the effect this dress produced. I felt at home in its appearance of love storied; I was inside a love story. I could not resist. When I told my mother by phone, she iced the line. Given that she hated the idea of my marrying this man, I had thought she would not much care about the dress. But she did.

I regret not asking her why. We moved to silence. She never again brought up her dress.

She did, however, bring out related issues by taking absolute control of all else. If I was stupid enough to want this marriage, she would orchestrate a wedding that might come as close to her vision of perfection as possible in terms of colour scheme, music, flowers and food. I was never consulted. I did not even wish to be consulted. It wasn’t fair because I knew it was too much for her, but she did not want my input. At least that is how it felt. Perhaps she wanted only my compliance in relation to the choices she was making.

My choice of husband, my defiance in persisting in this choice, this standing of ground in a daughter well taught to please and comply, well, it drove her to a command post I dared not undermine and a breach we could not name.

My mother chose an apple green and yellow colour scheme (a combination I did not like though I don’t know if she knew that) — apple green and yellow chiffon for the bridesmaids with explicit instructions to the flower girl’s mother that she find a dress matching this vision. When the little girl appeared in pink, my mother blew what was left of her gasket. It was a very hot day. The hotel had no air conditioning. My mother was railing in the hallway of the hotel’s fifth floor. My bridesmaids were dressing in a room on the same floor. They could hear my mother. They stripped down to their underwear to wait in the heat. They would dress in the apple green and yellow chiffon when there was some semblance of an all-clear.

I have a snapshot of us in waiting. I am outfitted in my Shakespearean motif; the girls are languishing in their underwear on the bed. I don’t know how my mother gathered herself. I do know much more fully now that her unhappiness had to do with so many things that were off kilter in her own life; that my marriage to a man who came with hardship and poverty as part of his being scared her; that her own marriage had failed her; that she could not figure out how to be happy; that she worried I wouldn’t either.

I did walk down the aisle. I want to say that the piano player did not show and that my mother — a most gifted musician — played because she could play anything at a moment’s notice, sophisticated, fully-developed versions, impeccably so. I don’t think that happened. But I wish it because she deserved more than the colour scheme and the flower arrangements. She had her own powerful voice and it needed a much fuller expression than a 1972 mother of the bride could allow.

I remember the day in the pictures I have in those thick, plastic-coated wedding albums that were de rigueur at the time. I have my own big book and her smaller one, part of my inheritance when she died. I remember that the day was hot; that there were mice in the hotel though wedding guests who were staying there did not mention them until years later; that the young children who attended spent the evening riding zanily up and down the elevator; that my mother did not smile when she gave me away; that I married a man who proved every day how far from failure he could live.

And, somber and joyful, I can add that over the course of the 20 years she grew to know him as son-in-law, until her death, my mother’s vision expanded under the auspices of her own maturing love for a marriage she thought a mistake and never expected to celebrate.

debbieschnitzer@mymts.net