My Oldest Daughter is Getting Married!

My firstborn daughter is getting married to the love of her life tomorrow, which is a sentence I can apparently type while still not fully understanding how in the world we got here. Because wasn’t she just turning ten in Paris, and also somehow wasn’t that a hundred years agoLife is so weird like that.

I keep thinking about doorways, which sounds very metaphorical and dramatic, but that really is what this weekend feels like to me. Like we are all standing in that strange little space between the life we know and whatever comes next, and you can almost feel the shape of things changing around you before anything has actually happened yet.

Tomorrow Abigail becomes a wife. Seth becomes family in a different way than he was yesterday, and somehow the rest of us change a little too.

I think that’s what gets me about these big life moments. You don’t lose the room you came from just because you walk into another one. It’s all still back there. Every version of her, every version of me, Christmas mornings and car rides and vacations and arguments and regular old Tuesdays we had no idea we would miss someday.

Twenty-four years of Abigail are on this side of the door with me.

Tomorrow there will be flowers and lavender everywhere, a million moving pieces, people we love all in one place, and me probably asking where the cake knife is while also having some kind of existential crisis in the corner.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I want to remember to stop and really look at her. The little girl she was and the woman she is now, somehow both standing there at the same time.

And now there is another room.

Tomorrow we get to walk into it together. I don’t know exactly what shape our family will take on the other side of this doorway, or what this next season is going to look like once we’re all standing in it, but I can’t wait to find out.

What a beautiful thing to get to witness, and what a beautiful doorway to be standing in.

~Amanda Fleming Taylor