Looking Back

by Eli Joyce

It took 10 years, 60 invitations, 2 words and 1 pumpkin before the future began. And as I stood silently overlooking the Columbia River, I watched that pumpkin catch the wind and cascade to white caps of the water below, along with the past.

I sat at the kitchen table, across from the blonde ball of sunshine that was my mother. And two words escaped her lips, “He proposed”. I inquired as to how she’d responded. She said, “How do you think I responded?” I exhaled a breath that had stuck in my lungs for 10 long years; “It’s about damn time…”

My mom met Bill when I was 8 years old and my life was literally turned upside down. The instant connection that fused them together forced me out of my livelihood in Berkeley to a place where nobody understood my foreign Berkeley quirk: Alameda. After only nine months of living as an alien, my mom grew sick of the bland lifestyle we’d become accustomed to and we moved back. This is when the trouble really began. Over the course of the next nine years, the two went through four breakups and make-ups, all the while catching me in the mayhem that constitutes any serious relationship. I didn’t understand it then, but this was the basis of it al: the struggle and heartbreaks had only solidified the notion in them both that they were meant to be.

After breaking the news of the engagement, my mom threw her entire self into planning the wedding that she’d been anticipating for the past 10 years. The first step of any wedding, I soon learned, was the finesse of invitations. In my mind, just an ordinary envelope with an ordinary invitation tucked inside would suffice. And I was so wrong. There were at least 6 parts to every invitation, printed on special vellum and glossy envelopes, all of which had to be specially ordered. But even more than the overzealous invitations, was the irony of the designer in all of this. My biological father just so happens to be a very gifted graphic designer and my mom showed no hesitation in asking him to design a cover for her invitation. Even though I had lived my entire life watching my separated parents achieve the nearly impossible feat of maintaining a healthy friendship after divorce, even I knew that this situation was not commonplace. In fact, as a joke, my mom even toyed with the fancy that my dad would marry she and Bill, as my father is also an ordained minister. Obviously, that crossed a very bold line but even the thought is unbelievable between divorced parents. This peculiar dynamic is only the beginning.

Just two days before the wedding, my dad and I hopped a plane to Portland to meet my brother (who is ten years my senior) and his girlfriend. As we settled into our seats on the plane in the Oakland International Airport, my dad asked, “How are you feeling about this whole thing?” I could only think of one possible response that could attempt to cover the plethora of words that fluttered in my brain; “Overwhelmed”, I replied, and I was not fibbing in the slightest. Within the next two days, I would gain a stepfather and two stepbrothers to add to the family menagerie and it all seemed surreal. I had expected this marriage so long ago, that the thought itself didn’t seem real anymore. But more than anything, I was just afraid; afraid of the expectations, the changes, the ring glinting on her left hand. I had lived so many years with the constant notion that separation was necessary to maintain that sort of relationship and I’d become privy to the idea. But as comes a wedding, comes a bond like crazy glue, virtually unbreakable and untouchable. Mostly, I was afraid that after all this, that I’d wake up only another day older, my mother sitting at the table staring listlessly into an empty cereal bowl as she had done in the spans of Bill’s absence.

After a night in Portland at a surprisingly swanky hotel in the downtown area, the four of us; my dad, my brother, his girlfriend and I, took the scenic route along the Columbia River, an hour east to Hood River. Along the way, I stared out at the river to my left and watched the waves crash against the border between Oregon and Washington state. Each foot we drove, the closer we got, and the tighter my chest felt. I had so much emotion already coursing through my body and brain, that it had almost become too much to bear.