On vacations

There is no lonelier feeling in the world than sitting in a group of people who are staring at you blankly because you've just announced that you think the idea of the Florida Holocaust Museum is hysterical.
There's no point explaining that you're not laughing at the Holocaust in general or even Floridians' need to memorialize the victims. There's no point explaining that you're just imagining Mickey Mouse in striped pajamas with a "Juden" star. They won't get the humor.

Night Sweats

Regrdless of your attitude towards planning a wedding, you will have massive moments of anxiety sometime during the planning phases. Being that this is my second trip on the merry-go-round, I thought I'd be immune. I was woefully mistaken.
During the planning for my first wedding, my main source of anxiety was my mother. A full SIX MONTHS before the wedding, she called me in a panic. "What have you done about a guest book attendant?!" I stammered out "I don't know" which is, it should be noted, the absolute WRONG answer to give my mother in any situation. She's a little...tense. And under-medicated. "WHY don't you have a guest book attendant?! The whole wedding will be RUINED if you don't get someone by SUNDOWN TODAY!" So, I called my friend Val and asked her to be my guest book attendant. That is, I asked her after my copious weeping had subsided. It never once occurred to me to say to my mom "What, my guests are gonna be too dumb to know to sign their goddamn names? Or is some dumbass going to steal the thing?" When Mom panicks, all you can do is go along with her and silently pray that New London, Minnesota starts to lace its drinking water with Thorazine. I won't even go into the argument we had about what was on our registry. Suffice it to say that the telephone conversation after that debacle ended with the immortal phrase, "You think this wedding is about YOU, Amy? This wedding is NOT FOR YOU! IT IS NOT YOUR DAY!"
This time around, Mom is largely silent and stress-free. This time, my own damn subconscious is the problem. The venue and dress were cakewalks, each coming in so far under our cost estimates that I began to get a little giddy. Then the nightmares started. One night, I dreamed that I was at the venue, waiting to walk down the aisle, when I realized I didn't have a bouquet. I frantically looked around for something that would pass as a bouquet and saw some wildflowers growing IN the restaurant (isn't that a health code violation?) and gathered a handful. Some faceless killjoy then told me that they looked stupid, so I threw them away and desperately searched for an alternative. Another faceless someone gave me a giant paper cone filled with cottage cheese into which I stuck branches I tore from a fake ficus tree standing in the restaurant's vestibule. I remember thinking to myself "I love cottage cheese, so it's totally appropriate that I include it in my ceremony."
By that time, it was HOURS past when the ceremony was supposed to start, and I practically sprinted down the aisle. The room was empty save for my fiance...even the officiant had left. My fiance blithely said "Everyone went home. A couple of people said it was the worst wedding they'd ever been to." I believe I started to cry into my cottage cheese bouquet then. "Hey, I'm here and you're here and that's all that matters, right?" Even in nightmares, my fiance cannot help but say the right thing at the right time. I think I woke up then, heart racing and bedclothes in a knot.
The second nightmare involved picking up my wedding dress from the store. It's only a fragment of a nightmare, but I vividly recall putting it on, only to discover that there was a new chiffon overlayer that hung down from the shoulders, printed with monstrous roses in various states of decay. I looked like Bea Arthur's closet threw up on me. "Oh well," I thought, "at least I'm not carrying cottage cheese for a bouquet."

Phantom Spouse

I got married early. I got divorced early. I like to be the first on my block with major life changes, apparently. My ex husband and I were a great couple until his senior year in college when we turned into sniping, punative, hyper-critical, nasty, defeating people. Still, we thought it was a good idea to get married. Three and a half years after our wedding, when the wheels came off, I don't think either of us were surprised. Still, moving on from a seven year long relationship was difficult, at best. For the longest time, he seemed to still be there, in my life, in my apartment, in my thoughts... It was like an amputee who wakes up in the middle of the night because their non-existant leg has begun to itch. I had a ghost spouse.
I'm long removed from that divorce, if I am allowed to call five years "long," and am about to be re-married. I'm marrying a ridiculously kind man, whose patience is only exceeded by his great, good heart. He's marvelous. When I get mad, I very clearly know that it is seldom related to anything he's done, said or left undone. He's wonderful about separating my bad moods from the reality of our interaction. He knows me. He accepts me. He loves me. Still, sometimes that missing leg itches.
My ex husband's mother is an associate pastor at a church that gives her a monthly message column on its website and, apparently, in its church bulletins. I, being unable to detatch myself completely from the family that once was my own, read them, bitchily observing how many times she uses "quotation marks" where she "doesn't need to." Her columns are pretty "basic" and rarely, if ever, break any new spiritual ground. Moreover, she tends to vent her own frustrations and talk exclusively of what's going on in her life, generalizing it as if it were the world's problem, not her own.
This month, her column was about trials experienced during the Christmas season, which should be filled with joy and laughter and all of the other shit you're supposed to like about Christmas that never really happens anyway, leaving yourself to wonder "What the fuck?" See, I've just made my own feelings of Christmas general like you people have shitty holiday memories and problematic families. Anyhow, rather than talking about how, in the middle of a season of joy, we should not forget that people suffer (including those among the readership of her column), she spoke specifically about those people who get news that their son and his wife, who were expecting, lost their baby and how those people must content themselves with the knowledge that their first grand baby is resting in the bosom of Jesus.
When I read that column, my heart started to hammer. Granted, my ex's brother could have married and she could have been speaking of him or, in a more unlikely scenario, she was being insufficiently obtuse about a congregant's unfortunate situation but I don't think so. My stomach tightened and my heart wouldn't stop pounding. A co-worker brought work to my desk and a noticed that my hands were shaking as I took the papers from her. But, why? Why does this hit me more than the news I received last week that a classmate of mine from my very small high school had passed away?
For the longest time after the divorce, I would dream about my ex husband. I thought of his shoes in some other closet, his keys on some other table by some other door, his hand in someone else's. The thoughts of his familiar things in an unfamiliar situation were as incongruous as the thought of walking in to work to find that your cubicle has been replaced with your bedroom furniture. His shoes belonged where I last saw him. In the space that I last saw him, some of him still lives there.
I have moved several times since the apartment we last shared, but his ghost trails after me yet. Were we still on speaking terms, it may be easier to move past the phantom limb stage of this severing process, but we are not. If I talked to him now, I would know him as he is now, not as he was five years ago. He wouldn't be a ghost then.
I hope that she didn't mean him. As little love is lost between he and I, I do not wish him any misfortune, especially the heartbreak of miscarriage. Truth be told, I wish for him the same thing I wish for myself: a total exorcism of the ghost of spouses past.