judecorp | May. 14th, 2005

By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you legally married.

I'm sure it was guaranteed to be a rollercoaster of a day from the get-go. The only agenda on my work plate was to take a child and her mother to the zoo as a goodbye - short but emotional. I was feeling sick to my stomach since the night before (ate too much pizza) and actually at one point almost vomited in my work parking lot on my way to the car, pre-zoo. I made it to the family's house in one long hot flash, windows blasting cold air in at me, gulping it down trying to keep it together. I felt better by the time we got to the zoo but all the sweat I'd accumulated gave me a chill for a bit. Sunshine helped. Did I mention it was an unexpectedly beautiful day? Clear skies, coolish temps, bright sunshine. Lovely.

After several hours at the zoo with a child who was misbehaving because she was upset about having to leave our program, we had a slightly teary goodbye and I raced to work to drop off some paperwork. Coworkers chased me out after too long and I got home in time to get to my destination, but not enough time to change. This caused some drama because my beautiful Jennifer was dressed up a bit and I was wearing crappy work clothes. She ended up putting on a less nice sweater. What a doll. :)

The three of us (Jen,

Carina and I) got on the train and headed to City Hall, where we met up with

Amy. We went in, paid our money, waited in a waiting room with a creepy painting, and then were ushered into the City Clerk's office for the wedding.

She was a very nice lady, who started out with a little diatribe of her own about same-sex marriages. She said that we were her first same-sex marriage this month, that she'd mostly married men in Boston (but women as a whole dominated the same-sex weddings here in Massachusetts), that she was just thrilled to do so, and that she thought this outpouring of love was so important to our world and to our community here in Boston. She started to sound a little bit like she was running for re-election, so I was pretty excited when she stopped talking about her feelings and dove into the actual stuff. She talked about what she was going to say, and what we were going to say, and asked if we were exchanging rings. We handed over the rings we've been wearing for nearly two years now and she commented on their loveliness.

At first I felt a little weird about doing the whole exchanging rings thing with the rings we exchanged in the past, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. This really /was/ more about simply solemnizing and legalizing the life committment we made to each other that evening in October where we said our own vows to each other, privately in our living room. And while it's likely not as awe-inspiring as witnessing a legal marriage of a couple who have been committed to each other for 50 years or more, there was something pretty awesome about exchanging our worn, dulled, time-honored rings in our little ceremony.

It was quick, with about five minutes of actual ritual. (City Clerk said her lines, we said our lines, she said more lines, we smooched.) Carina snapped a few pictures while Amy was an applause party of one. (Totally adorable.) I was surprised that she told us to kiss. (I guess I thought that part only came in big, formal weddings. It felt weird to kiss in the City Clerk's office.) I was surprised how touched I was, honestly. I really hadn't wanted to make a big deal out of this because I felt like we'd made our committment a long time ago, and this was just a little legal hoop that we were going to jump /because we could/. But it was more than that, because as the City Clerk was talking, I realized how symbolic, how important, and how touching it was to have our union blessed and supported by our little government and by our larger community as a whole.

I do a lot of preaching to people about the importance of marriage vs. civil unions, about how the ability to get legally married shows equality and recognition of the validity of a relationship more than anything else, and you know what? I'm so right. But I missed the part about how that /feels/, which isn't all that unusual for me since I'm more a logical person than anything else. Damn, it felt uplifting and powerful to be able to sign up for a marriage license and bring it to City Hall so that the City Clerk could smile and shake our hands and tell us she was honored to support our love and our commitment to each other.

Putting politics aside, my Jennifer looked so beautiful and so happy, and when she repeated those vows and almost lost her composure, I felt so special and so loved. It was phenomenal, especially since I've never felt something like that and, hello, I already had a wedding once - a big one with all of the pomp and ceremony and guests - and it wasn't at all like that. I remember repeating vows to A. and being unable to make eye contact (a communication problem I struggle with daily), but finding no problems yesterday. I just wanted to tell her over and over how much I loved her, how I wanted to mesh our lives together even more than they were already, how I wanted to fill our home with love and babies and activism and spirit, and how I just plain thought she was the greatest person I'd ever met and how thankful I was to know her. Instead, I repeated my simple little phrase that the City Clerk told me, about good times and bad, sickness and health, and we held hands and exchanged our sticky old rings and it was just marvelous.

I was so caught in the beauty of the moment, truly. It was so moving to me that part of me wished we really /had/ done it in front of everyone we loved. And part of me wished we done it completely alone, the two of us, another victory we could cherish together in secret. We're thinking of trying to organize a formal (and public) blessing of our union a year from now, on our anniversary. By then perhaps we'll have the time and money to pull an event off. We just really wanted to finally get married, since, well, that's what we've wanted to do since we moved and hadn't been able to get it together.

~//~

It's kind of sad, though, because now that we have both felt that power of the legal support of the Commonwealth, we both have reservations about leaving. I had been joking up until now that it will be funny to go to Columbus next weekend, because we can play, "Now we're married! Now we're not!" But the truth is, it isn't funny. We had something beautiful and perfect and /right/ yesterday, and I'm so scared for someone to try to take that away from me. Last night, in the quiet, inky moments before sleep, we curled into each other and talked about reluctance to leave now that we've actively witnessed and experienced what real governmental support felt like.

It wasn't just the /opportunity/ or the /ability/ to get married. I don't think until yesterday afternoon either of us realized just how much our government, our Commonwealth as a whole, seemed proud and happy to make it happen.

~//~

p.s. Big thanks to