Announcement

I wrote this when Elai first got here. But she wouldn’t let me post it till right now.

This is a day you pray for. This is a day you wonder about. This is a day you aren’t ready for even if you saw it coming. This is the day your daughter walks out the double glass doors of the airport with a silly grin on her face and a spring in her step and you start the twenty questions game because it’s bursting out of her and you know it, and she doesn’t want to say quite yet, but she never could keep a secret from you. This is the day your daughter tells you she’s getting married.

I have a new son. Mikael. How do I introduce Mikael? Mikael loves God and my daughter. What else is there to know?  Born in Texas, he grew up in northern Mexico where his parents translated the Bible into Pame and where his mother also grew up in a missionary family. He met Elai at a camp in Puebla, held every year for missionary kids from all over Mexico, and they started dating after Elai graduated from high school. So two years now. This last year Elai transferred from Redeemer College here in Canada to Wheaton College outside Chicago, so they have spent the year studying there together. This summer Mikael was a lifeguard supervisor at Schlitterbahn Water Park and also coached their lifeguard team, Top Dog, taking them to compete at state level. At Wheaton he’s interested in Economics and Math and International Relations. Busy guy. Smart. Hard working. Elai adds love of Art, Sociology and Cats.  I’m glad to welcome him into the family.

So many thoughts go through my head. Do they know what changes lie ahead? Are they ready? My instinct is to want to shield them, but of course this is exactly what they don’t want. They want to step out and take their own chances, and I need to let them. I think of how similar their backgrounds are, and how this will help them understand one another better and go for the same things. But I also think of how different they are, and how different Robert and I are, too, and how that has worked out just fine after all. I think of how Mikael ran for student government his first week of college, while Elai is my free-spirited hippie child who will never quite conform to anyone’s norms, and how they could either fight or complement one another, or both, according to their will to love. And with all my heart I welcome and bless this marriage.

 I know it feels like years instead of months away for her. I felt the same, thinking back. I wanted to elope, but now I’m glad my future husband thought it through, and now, 25 years later, we have a wedding to remember. Some girls dream of their wedding day and have plans made from childhood, imagining dresses and vows and wedding songs. This was not me. Nor is it Elai. But yesterday I got Elai to draw the dress she’s looking for. She’s had much practice drawing dresses, but they’ve usually been for mermaids and Indian princesses and warrior women, not for her own good day, so this was a new thing. I noticed on the paper she also drew a random manga princess. My princess turning bride.

We got the dress. As you know. Just waiting for the day. December 22. If you can come, please do!

Mikael has spent the week with us, getting details straight, and today the two of them drive  back to Chicago to start school. Meanwhile, Robert and I are driving to Stratford (Canada’s theatre town) to celebrate our 25^th on the 26^th. And the computer isn’t going with us…