Finding the Joy

I went to my sister's wedding this weekend. Before I go on I should clarify: When my father remarried, he and my step-mother eventually had 2 children of their own, both girls, the oldest 20 years younger than me. I always had mixed feelings watching them grow up. There is nothing I particularly regret about my own childhood but my father was generally somewhat remote as I was growing up. From the time in my life when I moved from Texas to Illinois, and in with him and my step-mother for high school, I primarily have memories of loneliness, of trying to be a part of a completely different social and cultural scene while rattling around in a large house with these two awfully busy workaholics who rarely seemed to be around. I had been comfortable with my mother and step-father and my brother. This was completely new, and hard. I knew I was loved by my father, but it felt more like the love for some sort of exotic pet whose habits and behaviors are unknown and perhaps a little intimidating. Love at a remove.

Later as my sisters grew up and I watched the ease with which they moved through life with 2 very present loving parents and a stable home I had mixed feelings. I felt resentment and sorrow watching the experience I had not had. At the same time, I was happy in my life and had no desire to go back and repeat anything differently. I was grateful to my parents for the childhood I had experienced, and simultaneously angry at them for not doing things differently. I was frustrated by my father's lack of awareness of my own experience since he obviously knew in intimate detail about the lives of his other two girls. But at a twenty year remove it seemed ridiculous for me to dwell on it any more. The girls themselves were delightful and I couldn't bring myself to dislike them.

My own path into adulthood has taken me in some strange directions, and parts of my life look very different from a "normal" life. Many of the things that are signifiers of adulthood in our culture, such as marriage and children, I have chosen not to do. In fact, marriage has not been an option for me legally at all. Because of this, weddings bring out a variety of emotions in me: anger, sadness, annoyance and fury together with the more usual celebratory emotions. Seeing a community come together in love and support for a new couple is heartening, but also devastating when you understand that they will never come together in that particular way for you. Feelings of jealousy arise and it is tempting to close off contact in order not to ride that particular wave of emotion.

I sat at this particular wedding and felt my eyes well up as I watched my sister walk down the aisle and her groom begin to cry with joy. I was so happy to see so much love there. During the ceremony I kept myself from twitching with rage as a very particular brand of Christianity stamped itself on the proceedings. "This is her day and it's her religion," I kept telling myself. "Behave." Listening to the toasts later I dug down so that I could hear and appreciate the heartfelt emotion, rather than focusing on the words that dismay me.

Finally, it was time for the dancing. My sister danced with her new husband, and then my father took the floor to dance with her. His face shone with joy and pride as he led her around the floor and my heart broke. "This will never be mine," I kept hearing. "I will never have this with my father."

I've been thinking lately about sympathetic joy, that ability to feel joy and pleasure for someone else's good fortune. It's called mudita in Sanskrit and is supposed to be the antidote for envy. What I realized as I watched my father and my sister dance is that an antidote doesn't necessarily make the the underlying feelings go away. I watched and I cried quietly for myself and at the same time I was so very glad to be a witness to their happiness, and so very glad that they had this experience with one another, that the presence of my sister allowed my father to have what he never could have had with me. Everything else in my heart moved over and made space for my happiness.

When the open dancing began, I got up on the floor and moved. I danced to everything. I learned a new line dance with the young people, jumped and twirled with a little 5-year-old girl, danced the merengue with our old housekeeper's husband, and when the floor cleared I looked across the room and saw my father standing alone. I walked over and reached out to him. "Would you like to dance with me, Daddy?" "Right now? To this?" "Yes, right now, to this." I took him out on the floor and danced with my father joyfully at my sister's wedding.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles