Absolutely Yes

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I had been mired in angst as my husband’s son’s wedding drew closer. It would be an intimate gathering—only 50 guests—taking place on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, with a week’s worth of sun, surf and celebration leading up to the ceremony. Houses were rented, flights were booked and a taco joint reserved for the rehearsal dinner. A family wedding in paradise—what could be wrong with that? But that was the problem. It was a family wedding, and who was I? No one important—just the dad’s wife.

My husband and I had been together for eight years and married for four, but I had yet to step into the space waiting for me in this family, a step not taken because I didn’t believe the space actually existed. Even if I dared to ponder it as a possibility, I had no faith it was solid, substantive, able to withstand storms. I saw only one inevitable outcome—an immediate splintering at the first sign of trouble, the oasis revealed as a mirage.

It could have happened when I was 12 years old and my parents parted ways, or maybe it was from my own marital demise two decades later. Perhaps it kicked in after my mom’s second divorce, when all the aunts, uncles, and cousins I had grown close to vanished without a trace. No matter what the exact circumstance, the overriding issue was one of experience. Every family I’d known had fallen apart, so by the time I got together with my second husband, I had decided that a family was not something I was meant to have—a fact I accepted quietly, but with fierce, devoted conviction. During intimate whispers before falling asleep or the rare, emotional moments I let my overwhelming sadness over this loss pour out of me, my husband would try to refute my belief again and again: “But this is your family now.”

Really? I’d think, Because I don’t believe you.

My imaginings of what the week in Hawaii would be like were on constant replay: It was me—the dad’s wife—sitting on the sidelines. Family photos with the son, his bride, the mom, and the dad. Toasts made to the parents, acknowledgements made to in-laws. Meaningful glances between daughter-in-law and dad, mother and son. I saw my space in this gathering as separate and lonesome, a dotted line around me everywhere I went, keeping my role as the outsider firmly intact. I braced myself for all the varying levels of exclusion I believed would be part of my story—the only story—throughout our time in Hawaii.