Reflections in the Eye of the Storm

Reflections in the Eye of the Storm

Oh dear loves, thank you for your kind words of encouragement regarding my last post. Its funny and surreal to get a message from a friend and a stranger at the same time, saying the same thing: be you, be lovely, be happy. Friend and stranger: you are both right. And in the midst of the hurricane of sh*t that is my life right now, I had a clear moment last night. An "eye of the storm" moment, if you will, about what this is all about and how incredibly lucky I am.

I sat up against a pile of pillows in bed last night, returning panicked e-mails from my students, in an apartment filled with junk and dirty dishes, and, for some reason, I just stopped and stared at a wall for a while. As my mind went blank, I heard my TV blaring in the living room and started to laugh at the fact that Mike was listening to a law lecture at 11:00pm, simply because after fighting with his computer cables and laptop all day, he'd FINALLY figured out a way to play his MPRE lecture on the television.

I looked over to the other side of my bedroom and saw that somewhere between my window and bookcase, Mike had found an open spot on the floor to place a pink hamper of clean laundry that he'd washed and folded for me during the day.

On my nightstand, I found the small cup of foam earplugs he keeps handy so that he can hold me and still keep his sanity while I snore in his ear, curled up like a baby koala. Often times, the poor guy snuggles with me until I get nice and sleepy, goes off to his own place past midnight, and then returns at 7am to hold me for a few minutes and shake me awake for class.

Even the mess I'd been fretting about, I realized, were remnants of a happy couple living a happy life. Dirty dishes from a Sunday pot roast I'd happily made and he'd happily eaten. A pair of dirty coffee mugs sitting on the table after we'd decided to break into the new pumpkin spice coffee at 10 o'clock at night. A Costco-sized bag of his favorite Sunkist Gems sitting in the middle of the living room because there was no place else to put them.

The bottom line is, amidst the crush of school, work, cleaning, cooking, wedding planning, fuming and panicking, I'm happy. Ridiculously so. And I'm so, so lucky. I love him, he loves me, and we're just two people who want wake up and do all this everyday for the rest of our lives.

And that's why I'm excited to get married.

I know that Mike and I are together now after all these years because God wanted this for us. And despite the whirlwind nature of our courtship, despite what it looks like on the outside, we choose faith. We choose to have faith that God knows what He's doing, we choose to have faith in each other, and, in agreeing to this batsh*t crazy scheme, our families have also chosen to have faith in us.

Nothing brought this home for me more than a tear-filled conversation with my mom. I was going on and on about trying to bridge the culture gap, and how hard it was to meet everyone's expectations. I told her I didn't want something minor to end up offending one set of parents because the other set didn't understand where we were coming from. And I didn't want her to feel sad because we weren't going to do certain things the way most Korean American brides do them.

You know what she said? These are words I hope every bride hears from her parents, and if not, I hope you hear it here from me and take it to heart:

"You know what Yooli? All of this? The money, the time, the effort? All of this is just so that we have the privilege to bear witness to the fact that God made someone just for you. Do you know how lucky you are to have that? I don't care what Mike's parents want or don't want. I don't care about what other people might think. And I definitely don't want you to feel pressured to do anything for my sake. Mike is enough. You guys getting married and living happily ever after is enough. If no one else shows up to the wedding, if the food sucks, if it rains...As long as Mike shows up and you two get married and I'm there to see it, then that's enough. I love Mike, I love that he makes you happy, I love that he's joining our family. And that is enough for me. So don't be stressed, don't get upset, and don't pick fights. Make wedding planning fun and choose to be happy."

You're right Mom. I am happy, and I choose to be happy about my wedding.

I've fretted about my wedding dress and how my chubby arms will look in pictures for hours. I've obsessed about how my ceremony photos will look horrible because I hate my side profile. I've even wondered if we could do the ceremony facing the church because of that. I've fretted about our budget, the food, being too mainstream, being unreasonably DIY-indie-bride, and about whether or not I was becoming a Bridezilla.

And today I choose to not do that anymore.

I'm going to don a white dress and probably pay a ridiculous amount of money for hair and makeup on my wedding day, not because of pictures or my guests or what wedding magazines say I should look like. It will be for the man smiling at the other end of the church who would have thought I was beautiful no matter what I had chosen to look like that day. And I'm going to cry even if ruins my makeup and the resulting pictures, because if I'm crying writing this post, then I'll surely be a hot mess on that day.


I choose to be happy.

About my life.

About my wedding.

About my choices.

About my husband-to-be.

Because, as my mom says, at the end of the day, I still get a life with Mike. And he's enough.