Have you ever been to American wedding? Where is the vodka, where's marinated herring?

First of all, welcome to our new co-blogger. For those who know both, this is my friend Alex, not my wife's friend Alex. I have no idea what he'll write about, but I'm sure we'll find out. Though he's not a Russian Jew, I will note that he is a pretty much a lapsed Catholic, so he fits in with my lapsed Reform Judaism (which is almost exactly the same in many ways as observant Reform Judaism), and dkon's lapsed Marxism-Leninism.

Anyway, onto tonight's topic: weddings, and what they can teach us about my current predicament, er, um ... current familial situation. I'll start by attacking that favorite chestnut often repeated at weddings: "This is the happiest day of my life". No, sorry, it really isn't. The honeymoon might be, since you are finally done dealing with caterers, seating charts, complicated rituals, and a variety of prayers to intercede between family members on both sides who need to be separated...but the wedding is simply not the happiest moment in your life. This whole expression came about, as best I can tell, because it used to represent the first time one was allowed to have sex without being persecuted. Thankfully, such persecution is now on the way out, and as a result, weddings are really not the huge turning point in one's life that they used to be. Don't get me wrong, I actually had a great time at my wedding, as pictures will indicate, but I have to admit that the biggest change between before and after had much more to do with the flight to Cancun than the ring on my finger. I was pretty much committed to the relationship well before the marriage, and couldn't quite get used to the term "my wife" for a couple years afterward. For all the symbolism we would like to attach to it, in the end the wedding itself is a ceremonial rite of passage whose impact is primarily symbolic, rather than substantive. Society as a whole would be better if people would realize this, to say nothing of the benefit of forever eradicating the phrase "sanctity of marriage", especially when said by those who treated it as less than sacred, double super-especially, when that person had the New York City emergency management headquarters placed in a building known to be a terrorist target apparently so he could use it as a love nest for his mistress.

But I digress. I bring this up not to insult marriage, but rather to point out that many of the supposed turning points in our lives are much less climactic than we are led to believe. Just so no one out there is disappointed in such things when it happens to them, I should point out, with some trepidation, that finding out that your wife is pregnant may very well fit into this category. Don't get me wrong, it was exciting, but it meant that my life would be changing a full nine months into the future. In the short term, S. didn't look pregnant for a long time, she didn't have any real morning sickness (thank the deity of your choice or the lack thereof), and it basically meant that she and I both scaled back our drinking from nearly never to never and even more nearly never, respectively. For months, we knew a child was growing within her, but literally every book, website, and nurse we consulted compared it to the fruit, vegetable, or legume that it most closely matched in size. It's difficult to picture how a grape, kiwi, or nectarine will really be changing your life, and this is months into the process.

If I may be allowed a moment of misplaced Judaic chauvinism, I think I understand rather well now why Jewish law declares the quickening, or the first moment when you feel the baby move, to be the beginning of life. I think S. felt her moving a few weeks before I could, but once you finally feel your future child moving, then the tangibility of their incipient personhood hits you. By now, we can actually feel legs, feet, the butt, and all other parts sticking out (very much like this, I'm disturbed to say), and it really does seem like a small person inside there (yes, I realize that this is indeed the case). You simply can't abstract away something that kicks your hand, or something that causes rather stunningly large protuberances and indentations on your wife's stomach.

For better or worse, it seems that while many rites of passage in life are symbolic, childbirth is very demonstrably not one of them. I doubt I'll be going so far as to call it miraculous (nor "wonderfully Darwinian" while among strangers), but it is one of those things that actually sets down a marker in life, like before and after your team wins the World series or something like that. It seems as if there might be a few of those on the way for us over the next few weeks, but more on that later.

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Now playing: Gogol Bordello - American Wedding
via FoxyTunes