I’ve been blessed with many happy days in my life. One of them was October 2, 1985 when my daughter Meg was born. Another was July 23, when before their family and closest friends, Meg and her fiance Dick exchanged rings at their “Geektastic Wedding of Epic Awesomenesss.” And it was indeed an epically awesome affair.

After a taking a couple days to recover from all things wedding, I’m finally feeling rested enough to get back to writing. And I could tell you all about the months of planning and the hectic several weeks of “we’re getting close to W-Day” craziness and punchlists and getting everything in order for Wedding Weekend, but that stuff is all just boring project-managing type stuff, the scaffolding on which a wedding is built.

We could talk about Meg’s epic bachelorette party, which started with everyone drinking a couple rounds of wickedly strong “Black Opals” and culminated with a burlesque show and Meg being dragged on stage to get a Burlesque 101 lesson. Or I could tell you about the rehearsal dinner at our house the next evening, at which most of the wedding party, families, and friends who helped in countless ways with the wedding came together to celebrate and get to know each other and consume heaps of Tex-Mex and a not inconsiderable quantity of margaritas.

And then there was Saturday, the Big Day, which kicked off early in the morning at my best friend Donna’s house, where hot tea, mimosas and a lovely breakfast spread awaited us, so we could do our wedding makeup and hair before heading off to set up the venue for the event.

I could tell you the little things about the wedding itself, all the things people always want to know about weddings when they hear your daughter is getting married. I could describe for you in detail the sweet, historic venue near the Kirkland waterfront, which all the folks in the wedding party worked together to decorate, turning it into a splendor of white and black tablecloths with sheer silver overlays and mirrors and red roses. I could describe for you the amazing pulled pork and baked beans and such that our friend Texanna prepared, catered, set up and cleaned up as a gift to the bride, or about the fabulous cake and cupcakes, made by Meg’s bridesmaid Kim and her mom. Or I could tell you about the beer for the bash, brewed by Meg and Dick’s friend Ricardo, who owns a fledgling brewery, which flowed all evening along with countless bottles of wine and endless iced tea and lemonade.

Or I could tell you about the beautiful bride, stunning in her wedding dress, altered to perfection (also by Donna, who was dubbed the “fairy godmother” of the wedding), or about the photo booth we set up outside the venue, where family and friends could capture the joy they shared with us on that most wonderful of days.

Yes, all those details are the things that make a wedding, and every wedding has them. But the most important thing about the day was something more intangible; it was the love and energy of everyone who came together to witness the love of Meg and Dick surrounded by their family and friends, and the little moments that made the day truly special. And for me, the most important things about my daughter’s wedding day had less to do with things and details and punchlists and more to do with special moments that filled hearts to overflowing with the bittersweet joy of a daughter stepping fully into her adult life, hand in hand with the man she loves.

One of those moments was zipping my daughter into her wedding dress, holding back tears at how the happiness that filled her heart radiated from her face. If you’re a parent, and you’ve raised a daughter from cuddly infancy to sweet little girlhood, through tumultuous teen years that you weren’t sure either of you were going to make it through, and finally into adulthood, then you can perhaps understand a bit how profoundly joyous it is when that daughter grows up to become a steady, responsible young woman and mother and finally meets and then marries the kind of partner you hoped and prayed she would one day find. Yes, you might understand that.

Another was the ceremony itself, which was non-traditional and unique to Meg and Dick in every way. The families processed down to our seats to David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Then the bride came down the aisle to the Beatles “Something,” first with Jay, my ex-husband, who helped raise Meg from the time she was an awkward nine-year-old, and who has as much a hand as her father and I in the wonderful young woman she is today. And then halfway down Jay handed her off to Jeff, her dad, who escorted her to her waiting, beaming bridegroom.

I’m betting you’ve never been to a wedding where the officiant dramatically walked to his place holding aloft a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and where the ceremony made geeky references to comic books and Battlestar Galactica. Or at which, preceding the cake cutting, a friend with an amazing voice sang “Seasons of Love” from Rent, and the entire crowd spontaneously joined in (hey, Meg and Dick and our family have a ton of theater friends, what do you expect?). Or where the bride and groom’s first dance together as husband and wife was to “Origins of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch — in part a statement the bride and groom wanted to make about love and marriage and equality and the right of all people to marry the partner they love.

There were so many touching moments throughout the day, moments that will stand out in my memory as the most memorable of the day. One of the sweetest moments was when the wedding party walked down to the waterfront for photos and for Meg and Dick to complete a salt ceremony signifying the joining of their lives. My brother Lance blessed the salt, and Meg’s dad captured the moment in this photo, in which salt, sunlight and wedding day magic converged in creating a stunning prismatic aura.

Perhaps the most sweetest moment of a day filled with great moments was when Dick, in front of this smaller circle of family and very close friends, knelt to the ground, took my grandson Brandon (pictured at right, riding tall on his Papa Jeff’s shoulders) upon his knee, and vowed to always love him with all his heart. I’m not sure that Brandon, at age five, really understands Dick’s love for him, but I know that some day, when he is a man himself, he will come to fully appreciate the love and support and constant, fatherly presence of Dick in his life, and I hope that when he is a father himself some day, his own role as father will be informed, at least in part, by the love, warmth, compassion and good humor which Dick brings to parenting Brandon every day.

And then there were the many moments when I locked teary eyes with Meg’s dad Jeff, and my ex Jay, and my husband, Mike, acknowledging our love of this precious daughter of ours and our shared joy in this day. Jeff is my oldest and dearest friend, the one person in my life besides my parents who’s known me since I was a recalcitrant 15-year-old. There were times when he wasn’t around as much in Meg’s life as I know he wishes now he had been, but I’m so grateful that he and Meg share a close bond now, and as we danced at our daughter’s wedding to ’80s dance tunes that we last danced to before Meg was even conceived, we smiled at each other and shared many moments of joy and gratitude at where the intertwined paths of our lives have led us.

It was a long path for all of us, getting to this day. Meg was born when I was just 17, and because I was focused during her early years on studying my ass off and getting through college in three years so I could support her, I wasn’t always as emotionally present in her life as I wish I’d been. Then when she was nine I moved her first to New Jersey, then to upstate New York, then across the country to Seattle, where she settled in and found the fabulous friends who stood with her on her wedding day. During Meg’s teen years, I was often so busy and overwhelmed raising her four younger siblings that she didn’t get as much of my time and attention as she needed, and my patience for dealing with her normal teenage angst was, well, somewhat limited. We saw her through her pregnancy with Brandon and a rocky relationship with his father and the end of that relationship, and through all that we hoped and prayed that some day, the right man would enter her life.

Meg told me after her first date with Dick that she thought he might be “the one.” We were skeptical at first, coming as we all were off the very rough ending of her relationship with Brandon’s dad, but Dick stuck around, and through his kind and gentle ways, his constant patience in dealing with my daughter’s sometimes fiery temperament, his ever-present sense of humor, we began to see that Dick was, indeed, “the one.” He is the ice to Meg’s fire, her port of calm in stormy days; they complement each other perfectly, and the love between them, witnessed by the family and friends who love them both on their wedding day, is as clear to me as ever a thing could be.

They are soul mates, made for each other, and as they exchanged their rings and their vows, their hearts and ours overflowed with happiness. Meg and Dick, may your marriage live long and prosper, your love be ever be as true and pure as it was on your wedding day. So say we all, with much love to you both.

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