Lost Together

EMC Editorial - Two weekends ago, my husband Steve and I attended a wedding in Welland, Ont. Steve's inability to find his way around the Niagara Region - where, for the record, he grew up - never ceases to amaze me. I will spare you the details of our frenetic 45-minute journey from his godparents' home in Chippewa, where we were staying, to the church in Font Hill, other than to say that it gave new meaning to our own wedding song, Lost Together by Blue Rodeo.

Over the course of the day, I got thinking about wedding songs and what a strange and wonderful thing it is to even attempt to choose a song that represents who you are as a couple.

Personally, I never really thought too much about our choice. Steve and I share similar tastes in a lot of things, but music is not one of them. As a result, the song to which we shared our first dance as a married couple didn't seem all that important. Steve is a big Blue Rodeo fan and I thought Lost Together was a nice song for a wedding and that was that.

Looking back, however, I find it interesting how we as a couple have grown into and out of the song over the years. On our wedding day, we knew exactly where we were going and what we were going to do to get there, and saw ourselves as anything but lost.

Then, we realized that much of the world is, in fact, "controlled by so few", and that landing our dream jobs, purchasing our own home and arriving at a place in life where we felt ready to have children wasn't going to be as easy as we once thought. Wrong turns were taken, forcing us to live in different cities at various points while we desperately clung to any job prospect that hinted at a half-decent career path.

Yes, there were disasters, but they were our disasters, and all of our endeavours - foiled or not - were for the growth of us as a couple. We worked, and still do work, as a team, combating life's obstacles together.

The path we are on now is very different from the one we had dreamed of, but at least it's a path as opposed to a dark and lonely forest. And in many ways, you could argue things worked out for the better.

For instance, I always dreamed of being a young mother and having at least three children - perhaps as a way of ensuring my kids don't inherit certain odd personality traits of mine, which I'm sure are the result of being an only child. Now, I'm quite happy to be childless at this point in my life, and feel that I will have different but equally positive things to offer my future children as a more mature mother.

I thought about all this as we made an unexpected turn that brought us into familiar territory on the way to the wedding. Getting there took a little longer than expected, but we arrived - about three minutes before the bride.

I thought about it again later when Lost Together was played at the reception hall. It wasn't even the official dance at that point -the song came on as part of the background music that was playing during dinner - and yet Steve insisted we get up and dance. (Yeah, we gave up trying to be cool a long time ago.)

During the dance, I said a silent thank you that for the time being at least it looks as though we have found our way. I'm not so naive as to think that we will never again stumble off the beaten path, but if we do, we will be lost together, and together we will find a new one.