Kate & Joe, Ireland wedding

It all started with a text.  Actually, if I backtrack, it started with a Facebook status update and then a message from a dear old friend sharing the news about her engagement….and then came the text. See, when a dear friend from  graduate school days texts  to ask if she can hire you to shoot her wedding in a castle in Ireland and oh, hey,  of course we want to fly you here and put you up in the actual castle……well, I wish I could say that you don’t even hesitate and you book your flight the next day, but  I confess that I did in fact pause. First, I texted back about how flattered I was and how excited I was for her but shared that we’d be moving in the summer at some point and it would be really hard to leave the country in the midst of that.  She asked me to just think about it and I said that I would but in my mind, that was that.

I mentioned the kind offer to Mike that week and told him of course I’d declined. We might be in the middle of moving and it would be hard to leave the girls and I hadn’t even been on a plane since before Zoe was born and on and on and on I went with all of the reasons why it would just be silly.  Mike being Mike just listened and at some point casually asked me “Do you want to go?”  No, I said….No, that sounds so amazing but really, who goes to Ireland for 3 days? We can’t justify flying all of us over there in the middle of buying a home and it certainly wouldn’t be fair for me to just prance over to Ireland for a weekend  and leave him in the midst of packing up our condo and entertaining 2 kids under 5 solo.  But later that week, when it came up again he just looked at me. “You know, it’s not too often that people are going to come along and offer to fly either of us to another country and cover our expenses. We’d all be totally fine here.”

It’s not that I didn’t know that  they would all be fine but for some reason, I was still coming up with all kinds of reasons why this just didn’t make sense. And then, suddenly it sort of did.   I love traveling and as much as you can reclaim more and more of who you were pre-kids as the kids get older, carefree travel isn’t really one of those things that you can just add back on to your to-do list.  Between the expense and the complexity of scheduling around  the kids’ needs if you bring them or coordinating with someone to keep them for a few days or a week if you don’t bring them, I’m ready to to take a nap just from thinking about it all. So why on earth would I not just hop on a plane in July, fly to Ireland, shoot my friends’ magical wedding and then fly back that Monday? Would I really say no because I’d be really tired and jetlagged?  If I skipped out on this kind of chance because I was nervous about flying for the first time in years and afraid of being tired after the trip, that would be about as lame as it gets.  Every parent has experienced the depths of exhaustion that small children can bring you to and we’ve all survived.  Coffee is an amazing thing and so is having an incredible spouse who I knew would have my back if I was stumbling around in  the wrong time zone for a few days.

The trip was indeed a 72 hour whirlwind adventure from start to finish. As  I stood taking in my surroundings in the castle as they sun was just setting at nearly 10 PM (!) on Saturday during the wedding,  that thing happened where you can practically feel a specific moments being burned in your memory. I will be forever glad that I said yes.  It’s true that I’d been to Ireland once before in my early twenties when I was a college student and spent a semester in England.  I already knew how beautiful of a country Ireland is, how it feels to sip a Guiness in a real Irish pub, and how breathtaking the castles are.  But 16 years later, a husband and 2 kids later, I am now much more qualified to appreciate that while all of that was an incredible backdrop, the real beauty is in two people finding one another and knowing with every part of their being that this is it.  No matter how two people come to that realization, whether the road is bumpy or long or full of detours along the way, once you know that you are where you are supposed to be, nothing else really matters.  Joe and Kate ended up exactly where they belonged and I am so grateful to have been invited along for the beautiful  ride.

“You will always love and you will always be loved”

–Oscar Wilde