A big day

What happened:

Sitting in the great outdoors.

Up the aisle into the west!

Making it real.

Great cupcakes!

Eating together!

Playing together!

Dancing together!

What M said:

When you name a child, it is amazing how often a child takes on (reflects) the meaning of that name. Genevieve means “white wave”, and dad and I have from time to time reflected over the past 21 years how you are our “white wave”.

As a family that has many memorable moments canoeing, it is fitting to use the analogy of canoeing and our “white wave”.

When you were just over a year and on your second canoe trip, you experienced your first thrill. As parents we were perhaps fool hearty as we crossed the lake in high waves too eager eager to get to our favourite camp spot. You were not only trusting, but laughing and leaning over the canoe trying to catch the white capped waves.

Some years later you joined Sara and I and a few other  women on a canoe trip. It was a tactical error , not understanding weight distribution and the wind and waves that send you and another  person flying into the water startled and shaken.

A few years ago, and with more experience behind you, you paddles hard as our two canoes made an attempt to cross open water with strong winds and high waves that threatened to capsie our boats or crash them into the rocks. You had no choice but to listen to the voice of experience sitting in the stern, and in listening, you and dad and Lauren brought your boat safely to the nearest island.

You also know the thrill of riding with the waves and letting them carry you across the lake. Or to swim beside the canoe as your canoeing partner keeps pace with you.

You have also experienced calm waters, and there are two kinds of calm. In the middle of the day a lake without a breeze or a ripple on the water is a dead calm. As your paddle dips into the water, it is heavy like pudding, and you feel like you are going nowhere.

Then there is the calm that sets on the lake in the evening. After a hard day of paddling and portaging, it is a wonderful feeling to go back in the canoe for a short evening paddle around an island or in a bay.

Genevieve, your “white wave” experiences in life have profoundly shaped you into a woman who now desires compassion, sensitivity, forgiveness, and above all love. You are still a “white wave”, and will be and should be. Justin, you are the calm waters, and just as waves need calm, so calm needs waves.


May God, who is the author of love and all that is good, bless your marriage, and may your life husband and wife enrich others around you in the way you listen, talk, work, play, and grow together.

What PauPs said:

I cannot resist giving some advice. Sorry. When Margruite and I met, got engaged and then married, we were significantly different people than we are today. Some people that you haven’t seen for years may come up to you and say “Hey, you haven’t changed a bit.” but they’ll be wrong because they don’t know you anymore, and you have changed a bit. Probably quite a bit. This is not a bad thing. Who wants to be stagnant as a person? Who really wants to hear that “you haven’t changed a bit” thing, unless of course you really loved high school and still want to call that time the best time of your life.

I am not the same person today, that I was the day I got married. Of course many of my personal and physical traits are very recognizable, but the way I think about and interpret my world has changed because of my experiences. If I could do a “freaky Friday” experiment with myself take the mind of the me that is me today, and put it into my 22 year old just-about-to-get-married body, and have that hybrid me meet the Margruite of that time, I’m not sure that our relationship would happen, and last. Outwardly these two would still recognize and be attracted to one another, but the “hybrid future me” might not have the same vibe for Margruite as “young boy in the past” me.

Though I’m stating the obvious, I’ll still say it, time and experience changes you, but those changes are not immediately obvious. The more visible things that we tend to pay a lot of attention to – hairstyle, height, weight, eye colour, skin colour, even economic class – Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” When you fall in love, these visible things play a major role in determining your interest in the other person. We amplify the significance of the unimportant features, while overlooking deep differences. You cannot worship yourself, as Narcissus did, and stay in a marriage for long. Even if your partner worships you too, your little “church of you” will eventually lose its appeal and you’ll be left with disputes over toothpaste, toilet lids, cleaning the kitchen, credit card spending, and bad driving habits.

Genevieve, we have, together with you, experienced things that have changed us in ways that most people cannot see. We are not the same people today that we were when you were reaching over the gunwale for the waves on Lake Manomin. We have had to confront ourselves and each other through some pretty intense stuff, which has helped us understand our small differences and rely on our deep similarities.

Lately we’ve started riding bike together (Justin too) and through cycling I can see how you’ve changed in deep ways. Last week we rode from here to Emerson and, though you hadn’t ridden much this season, you wanted to take a regular turn at the front on the way out (That’s the determination of the “same-old” Genevieve. By the way, it’s an amazing thing to have your daughter set the pace for you, and to ride in her draft!). On the way back home though, you realized that you hadn’t ridden enough to keep the same pace, so you gratefully accepted my lead – all of this without frustration or anger.

Biking alone can be hard hard work. There’s always a wind to fight. Biking together makes the work so much less hard, at least if you work together on it. There are days when you’re strong and you pull your partner along, and days when you’re weaker and you let him face the wind and you follow his draft. But you have to work together to realize that advantage. A bicycle built for two, which you have invoked on your invitation, makes that working together “trust” thing really obvious. 

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Recipes will follow.