Which Anniversary Do We Celebrate? Today, and All the Others

Someone once asked Rebecca and me which anniversary we celebrate. Our reply? All of them.

So which one is today?

Today is the third anniversary of what we call our civil ceremony, or our second wedding. On January 2nd, 2014, we had a pop-up wedding with the same vows as we'd used at our religious ceremony on May 12, 2012, but this time in the rose garden at a park in Palm Desert, CA so that we could have the officiant sign off on a marriage certificate.

We had a photographer take a few pictures in the rose garden after the ceremony. This is one of my favorites.

People asked before our first wedding if gay marriage was "legal." I've heard from other same-sex couples that announced their engagement that people have told them that their wedding would be "illegal."

I prefer to think of the year and a half between our first and second wedding as a time when our marriage was undocumented, to borrow a term from immigration law. As in, it existed, just as the immigrants do, but there weren't documents to prove it because the state in which we lived had banned that kind of paperwork.

So today we celebrate the start of the paper trail.

Our marriage certificate isn't "just a piece of paper," as I've heard some people say, usually with the best of intentions, to try to reassure us that our marriage counts.

Of course our marriage matters, with or without the documents. But do you know what we got three years ago, besides the vows, besides the papers? A way for me to get medical insurance through Rebecca's employer. A guarantee that I will be allowed to see her in the hospital. A way to file at least our federal taxes together (though it would be a while and a hot mess until Michigan was forced to accept our papers and joint taxes). Protection from having to testify against each other in court should we ever be accused. And about a thousand other rights and protections (yes, literally, about a thousand).

We lived in what I will call "semi-documentation" for a year and a half. United States v. Windsor meant that the federal government recognized our paper trail. Michigan didn't.

What are we doing today to celebrate? We made eggs with chorizo and nopal, a favorite from the month we spent in Cuernavaca several summers ago, and well, Rebecca is doing tasks here and there around #fixerupperdetroit - laundry, dishes, installing curtain rods, etc, because all I want for Christmas and my anniversary is for our house to be done.

I'm still recovering from pneumonia, so the "in sickness and in health" part of our vows is in play. Rebecca has me tucked up in bed under an electric blanket with a pot of tea, and chastised me just now for coming downstairs to get this laptop so that I could write this post. That would happen with or without the documents, of course.

So there's May 12 to hope that I'm healthy and we can do something fancy. There's also June 26th, the anniversary of when Obergefell v. Hodges was handed down by the Supreme Court and Michigan was forced (yes, forced - they fought tooth and nail to reject our California marriage certificate - a slap in the face to both us and California) to accept our documents. Michigan, in fact, took the maximum amount of time provided by the federal government to process our documentation.

And of course there's also September 18th, the anniversary of coming out to each other and admitting that we're in love.

We've been through a lot. Our marriage has been hard work. All marriages are, though for a  lot of couples, getting the documentation is the easy part.

So we celebrate all the anniversaries. All the days we've worked for and fought for and planned for. And we're grateful to those who have helped us along the way and celebrated with us.