A Woman's Wedding Song: Honoring the Loss of Girlhood

Weddings are celebrations with much happiness and joy. But like most rites-of-passage, there can also be some sadness or a sense of loss over the life changes that this transition brings about. No matter her age or experience, a woman can sense a loss of girlhood as she goes through her bridal transition. This is why it’s important to acknowledge whatever feelings and emotions that come up. Here is where the wisdom of your rite-of-passage can assist you.

The nature of a rite-of-passage is to emphasize the cycle of beginning, middle and end. It is to define completion, even offering the space to mourn as you leave one way of life behind. Then being aware of this time as a "process" helps to ready you to begin something fresh and new. Many old wedding customs illuminate this transition, like crossing the threshold.

Crossing the threshold—a universal symbol of passage—is really a series of steps: the first threshold in the family’s home, the bride-to-be says goodbye to her life as a girl; she crosses another threshold into her husband’s home, and enters her life as a wife and —in more enlightened cultures—as a partner. “Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.”1 

One way that the connection of women comes into play more powerfully than any other is in supporting another woman’s gentle transition. The old wedding customs represented this relationship in tender and poignant ways. The capping ceremony from the Slavic traditions acts out the girl into woman process: after the wedding vows, the bride’s female friends gather with her. The women “sing melancholy songs, mourning the loss of girlhood, while an older married woman removes the bridal headdress and places a matron’s cap on the bride’s head. Ending the week-long wedding celebration, the capping ceremony marks the time for sexual relations as well as when village matrons accept her into the ranks of married women.”2

Village women in a Folk Festival in Myava, Slovakia, 1992, reenact a centuries old capping ceremony ritual in which women lovingly support other women. Left, as the matrons gather around the bride and sing plaintive songs of losing their child, a respected member of their ranks symbolically removes the floral headdress. Right, a matron’s cap, usually made from handmade lace of the region, is placed on the bride’s head, ceremoniously capping the newly married bride. [Photographs Courtesy of Patricia Williams]

Other ethnic cultures such as the Berbers in the Moroccan desert continue the tradition of completely covering a bride’s face, which is thought to “protect the bride from revealing too much about her inner joy or sadness concerning her marriage.”3 There are wedding traditions all over the world honoring the rich holographic nature of life that reveal a great deal about the loss of girlhood.

Modern culture also recognizes the need to process change and to honor the mixed emotions felt during a growth process. This is how rituals can be so useful to us today, serving to strengthen us—as individuals as well as in our marriages and communities. When we bring the ancient wisdom that inspired these traditions into our lives, we stay in touch with their original essence of deep connection.                                                         

        

Missy McLamb

A contemporary bride may wear a sheer tulle veil on her wedding day

just because it’s beautiful and makes her feel dreamy—not because it's a tradition from her own heritage. This is the freedom of modern culture, yet her choice is still an expression of her heritage as a woman, an echo from the past rooted in ritual wisdom. Listening through the veiled quietness, the bride may hear the laughter of girlhood, the voices of her inner guides encouraging her, crossing a threshold of her own design.

The dreams of a little girl claimed by a woman's voice can grow into a full, loving and satisfying life.

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1. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and   Gabrielle L. Caffee, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960).

2. Patricia Williams, “Slavic Wedding Customs on Two Continents,” Wedding Dress Across Cultures, (Oxford England: Berg, 2003), 177.

3. Cynthia Becker, “Gender, Identity and Moroccan Weddings: The Adornment of the Ait Khabbash Berber Bride and Groom,” Wedding Dress Across Cultures, (Oxford, England: Berg, 2003), 111. 

PHOTOGRAPHS:

[top two] Beth Ely for Missy McLamb Photographers

[capping ceremony] Courtesy of Patricia Williams

[bottom] Missy McLamb Photographers

TEXT BY: Cornelia Powell