“Honey,” she said. “I was looking through your registry and I have a few thoughts. Do you have a pen? First of all, you only registered for six mugs and that isn’t nearly enough. You need at least eight mugs because mugs chip. And my next thought is that the duvet you picked might not be practical. ...”

I took a Maalox and tried to shake the creeping feeling that this wedding inspired in others the assumption that I had officially joined the fold  no surprise, as I had allowed myself to entertain the same assumption. With my readmission to polite society, I had implicitly disowned the girl with the sweaty, crumpled cash in her pocket, the girl in long sleeves standing on a downtown corner in the middle of the Los Angeles summer.

And who cared if that girl, that huge part of me, was cast aside? She was a disaster of epic proportions anyway. Then again, that disaster had walked herself into detox, sweated through the sleepless nights, and somehow found a scrap of faith to cling to, even when there was no evidence to support such an act of hope.

I understand why redemption stories end at Happily Ever After. Who wants to see a married Sleeping Beauty staring out the castle window and wondering if volunteering with Habitat for Humanity might fill that void where she once had a sense of purpose? You know  back when snagging the Prince and circumventing that pesky curse was all she had to think about. But in my fairy tale, what it took for me to change wasn’t one big vow made at one climactic moment, but a series of small and consistent daily decisions to behave in a more loving way toward myself.

My middle-class Jewish relatives wanted to nominate Scott for sainthood (if such a thing were possible in Judaism), because who else but a saint would have a girl like me? Who else but a saint would proudly take a tattooed ex-junkie, ex-prostitute home to Mom and brag about her veggie stir-fry?

WITH each loaded “You are so lucky. Scott is such a great guy” comment, I felt a little more of myself dissolve. When I stood in front of the mirror while my mother took a picture of me in a stunning off-white silk, Monique Lhuillier wedding dress, I felt a tightening in my chest and tears pressing hot from behind my eyes.