In which Bridezilla pisses and moans about her white wedding
I am at the point that I hoped never to reach: I am starting to get stressed and unhappy about my upcoming wedding. I was sure this would not happen to me, for the following reasons:
A) I don't care about details like flowers, bridesmaid's dresses, centre pieces and junk like that. I trust my mother and my friends to pick nice things and I don't have any specific expectations. I had and have no urge to dress my bridesmaids like pink puff balls. I just want them to wear something that makes them feel pretty and happy.
B) My mother is doing most of the planning for me, so I don't have to meet with cake bakers, discuss bouquets with flower people and so on.
C) My mom is involved in the church where I am getting married - she is in the choir and stuff, so she's all chummy with the rector, the organist and so on. Plus my mum told me that the organist is really fantastic: he's a real organist, not just some old guy who can pick out a tune with one hand, which is unusual in rural churches. This made me very happy, because I've always pictured myself going down the aisle to Bach's Jesu, Lord of Man's Desiring, one of my favourite Bach tunes. Actually, my FAVOURITE Bach tune. And I like Bach a lot, so that's saying something.
Anyway, so I figured that planning this wedding wouldn't be too bad. A little hectic at times, and I had minor panics about finding a good photographer and DJ (I really, really hope the DJ doesn't suck. Bad music can just ruin a reception. Mum has heard good things about the guy she has employed, but personally I find his emails to be a little snooty) but overall, I didn't think things would be too bad.
Even better, my mother seems totally on-board with the idea of my getting married (a miracle unto itself, if anyone knows my mother) and has been working really hard at arranging my wedding for me. She even calls me up and says "Hi dear, it's your wedding planner calling."
What I didn't count on was the universe trying to thwart me in every aspect to my wedding that actually IS important to me.
I didn't have a whole lot of fancy ideas about my wedding. But there are a few things that I have thought about since childhood.They are
a) Having my dog(s) involved in the wedding. I always knew I would have pets, and well trained ones, so I always wanted to have my well trained dog(s) go down the aisle.
b)Having a pure metal wedding band.
c)Jesu, Lord of Man's Desiring for a processional.
d) Having the man who Christened me, Doug Hergett, perform the ceremony.
Good news first - Doug Hergett agreed to come out of retirement to do my wedding, bless his heart. But as for the other things... Regarding the dog - my mother was horribly embarassed by the idea of my involving a DOG in my WEDDING. She argued against it for the longest time, and then refused to even bring it up with the rector of the church. I eventually had to email him myself, and he said that as long as it was okay with Rev. Hergett, it was okay with him, although he expressed concern over his carpets. (Yeah, that's right, I train service dogs who go to movie theatres and malls and five star hotels and on air planes, and I train them to open doors and push buttons and carry grocery bags, but my own dog will clearly pee everywhere). I told my mother that I was allowed to bring Odin in, and Mum immediately switched tactics onto the "it's so cruel to bring your dog on a plane across the country" line of thought. She does it completely guilelessly, too, with smug little sentences like "Surely there must be plenty of people at your work who could take Odin while your away. Yes? Hmm. Something to think about."
I am perfectly aware that I am asking a lot of my dog, and I have been suffering crises of guilt about it already. It's a terrible balance. Do I bring Odin to NS for the wedding of my dreams? Or am I kind to my dog and do I leave him here, making myself sad but my dog and my mother happy? Somehow, it won't feels as much like MY wedding if Odin isn't there. I even bought him a tuxedo bow, years ago when I was still with Jonathan, just so I would have it when I got married some day. But I know that if I bring him, Mum is going to guilt me about it the whole way, and I'll be feeling guilty enough already. I don't know if I'll be able to stand it. Maybe I should just leave him here, and say to hell with my dream wedding.
And then there's the processional. The organist has announced that Jesu doesn't break up nicely enough to be a processional, and insists that I choose between two truly horrendous pieces of music, neither of which seems at all like me. One of them is the one Princess Diana came down the aisle to. Now, that might be nice for some girls, but not for me. I am not a princess type. I don't want something that's all blasting fanfare and marching rhyhtms. I want something lighter and happier. And Jesu has always made me feel like spring. I was upset about this information, and Ivy, who composes instrumental music, suggested that she compose something in collaboration with the organist, perhaps a variation on Jesu. So I emailed the organist and suggested that. He emailed back and repeated that Jesu doesn't break up nicely, and neither does Pachelbell's Canon in D (which is odd because the Canon just repeats the same series of notes in slightly different ways again and again and again. What could be easier to break up) and then he went on to say that the two he has suggested are nice and formal and easy to march to and so on. Then he said that if my friend could compose something appropriately formal and traditional he'd be willing to consider it. But I don't WANT something formal and traditional. So then I was looking at no dog, and no Jesu. Suddenly, it didn't feel like my wedding at all.
Benn and Ivy both looked at the email, and they have pronounced the organist to be an idiot. They both understand music composition much better than I do, and they explained to me in language that I don't understand that there are multiple points in Jesu where the music can break nicely. And Ivy even demonstrated on her electric piano how Pachelbel's canon can stop pretty much anywhere. Unfortunately, this doesn't change the fact that this guy is the best organist we've got. And I hate both his selections for music.
Then tehre are the rings. When I was little, I planned on white gold. My engagement ring is white gold (I'm not a yellow gold kind of person) and so obviously I want my wedding ring to match. But when I was a kid, I thought white gold was a special kind of gold, like a different isotope or something. Since I've found out what it really is... I'm really not a fan of a white gold wedding band. My logic is, white gold is just... extremely impure gold. It's gold that has been mixed with nickel and junk, so that you can't see the gold anymore. (That's why so many people have allergic reactions to it.)Then they coat it with rhodium to take away any remaining vestige of yellow in the mix. That's fine for my engagement ring - after all, the ring is just something to hold the blue topaz and the diamonds on. But a wedding band is supposed to symbolize our love and stuff. I see it as a sort of romantic shackle around my finger. Like the wrist bands on Genie in Aladdin... only nicer. I want it to be something clear and pure... It's weird and slightly superstitious in nature. My mother's wedding ring is white gold and her marriage has lasted fine, and I'm sure my marriage will be unaffected by ring material. It's just a mental thing. I want to feel like my ring actually symbolizes something, and I want that something to be better than nickel.
Benn and I looked into titanium, but it's ugly. Platinum is WAY too expensive. Then we discovered Palladium. It's in the same metal group as Platinum, and like Platinum, is hard enough to be made into jewelry pure, without being alloyed in with other stuff the way gold is. It's actually whiter than platinum, and harder too, but it's not as heavy: only slightly heavier than silver. It hasn't been used for jewelry much because it's only recently that they've figured out how to work it. And because it isn't in as high demand, it costs only a quarter of what Platinum costs.
So Benn and I went to see a jeweler. He suggested a ring that was 25% Palladium and 75% gold - essentially white gold, but made with Palladium instead of random contaminant metals. We were fine with that... until he quoted us 800 bucks for my ring, and $1250 for Benn's. That's when we asked how much pure palladium would cost. He hemmedand hawed and admitted that it would probably be cheaper, then offered to call us in a couple days with revised estimates for both. He never called.
So we went to Peoples, and they said they'd arrange an estimate for us by getting in touch with head office. They called us the next day - and quoted us 7300 bucks for the two rings together. In the message they left on our phone, they kept saying that Palladium costs the same as Platinum. Funny, seeing that all the palladium rings we look at online cost between 120 and 400 dollars, depending on how fancy they are. Like, if you look here, you'll see that this ring in palladium costs $190... and in platinum it costs $1,120. The thought that Peoples would try to rip us off like that makes me SO angry and frustrated.
Meanwhile, my mother is constantly calling me, bugging me to give her addresses of people who haven't responded to my request for addresses yet! She nags and harasses and doesn't seem to register my responses. Like, she kept calling and reminding me to go and buy a veil and shoes. And I kept telling her "I'm going Saturday". Every time she called, she'd bug me again to go and do that, and I'd keep saying "I'M-GOING-SAT-UR-DAY." Now she does the same thing with the addresses.
Meanwhile, Benn and I are going crazy trying to figure out this wedding ring thing, not to mention how we are going to PAY for these if we can ever find them at a decent price. If we mention this to Mum, to show that we are not just sitting around on our butts, she just suggests white gold as if we hadn't thought of that. She even said to me the other day that she had gone in to the local jeweler's, and asked them what white gold was, and she informed me that they had told her that it is gold with other things mixed in. And I wondered if she ever listened to a word I said.
Plus we're trying to get our travel plans sorted out. No travel agent we could find was able to help us find a European holiday. They would assure us that their travel book listed packages for every possible destination. And we'd say "Oh good, is there Paris?"
"No..."
"Italy?"
"No..."
And it would turn out that all of their packages were to places in the Caribbean. Oh, yeah. Every possible destination.
So we're figuring it out ourselves. But it's an uphill battle, and completely overwhelming. Plus we want to register for our honeymoon so we can actually, what's the word, oh yeah, HAVE one. We can't afford five nights in Paris and then a week in Tuscany! We're setting up a website so people can buy us things like tickets to the Louvre, a night in Chianti and so on. My mother was trying to make up a slip of paper to og in the inviations mentioning our registries, and it announced in big letters our wedding registries with The Bay/Home Outfitters, and then mentioned that there were other gift ideas on our website. I asked her to play up the honeymoon registry a bit, because really, we didn't register for much at The Bay/Home Outfitters, and when it comes down to it, we'd rather have a night in Paris than a crystal goblet. Mum re-did it, with almost no change. No mention of our honeymoon, just a bit more of a detailed direction to our website. So I emailed back again, and asked her again to play up the honeymoon registry, and she called me all upset because she didn't understand what I wanted, and how could she word this, etc etc etc. I told her I just wanted her to emphasize that we were registering for our honeymoon. And she started going on this weird tangent about what about people who don't use the internet, what are they supposedto get us, blah blah blah.
"Then they buy us stuff from The Bay. But I don't want The Bay mentioned as our PRIMARY registry place."
"Well, I don't know how to word this. I've tried everything, and nothing makes you happy."
"How about, 'For Carol and Benn's honeymoon registry and other gift ideas, visit www.carolandbenn.com'?"
"But what if people don't WANT to go to your website..."
I ended up throwing the phone at Benn and he talked her down and they came up with a wording which ended up being almost identical to the one I had suggested. Mum seems embarassed about the honeymoon registry. She said to me, after,
"I don't like mentioning that you are registered for your honeymoon. It seems like we're ASKING people to pay for your honeymoon."
"Well... we are, Mum."
"Well, it doesn't seem very polite, to just say "hey, pay for our honeymoon."
"But it's okay to say "hey, buy us stuff from The Bay."?"
Which is when Benn announced loudly "Dinner's ready!"
I just wish that my mother would actually help me with the things that are important to me. Odin is important to me. The processional is important to me. The honeymoon is important to me. And yet the things that are important to me all seem to embarrass her, and I feel like she's slowly trying to eradicate them all. Instead, she holds me up on the phone talking about stuff like whether or not the bridesmaids should have a sash around their waists, even though I keep saying "whatever they want, I'm happy with."
Meanwhile I'm trying to renew passports, set up websites, figure out travel plans, figure out MONEY, and find a jeweler who won't rip us off. And I'm up late, ranting about all of this instead of sleeping, because poor Benn is so stressed out about all of this that I don't want to burden him with it any more, and I can't sleep for feeling so... angry about it all. Benn says I just need to go Bridezilla, and tell the organist that he's playing Jesu, so live with it, and tell people to go to hell and do what I want with my dog, and so on. But that just... doesn't sit right with me. I don't WANT to piss and moan and shout and stomp my feet and go all Bridezilla. I just... want my little wedding, with the nice music and my puppy and a ring I am happy to wear the rest of my life.
A) I don't care about details like flowers, bridesmaid's dresses, centre pieces and junk like that. I trust my mother and my friends to pick nice things and I don't have any specific expectations. I had and have no urge to dress my bridesmaids like pink puff balls. I just want them to wear something that makes them feel pretty and happy.
B) My mother is doing most of the planning for me, so I don't have to meet with cake bakers, discuss bouquets with flower people and so on.
C) My mom is involved in the church where I am getting married - she is in the choir and stuff, so she's all chummy with the rector, the organist and so on. Plus my mum told me that the organist is really fantastic: he's a real organist, not just some old guy who can pick out a tune with one hand, which is unusual in rural churches. This made me very happy, because I've always pictured myself going down the aisle to Bach's Jesu, Lord of Man's Desiring, one of my favourite Bach tunes. Actually, my FAVOURITE Bach tune. And I like Bach a lot, so that's saying something.
Anyway, so I figured that planning this wedding wouldn't be too bad. A little hectic at times, and I had minor panics about finding a good photographer and DJ (I really, really hope the DJ doesn't suck. Bad music can just ruin a reception. Mum has heard good things about the guy she has employed, but personally I find his emails to be a little snooty) but overall, I didn't think things would be too bad.
Even better, my mother seems totally on-board with the idea of my getting married (a miracle unto itself, if anyone knows my mother) and has been working really hard at arranging my wedding for me. She even calls me up and says "Hi dear, it's your wedding planner calling."
What I didn't count on was the universe trying to thwart me in every aspect to my wedding that actually IS important to me.
I didn't have a whole lot of fancy ideas about my wedding. But there are a few things that I have thought about since childhood.They are
a) Having my dog(s) involved in the wedding. I always knew I would have pets, and well trained ones, so I always wanted to have my well trained dog(s) go down the aisle.
b)Having a pure metal wedding band.
c)Jesu, Lord of Man's Desiring for a processional.
d) Having the man who Christened me, Doug Hergett, perform the ceremony.
Good news first - Doug Hergett agreed to come out of retirement to do my wedding, bless his heart. But as for the other things... Regarding the dog - my mother was horribly embarassed by the idea of my involving a DOG in my WEDDING. She argued against it for the longest time, and then refused to even bring it up with the rector of the church. I eventually had to email him myself, and he said that as long as it was okay with Rev. Hergett, it was okay with him, although he expressed concern over his carpets. (Yeah, that's right, I train service dogs who go to movie theatres and malls and five star hotels and on air planes, and I train them to open doors and push buttons and carry grocery bags, but my own dog will clearly pee everywhere). I told my mother that I was allowed to bring Odin in, and Mum immediately switched tactics onto the "it's so cruel to bring your dog on a plane across the country" line of thought. She does it completely guilelessly, too, with smug little sentences like "Surely there must be plenty of people at your work who could take Odin while your away. Yes? Hmm. Something to think about."
I am perfectly aware that I am asking a lot of my dog, and I have been suffering crises of guilt about it already. It's a terrible balance. Do I bring Odin to NS for the wedding of my dreams? Or am I kind to my dog and do I leave him here, making myself sad but my dog and my mother happy? Somehow, it won't feels as much like MY wedding if Odin isn't there. I even bought him a tuxedo bow, years ago when I was still with Jonathan, just so I would have it when I got married some day. But I know that if I bring him, Mum is going to guilt me about it the whole way, and I'll be feeling guilty enough already. I don't know if I'll be able to stand it. Maybe I should just leave him here, and say to hell with my dream wedding.
And then there's the processional. The organist has announced that Jesu doesn't break up nicely enough to be a processional, and insists that I choose between two truly horrendous pieces of music, neither of which seems at all like me. One of them is the one Princess Diana came down the aisle to. Now, that might be nice for some girls, but not for me. I am not a princess type. I don't want something that's all blasting fanfare and marching rhyhtms. I want something lighter and happier. And Jesu has always made me feel like spring. I was upset about this information, and Ivy, who composes instrumental music, suggested that she compose something in collaboration with the organist, perhaps a variation on Jesu. So I emailed the organist and suggested that. He emailed back and repeated that Jesu doesn't break up nicely, and neither does Pachelbell's Canon in D (which is odd because the Canon just repeats the same series of notes in slightly different ways again and again and again. What could be easier to break up) and then he went on to say that the two he has suggested are nice and formal and easy to march to and so on. Then he said that if my friend could compose something appropriately formal and traditional he'd be willing to consider it. But I don't WANT something formal and traditional. So then I was looking at no dog, and no Jesu. Suddenly, it didn't feel like my wedding at all.
Benn and Ivy both looked at the email, and they have pronounced the organist to be an idiot. They both understand music composition much better than I do, and they explained to me in language that I don't understand that there are multiple points in Jesu where the music can break nicely. And Ivy even demonstrated on her electric piano how Pachelbel's canon can stop pretty much anywhere. Unfortunately, this doesn't change the fact that this guy is the best organist we've got. And I hate both his selections for music.
Then tehre are the rings. When I was little, I planned on white gold. My engagement ring is white gold (I'm not a yellow gold kind of person) and so obviously I want my wedding ring to match. But when I was a kid, I thought white gold was a special kind of gold, like a different isotope or something. Since I've found out what it really is... I'm really not a fan of a white gold wedding band. My logic is, white gold is just... extremely impure gold. It's gold that has been mixed with nickel and junk, so that you can't see the gold anymore. (That's why so many people have allergic reactions to it.)Then they coat it with rhodium to take away any remaining vestige of yellow in the mix. That's fine for my engagement ring - after all, the ring is just something to hold the blue topaz and the diamonds on. But a wedding band is supposed to symbolize our love and stuff. I see it as a sort of romantic shackle around my finger. Like the wrist bands on Genie in Aladdin... only nicer. I want it to be something clear and pure... It's weird and slightly superstitious in nature. My mother's wedding ring is white gold and her marriage has lasted fine, and I'm sure my marriage will be unaffected by ring material. It's just a mental thing. I want to feel like my ring actually symbolizes something, and I want that something to be better than nickel.
Benn and I looked into titanium, but it's ugly. Platinum is WAY too expensive. Then we discovered Palladium. It's in the same metal group as Platinum, and like Platinum, is hard enough to be made into jewelry pure, without being alloyed in with other stuff the way gold is. It's actually whiter than platinum, and harder too, but it's not as heavy: only slightly heavier than silver. It hasn't been used for jewelry much because it's only recently that they've figured out how to work it. And because it isn't in as high demand, it costs only a quarter of what Platinum costs.
So Benn and I went to see a jeweler. He suggested a ring that was 25% Palladium and 75% gold - essentially white gold, but made with Palladium instead of random contaminant metals. We were fine with that... until he quoted us 800 bucks for my ring, and $1250 for Benn's. That's when we asked how much pure palladium would cost. He hemmedand hawed and admitted that it would probably be cheaper, then offered to call us in a couple days with revised estimates for both. He never called.
So we went to Peoples, and they said they'd arrange an estimate for us by getting in touch with head office. They called us the next day - and quoted us 7300 bucks for the two rings together. In the message they left on our phone, they kept saying that Palladium costs the same as Platinum. Funny, seeing that all the palladium rings we look at online cost between 120 and 400 dollars, depending on how fancy they are. Like, if you look here, you'll see that this ring in palladium costs $190... and in platinum it costs $1,120. The thought that Peoples would try to rip us off like that makes me SO angry and frustrated.
Meanwhile, my mother is constantly calling me, bugging me to give her addresses of people who haven't responded to my request for addresses yet! She nags and harasses and doesn't seem to register my responses. Like, she kept calling and reminding me to go and buy a veil and shoes. And I kept telling her "I'm going Saturday". Every time she called, she'd bug me again to go and do that, and I'd keep saying "I'M-GOING-SAT-UR-DAY." Now she does the same thing with the addresses.
Meanwhile, Benn and I are going crazy trying to figure out this wedding ring thing, not to mention how we are going to PAY for these if we can ever find them at a decent price. If we mention this to Mum, to show that we are not just sitting around on our butts, she just suggests white gold as if we hadn't thought of that. She even said to me the other day that she had gone in to the local jeweler's, and asked them what white gold was, and she informed me that they had told her that it is gold with other things mixed in. And I wondered if she ever listened to a word I said.
Plus we're trying to get our travel plans sorted out. No travel agent we could find was able to help us find a European holiday. They would assure us that their travel book listed packages for every possible destination. And we'd say "Oh good, is there Paris?"
"No..."
"Italy?"
"No..."
And it would turn out that all of their packages were to places in the Caribbean. Oh, yeah. Every possible destination.
So we're figuring it out ourselves. But it's an uphill battle, and completely overwhelming. Plus we want to register for our honeymoon so we can actually, what's the word, oh yeah, HAVE one. We can't afford five nights in Paris and then a week in Tuscany! We're setting up a website so people can buy us things like tickets to the Louvre, a night in Chianti and so on. My mother was trying to make up a slip of paper to og in the inviations mentioning our registries, and it announced in big letters our wedding registries with The Bay/Home Outfitters, and then mentioned that there were other gift ideas on our website. I asked her to play up the honeymoon registry a bit, because really, we didn't register for much at The Bay/Home Outfitters, and when it comes down to it, we'd rather have a night in Paris than a crystal goblet. Mum re-did it, with almost no change. No mention of our honeymoon, just a bit more of a detailed direction to our website. So I emailed back again, and asked her again to play up the honeymoon registry, and she called me all upset because she didn't understand what I wanted, and how could she word this, etc etc etc. I told her I just wanted her to emphasize that we were registering for our honeymoon. And she started going on this weird tangent about what about people who don't use the internet, what are they supposedto get us, blah blah blah.
"Then they buy us stuff from The Bay. But I don't want The Bay mentioned as our PRIMARY registry place."
"Well, I don't know how to word this. I've tried everything, and nothing makes you happy."
"How about, 'For Carol and Benn's honeymoon registry and other gift ideas, visit www.carolandbenn.com'?"
"But what if people don't WANT to go to your website..."
I ended up throwing the phone at Benn and he talked her down and they came up with a wording which ended up being almost identical to the one I had suggested. Mum seems embarassed about the honeymoon registry. She said to me, after,
"I don't like mentioning that you are registered for your honeymoon. It seems like we're ASKING people to pay for your honeymoon."
"Well... we are, Mum."
"Well, it doesn't seem very polite, to just say "hey, pay for our honeymoon."
"But it's okay to say "hey, buy us stuff from The Bay."?"
Which is when Benn announced loudly "Dinner's ready!"
I just wish that my mother would actually help me with the things that are important to me. Odin is important to me. The processional is important to me. The honeymoon is important to me. And yet the things that are important to me all seem to embarrass her, and I feel like she's slowly trying to eradicate them all. Instead, she holds me up on the phone talking about stuff like whether or not the bridesmaids should have a sash around their waists, even though I keep saying "whatever they want, I'm happy with."
Meanwhile I'm trying to renew passports, set up websites, figure out travel plans, figure out MONEY, and find a jeweler who won't rip us off. And I'm up late, ranting about all of this instead of sleeping, because poor Benn is so stressed out about all of this that I don't want to burden him with it any more, and I can't sleep for feeling so... angry about it all. Benn says I just need to go Bridezilla, and tell the organist that he's playing Jesu, so live with it, and tell people to go to hell and do what I want with my dog, and so on. But that just... doesn't sit right with me. I don't WANT to piss and moan and shout and stomp my feet and go all Bridezilla. I just... want my little wedding, with the nice music and my puppy and a ring I am happy to wear the rest of my life.