I’ve found a whole tribe of men and women who are planning in the face of sadness. But what about strained relationships? Or not very close ones? I’m not terribly close with my mom. She’s a difficult and complicated person. I’ve made some choices in my life that put some space between us. Since our engagement, we’ve been talking a few times a week, up from once a week. It’s bringing to light all the differences and unresolved issues we’ve had over the years.

My mom has been loving and supportive all my life; she has contributed to shape me into the person I am- but you can’t choose your family. We have a lot of hurt and as repressed Irish Catholics – we keep it in. We can’t find the words to express our true feelings and when we finally summon the courage to do- it’s a emotionally fraught exchange. I’ve learned that my mom is the way she is after 60 years and that’s a lot of undoing of a lot of hurt and psychology that won’t happen in the next three months.

I’ve been rereading the Conscious Bride, especially the sections of letting go and poking around the Mother’s Hut online*. I’ve found it helpful to think about what my mother may be feeling. There have been tiffs over the color I picked for my sisters dress, classic example of the hard to name feelings that we’ve been having.

I’ve been very independent of my mother for many year now, and I feel sad that we aren’t very close. All the television programs out there show mothers and daughters saying yes to the dress together, going over flower arrangements and tastings. I’ve been doing that largely alone or with Bryan, or just outsourcing. And all of that’s fine. It’s just details, but magnifying our fraught relationship. I wish that we were closer, to spend more of this time together. Or even just to be able to talk about our feelings, but there is just a lot of distance between us. Getting married will change our relationship, perhaps not in the immediate but in the future. Bryan and I may move farther away, certainly when we have children. These are complicated emotions for me to navigate, and I imagine they are for my mother.

These unresolved issues are magnified- I am reliving years of my life, feeling sadness, disappointment, hurt in the span of weeks. And I’m not quite sure how to handle it. These are issues that have been below the surface for many years, just pushed aside or ignored. I’m challenged to learn how to navigate the next three months, which already seem more stressful**. I want her to understand my expectations for this remaining time and I want for her to communicate them to me. At the very least, get us to somewhere in the middle, where we can enjoy this time together and be celebratory. A place where our actions and their meaning, come from a place of love and respect.

*and sending dear mom some articles
** 'cause the BIG DAY is coming

I’m about to unsubscribe to all my wedding blogs. I’m so fed up with these backyard weddings, at so and so parent’s house, with party lights from the trees, perfect summer lighting and cutsy signs.

Seriously, enough is enough.

We all don’t have access to a goddamn huge backyard that is conducive to party throwing. And let’s talk about the logistics for just one moment. Where does everyone go to the bathroom? Seriously? Right– ’cause you know people are going to have to pee after they’ve been drinking all night. So next time when these blogs features a backyard weddings, they better tell me where everyone is peeing.

Walking to the train station, a song from the late 90s came on. Liz Phair’s Jealousy. By all accords, a rocking song, but tonight it hit a new chord.

Sometimes I’m envious of these high school/ college sweethearts. (And middle school. My dear sweet friend!). There was no life before them. Bryan and I are grown adults with a few relationships under our belts. And this was a first for me- the first man I had been substantially involved with to care about his ex. Our past relationship experiences framed a lot of our early conversations- what made us unhappy, why we stayed and ultimately why we left. These were the experiences we bonded over and through them discovered our shared values.

I wonder what we do with the digital artifacts of our previous relationships. I liken them to digital clutter- why hold on to it? Bryan says, why does it matter— and years down the road it will matter less. It’s still memories of the life he had before me, which involved experiences that shaped him into the man I adore. Yet, I say, why hold on to that. It was the pass, let it go.

Let me say this to shape my point- I don’t believe in the friendly exes. I don’t do it, and I’m not entirely convinced one can. Is it related to the idea of your partner (being spouse, B/G-friend) as your best friend. We are friends- but our relationship is more than best friends. I think you need some immediate distance, you still aren’t going to tell your now ex everything you once did. I’ll concede that people may be able to get to that point later on, but it involves a lot more people being on board with it.

So, I try to work through my jealousy. Is it the same pose in photographs? Was it the living together? Or was it the time in between his last relationship and me that drives me crazy? And the truth is, it’s a bit of all of it.

Jealousy is insecurity, anxiety and fear of a loss. My fears are that we won’t last; he’s going to leave me. It’s irrational, but it’s based in the relationship models I had growing up. We’ll be vowing our commitment to each other soon and already as Bryan says, feels in his heart that we are married. But underlying, there is this fear: of being rejected and pushed aside, at some point. It’s similar to the feelings I had early in our relationship- I felt like I was self sabotaging so he’d just get the breaking up with me over with. Marriages don’t fail so instantly, there is hurt, lies, contempt that builds up the breaking point. One must work every day at having a positive relationship and be honest about expectations.

i’ve been thinking about and feeling the pain surrounding wedding planning. the ever wise meg, leader of the practical brides, posted a question from a reader. her father was very ill, and may not make her wedding. she was reaching out to the community of readers to say wtf, this sucks, and what do i do?

weddding planning is hard work, it’s money, it’s details. but it’s also some of the most emotional taxing work i’ve ever done on a consistent basis. and it is not fun.

my father died on sept 21 2003, just a few months after i graduated from college. it was sudden and painful. he entered the hospital on the night i drove to boston to see bjork and died 3 weeks later. my dad was never well through my life, struggling with his weight and side effects of being overweight. that first year was the most painful- a physical pang in my heart, a measured loss, a concrete change. and then slowly you shift. i believe if one could  hover in space and look down at the imeline of my life, there is a large black line (or maybe even a wall, ’cause you can’t go back) when my father died. crossing that line meant crossing into a new life, a new world and learning how to be okay in that space.

and father’s have a big role in weddings, right? i mean, traditionally a father gives her daughter away, dances with her, gives a speech. and even before, he’s to approve of her beloved and offer his blessings for the engagement. taking all the feminist concerns and trappings of patriarchy away, father of the bride is a big deal. especially when, you can’t have it. the fresh faced women studies major may have balked at being given away, but today i see it more as a symbolic act of recognition. i am who i am because of my parents, and it’s a way to honor them. (remember, ’cause weddings just aren’t about you.)

but this is the sadness of wedding planning that no bridal magazine speaks of. what it’s like to plan a wedding in the face of sadness, and many more women and men are planning while sadness is unfolding on a daily basis. i was so thankful for this post- it was the voices i had been waiting to here. that i wasn’t alone in carrying darkness around.

and this is a club. not any club we’d want to be members of, but here we are. a club of pain, longing, sadness, but a club of hope, joy and deep love. and out of this club, we learn about the ways to celebrate the people we love at our celebrations. i’ve asked my dad’s sister to read a mary oliver poem, poppies. a good friend, a lover of poetry, sent to me shortly after my father died. it was touching, raw, and provided a little light- of life beyond the current plain. poppies has provided me comfort over the years- words i constantly turn to, keep nearby.

and this lightness, this happiness is our marriage. our commitment to each other. and while not there, i know my dad’s love will be shining down.

About a month ago, I realized I hadn’t obsessed about some wedding related detail and furiously texted about this or that. I felt like I had my ideas of what was going to happen, and if not… well, somethings are bound to go wrong.

I’ve been focusing more of my energy on the after wedding stuff. What it means to be a wife, what it means to be married, what kind of wife do I want to be. And most of those answers, are an extension of who I am now. There won’t be some grand change, where I wake up and feel like a new person. But I’ve been mindful for the small changes taking place, of how relationships are slightly shifting, of how we move through time and space, and what impact that has on how others interact with us.

Perhaps I am more mindful of this as we are navigating the holidays. We’ve made our arrangements to see family, and the schedule felt good. Time was well distributed, enough to see everyone, but not so much to spread it thin. But of course, it’s never enough and feelings are bound to be hurt. We are very lucky that everyone is going to be in one state. We go back and forth between are we being reasonable, are we working with people enough? to we are reasonable, sometimes scheduling is an issue. This will get bigger when we have our own children. It’s about making decisions for us, as a unit and our respective families, and being trying to be fair.

A few days before Christmas, we received our homework from Stay Hitched, the one day premarital education session we are attending. Facing a mountain of work this week, Bryan took to the bedroom Monday night to start the survey. Almost immediately, he yells “Did you know this is from BYU?!”
Um, no. I didn’t. Bryan went through the questions, and I could hear the occasional, Are you kidding me? from the bedroom. At one point, I poked my head in to see how things were going and he said, “I’m being asked how many sexual partner’s I’ve had. I don’t find value in sharing that information. I think we are beyond that.”
I took it the next morning, finding myself answering in the extremes. My partner is ALWAYS this and NEVER that. (Which, isn’t true. It’s closer to OFTEN and RARELY. But I was pretty smitten with Bryan that morning, so he got high marks.) We both found it interesting that the there were hardly any questions about money. One of the few money related questions was: “Do you want to provide your family the finer things in life?” Well, vacations, nice computers, experiences and education, yes. Big televisions, fancy cars, big house- not really. The questions were vagueish, and I often wanted to know what the survey designers definitions

Upon finishing, we linked our surveys and received the report. We were instructed to look at the report together, so we sat down after dinner and took at look at it. I felt anxious, that the report would say “DANGER AHEAD!” or reveal something that Bryan had been keeping from me.

But it was just everything we knew and have already talked about, which was good and relieving. That we already are very open with each other and aware of our program areas. We’ll be taking the workshop this Saturday and I’m curious how the whole thing will play out.