APW Happy Hour

Hey APW!

So there is good news, and there is bad news. The good news is that it’s almost the long weekend. The bad news is that APW is closing a day early, so I can give the staff a much-needed day off (though, of course, I’M not taking a day off. Self-employment, y’all). It’s Labor Day here in the States, and around these parts we’re going to celebrate by not going anywhere or doing anything. I’m pretty excited. Feel free to kick it on the open thread this afternoon and all day tomorrow, or just get to browsing all these links.

It’s your (Thursday!) open thread. Hop on it!

Until Tuesday, cheers!

xo

Meg

Highlights of APW This Week

Thanks to Monogamy Wine, we brought you an entire dance party for your wedding. Download it, use it, or just keep it on your phone for dance party emergencies.

Elisabeth’s post You Brought Me To Church is my favorite that she’s ever written (and that’s saying something). For all of you that are both progressive and religious, go read it NOW.

This beautiful mountain wedding contains the line, “Reality check: Every other person on the face of the earth has the same vision for your wedding, and it’s much simpler than yours: You, happy. That’s it.”

This post chronicling feelings after a miscarriage leads with a line that haunts me, and provided comfort for some of you.

On building a business that you fully expect to fail (and not caring).

This open thread on travel was tons of fun, and contained lots of conversations about traveling with kids.

Around The Web

In the craziest twist of the week, I thought that Miley Cyrus’s VMA performance stirred up some of the most interesting feminist conversations I’ve heard in awhile. My personal favorite was Rebecca Woolf’s fierce defense of women in their early 20s, We, The Miley. Also important, this sexologist’s take on how women are “allowed” to behave. Rachel submits this Groupthink/Jezebel post on the racial implications of the performance as her favorite, Solidarity is For Miley Cyrus.

In a related story, NPR is turning #solidarityisforwhitewomen into a larger conversation with a new series. Fuck yeah, feminism.

The New York Times features some couples who are really hung up on the gifts they didn’t get for their weddings. Is this really a thing? I’m only still irked about guests who didn’t show up on the day of, not the many wonderful people who didn’t get us gifts. Read More…

The Splinter


by Anonymous

Four weeks before our wedding, a splinter shaped like the end of a toothpick became lodged in the underside of my left ring finger knuckle. My fiancé and I were building a bar for our reception tent, inspired by a picture I pinned on Pinterest. The pallet bar was the culmination of a series of projects I had spent each weekend working on over two months. Not surprising that I’d fill that time, because every other weekend I was booked, too. My fiancé was wrapping up his last year of medical school, we both would turn thirty, and he would start residency in the summer. When we got engaged last April, we decided to sandwich our wedding between med school graduation and the first day of his residency program. Blinded by overachiever invincibility, we marked off every Saturday square on a calendar and crammed every major quarter-life event remaining for the two of us (except for offspring, thank God) into a three-month span of time. I used to think it was cute, and when people asked about our wedding, I would proudly rattle off all of the other exciting days that would be fenced around it.

When I felt a sharp pain and pulled my hand away from the splintery barn board topping our Pinterest bar, I reacted to the blood by yanking my engagement ring off my finger. This instinct probably saved my antique ring; the skin on the inside of my otherwise petite knuckle swelled around the piece of wood instantly. A week later, the puncture wound itself healed over, leaving the wood implanted under my skin like one of those lost pet computer chips. The engagement ring no longer fits over the knuckle, and the skinny platinum band we bought to accompany it is even more impossible. My primary care provider, the recipient of my first wedding freak-out, offered to send me to a hand surgeon. Fundamentally, however, the best course—all I could do—was wait and try not to stare at my naked finger, try not to touch it.

When I called my best friend from college to tell her this story, I prefaced it by saying that the splinter debacle was only the tip of the iceberg. The splinter story made us both laugh for a sec, and then I pulled out every ounce of grace I possessed to tell her that my fiancé had cold feet. Somehow, I did this without tears. I rationalized that cold feet are normal, and in fact, cold feet are a good thing, right? I pictured a bumper sticker: “If you don’t have cold feet, you’re not paying attention.” But in all reality, my fiancé’s cold feet were symptomatic of something more. He has suffered from mental illness for as long as I’ve known him, and after the ridiculous year we’d had, it was out of control again. He didn’t “just” have cold feet: he couldn’t marry me, he couldn’t ruin my life, he couldn’t have children, he couldn’t ever have children, he couldn’t fix all of this without being alone, and he couldn’t ever fix this. No amount of reassurance I might offer could save us from this. Three weeks before our wedding, he checked himself into an outpatient psychiatric program for two weeks. This was not a wedding snafu for us to “fix,” despite both our parents trying to hold it all together, begging us to consider just going forward as planned.

Read More…