Wedding Undergraduates

May 2013

Back when I was pregnant, I wrote about how the things I’d learned during wedding planning came in handy during pregnancy. All those lessons about boundaries, asking for help, presenting your vision clearly, and dealing with people who are unsupportive? All those lessons apply to baby-having too. At the time my joke was that I’m glad I got married before I got knocked up (but not like THAT). These days, I see the argument for the other way around: something about the mix of hormones and mild sleep deprivation means that these days, I mostly just do my own thing without even stopping to worry about what Other People might think. Having a kid hasn’t made me sensitive to other people offering opinions (like I was told it would be); it’s made me cheerful(ly oblivious). You think I should dress my kid in monster truck shirts? No thanks! You think I should give him teething tablets? Why are you so SMART all of a sudden? Thusly, today’s anonymous post reminds us of the power of baby drool for invitation licking and the struggles and joys of balancing baby and wedding. Cute struggles. Mostly.

—Meg

by Anonymous

A while ago Meg joked about how glad she was that she planned her wedding BEFORE she got knocked up, and not the other way around. Silly Meg.

You see, planning a wedding when you’ve got a baby, toddler, small child, angst-ridden teenager, or a child that won’t leave home, is a breeze. I don’t have much experience with the older kids, so I’ll just keep my advice to the tiny people. Let me run down a quick list of pro tips in case anyone is in the throes of planning and can use the hints.

Tip #1: Put your kid to work.
Okay, babies are pretty worthless when it comes to wedding planning. But they are useful as paperweights, and their slobber is great for sealing envelopes. Who needs that wax seal when you’ve got infant mouth goo? Toddlers, on the other hand are super helpful. They can help organize all your lists and planning supplies. If they think something is a bad idea they’ll put it in the toilet. Or someplace where you will never find it. Trust their judgment.

Tip#2: Your wedding is about entertainment. For your baby.
Do you really want to deal with a temper tantrum at your wedding? No. So your job is to make sure that your baby has a good time at your wedding. Rent a bouncy castle if you need to. Same goes for wedding fare. Hot dogs, anyone? Or consider getting married on a weekday and dropping darling child off at daycare.

Tip #3: Lots of wine.
This is very important. Lots of wine during the planning process and at the wedding. Only way to get through it. Mmmm.

Tip #4: Wear a beautiful white dress.
Bawhahahhahahahahhahahahha. That was mean, I know. But seriously, go ahead and wear one. Just don’t get all bent out of shape when your little one tears it or wipes their snotty nose on it, or puts an awesome dirty handprint on it.

Tip #5: Get lots of rest during the planning process.
I like to go to bed immediately after my toddler. So we both sleep from about 8:30pm to 5:30am. OMFG it is so wonderful. Me time. My fiancé likes to watch TV after I go to bed early. I checked our DVR once to find some Sesame Street for the child, and it was full of recordings of True Blood. This discovery made me really reconsider things marriage-wise. But it was getting close to 8:30, so I just went to bed instead. Continue reading Planning A Wedding With A Baby

Posted in: Planning, Wedding Undergraduates | 32 Comments »

May 2013

Planning Our Invisible Wedding

It seems like seconds ago that I was packing all of our earthly possessions from our two very separate apartments into a Ryder truck and driving them across the country to move them into one apartment. It was a life changer. The life changer, really, since our day-to-day life changed very little after getting married (transcendent spiritual moments aside). And it was expensive. We had zero jobs, and I had $2,000 in savings and an open unemployment claim with the state of New York. I don’t say this for pity, because it was oddly exhilarating. However. Moving was expensive, and logistically hard, and we really needed curtains, and we got basically zero social and financial support. Fast forward two years, and we couldn’t keep up with the number of plates coming in the door from our registry… and we already had plates. Today’s post is about exactly that: the invisible wedding of moving in together over long-distance and our misallocated cultural capital in a changing world.

—Meg

by Anna Wilhite

Right now my brother and his fiancé are planning their October wedding. I am planning to move cities in August to move in with my long-distance partner. For different reasons, my future sister-in-law and I both have ended up doing most of the heavy lifting in planning our respective events. We are both drowning in spreadsheets, budgets, and stress. We are both working full-time while trying to coordinate life-altering events involving massive amounts of money. We are both receiving well-meaning but unsolicited and irritating advice. We are both struggling to communicate with our partners, to merge finances, to find a place to live where we’ll start our new lives, to learn how to protect our identities and independence even while we intertwine our lives closer and closer with another person’s.

There are some big differences, though. One of us has a brigade of friends convened specifically for providing moral support throughout the planning process. One of us is given (right or wrong) a blank check on behavior due to stress levels. One of us is participating in a societally approved rite of passage that merits gifts and congratulations starting with our closest family right on down to workplace acquaintances.

Hint: It ain’t me.

Though I think preparing for marriage and planning a wedding absolutely deserves the special attention and care it is given (my partner and I plan to marry at some point), it is more than a little frustrating that major life changes not related to marriage—or having children—are not given this kind of care. My mom brags on Facebook about the wedding, or about my other brother’s children—and she should! Because oh my God they are cute. But she doesn’t brag that I too am making a permanent, if not yet legal, commitment to my partner, or that we too are beginning to build a life together as a baby family. Similarly, I don’t feel comfortable sharing with work associates that I’m moving in with my partner in the same way that I’d feel comfortable sharing that I was getting married. There isn’t an entire industry churning out magazines and blogs about how to make this happen—actually, there is a terrible dearth of any kind of meaningful advice that digs deeper at what moving in together means. Mostly what I found was, “Make sure you really like this person;” “Don’t move in together just to save on rent;” and—from a men’s magazine—“Be ready to give up Monday Night Football for Say Yes to the Dress.” Okay. Got it. (They’re wrong about MNF, by the way. I’m a football fanatic.)

In fact, I found APW a few months ago by searching “moving in together for the first time” and found a whole series of very high-caliber posts (and comments) about moving in. Um, jackpot! I had found a safe haven where whip-smart, progressive women and men rally together to make sense of the very difficult task of growing up. Whenever anything is tagged with “The Hard Stuff” I almost always feel that I could Exactly! the whole post because I am experiencing the same things— just outside of the context of getting married. For example, while for some moving in together is as simple as renting a U-Haul, driving twenty minutes, and arguing about how to arrange the furniture, our journey to live-in bliss has been a tiny bit more difficult. Here’s a taste:

I am leaving my hometown where I have lived all of my twenty-four years, where all of my family lives and almost all of my very close high school friends still live. I am moving about eighty miles away to a small city I don’t like very much, where I know no one except my partner and his friends and family. We don’t currently have a place to live. We’d been searching fruitlessly awhile when a great opportunity came up for us to rent the house owned (and lived in) by one of my partner’s coworkers. We met with them, saw the house, verbally agreed to move forward. A huge burden was lifted from my back and we made all sorts of happy plans for the spaces and the lot. Wind chimes, a fire pit, a picture wall, a no-cats-allowed room dedicated to my partner’s vinyl collection. But… you guessed it. They called us last week and said they’d changed their minds about moving and the house was no longer available to rent. So, we’re back on the hunt, trying to find a place that will allow three cats and include all appliances including washer and dryer in a residential neighborhood for under $1000. (This is the part where you laugh and say, “Good luck, honey.”) Continue reading Planning Our Invisible Wedding

Posted in: Wedding Undergraduates | 209 Comments »

May 2013

Being Black, Feminist, Thoroughly Girly, and Conflicted

by Jalondra A. Davis

Angela Davis, bell hooks, and several others have written about the distance between mainstream feminism and women of color in the Women’s Liberation Movement, as the workplace was often touted as a site of liberation and the private home as one of oppression. For many women of color and working class women, the situation was absolutely reversed, since enslavement labor had been the means through which Black women were abused and exploited. So the home and the act of caring for their families domestically was an area in which they could have some measure of autonomy, of escape, of value for them and their families outside of the capital value that they produced.

I think many of the rituals and changes that women are expected to participate in when they get married reveal the same type of tensions. Things that might seem outdated for popular feminism may actually be points of pride for women who have historically been denied access to a certain mode of femininity. If you are a member of a group of women that has been constantly caricatured as mammies and welfare queens, sexually pathologized, and whose inequity has been attributed to broken, abnormal, and matriarchal family structures, then bearing the title of Mrs. and taking your husband’s last name can actually be displays of resistance. If you have grown up seeing constant media reports on the fatherlessness of Black children and the unmarriageability of Black women, then having your father walk you down the aisle and flashing your ring can both be points of pride.

But as a Black feminist Africana Studies scholar who constantly brings the insights of my work into my life, I just don’t get off that easy. I realize the way in which tradition and the politics of respectability have sometimes been a form of self-defense and resistance for Black women, but I also realize that patriarchy within our communities still operates in our lives. What women-of-color feminists advocated was an intersectional politics that could look at race, class, and gender as simultaneously operating forms of denying resources and power to marginalized people. We have to question patriarchy in its institutional operations (family being one of those institutions) and its cultural manifestations, for they are indelibly linked.

But I am a critical gender-conscious scholar with some seriously problematic guilty pleasures. I did beauty pageants and music video dancing and do not regret it, I watch the Miss America Pageant and Bridezillas pretty faithfully. I am a complicated person, and sometimes this complication feels downright hypocritical. And my desires for what I would want if I ever got married were shaped long before I started becoming critical of marriage and its accompanying traditions. I grew up in a large extended family where marriage was not necessarily an expectation. I’ve been to more funerals and baby showers than I can count but not many weddings. I was always taught to be independent and to take care of myself, but at the same time I was nurtured on fairy tales. So I was confident that I’d be a pretty princess with or without a prince, but that if I got a prince I wanted all that big, sparkly, even stupid stuff that comes along with it.

So there’s no neat conclusion here. For me, just living is an ongoing process of trying to reconcile my intellectual interests and political beliefs with my personal choices. As a bride, I am exercising my right to question patriarchal and Eurocentric tradition where it matters to me and live with the contradictions where it doesn’t. A few of the things I have struggled with:

The Ring: Okay, not much of a struggle. I was ready for marriage before my fiancé was, so it was reasonable to me that he signal his readiness through a creative proposal and sparkly jewelry. My ring is an aquamarine with an Akan adinkra symbol carved into the band. It was created by hand from a jeweler we know from Leimert Park, an African American cultural enclave in Los Angeles. Now, I actually did somewhat resent that I looked claimed while L was bare handed, so I bought him a ring, got down on my knee, and proposed back soon after we got engaged. He loved wearing his ring but recently lost it while roughhousing with his little cousin. (He had not listened to my suggestion that we get it resized.) When he went to the jeweler to try to replace it before I found out, he instead saw the ring he wants for his wedding band so decided that he would rather save the money for that and fess up. This close to our wedding, we need every dime, so I was pissed but let it go. So much for gender equity on that one. Continue reading Being Black, Feminist, Thoroughly Girly, and Conflicted

Posted in: Planning, Tradition, Wedding Undergraduates | 64 Comments »

May 2013

Elisabeth: Changing Course

Up to now, I’ve spent a lot of time fretting over our wedding clambake. Between negotiating my divorced parents in the same place, and my genuine questioning about whether getting married as queer women is the right thing to do; between our extrovert-introvert unbalanced guest list, and the feeling of blowing our life savings on a one day event; yep, I’ve been fretting. K and I have been jointly fretting, actually, although about different things, which has meant some tense conversations over dueling laptops and Excel spreadsheets. About a month ago she wanted to delete a column where I was collecting stats on neither-responded-nor-invited-yet guests who might decline a pre-wedding event, and I could not possibly understand why she wanted to delete said column since it was key for my estimates, all of which culminating in me shrieking, “Data is the basis for the entire field of epidemiology and frankly all of public health and you can certainly delete that column, I’m just POINTING OUT it is everything I stand for personally and professionally.” About ten seconds after saying that, I wanted to shove myself back in the closet, but it’s too late and now K pretends that I am John Snow, getting married in between field collection at the local water pump.

In the past week, though, the vibe has definitely started to change. Last Saturday I woke up at the crack of dawn to head for the Short Hills Mall, that magical suburban Mecca that I once heard referred to as the heart of darkness. I had two of my most fashionable friends with me, and we were going to find me a dress to wear at my wedding. I had a BPA-free water bottle, supportive running shoes, and protein-based snacks. Find me a goddamn dress and let’s get on with it.

I’ve mentioned my struggles about trying to figure out my wedding outfit, about what one should wear if one doesn’t want to wear white and doesn’t fit into “regular” sizes. Since that post, I can report I’ve done exactly nothing except fret (well, and rail against the media’s portrayal of women). In March, a friend made me go to Lord & Taylor (we tried Saks, but the one in the city doesn’t carry sizes past 14. Thanks, Saks!). She picked out about four hundred possibilities, and I picked out one that I thought was properly festive. It seemed promising. I did a slow turn as my friend diplomatically said, “That would be a great wedding dress, if your wedding was a dance club in Miami instead of a daytime clambake cocktail party.”

Real talk: if I did this on my own, I’d end up in a sailor shirt. A friend once described my gender identity as “camping femme.” Accurate! I refuse to wear those zip-away combo shorts-pants, but other than that, my standards are sensibly low. That, combined with my general shopping disdain, frustration at rarely finding things that fit well, and major unease with the wedding industrial complex, brought me here, about four months out from the wedding with not even any ideas for what to wear. So when we pulled into the parking lot ten minutes before the mall opened, I took a long slug of decaf coffee and ordered myself to think differently. Continue reading Elisabeth: Changing Course

Posted in: Marriage Equality, Planning, Style, Wedding Undergraduates | 57 Comments »

May 2013

Clear-Eyed Optimism

Today’s post from Mary Via encapsulates what for me, are the most important parts of the wedding tradition. Weddings give our relationships the context of community— they are about standing up in front of our loved ones (literally, or figuratively, in the context of elopements), declaring our intentions, and asking for help. Weddings acknowledge that no partnership is simple and that our marriages require support to thrive. In turn, weddings give our community hope, and that hope helps see us all through. Mary Via’s post is about more than religious traditions: it’s about the ties that bind.

—Meg

With just over a month to go until my wedding day, I want to say that I am actually very optimistic about my marriage. I really do think we’re going to make it. I also suspect that we’re going to be happy together. Very happy even. This might seem like a funny thing to say, but you should know that there are several reasons why I might reasonably have come to a gloomier conclusion. Not because there is anything glaringly wrong with my relationship, but because it’s been, shall we say, an “off-year” for marriage in our families.

My fiancé and I are all too aware of the ways in which marriage can both atrophy and erupt. This year in particular we’ve watched our families cope to greater or lesser extents with the darker side of marriage. We’ve witnessed a sibling’s explosive break-up and impending divorce after only a few months of marriage. We’ve also watched a thirty-year marriage strain under the weight of deep emotional pain, frustration and co-dependency. None of this has been reassuring for us as we prepare to get married ourselves.

What I’m saying is that I feel as though I’m going into marriage pretty clear-eyed. I’ve seen and considered the bad and the ugly. But there is also something to be said for the good.

Which brings me to, of all things, our marriage ceremony and the traditional Episcopal liturgy we’ll be using from the Book of Common Prayer. My favorite part of the service is the prayers that follow the marriage vows. The congregation makes these prayers on behalf of the couple, as if to say, “We just watched these foolish young people make some crazy promises to one another, and although we are tickled pink by how much they love one another, we know they are going to need our prayers.” Continue reading Clear-Eyed Optimism

Posted in: The Ceremony, The Day Itself, Wedding Undergraduates | 28 Comments »

Apr 2013

Pizza & Beer

Lets be for real: wedding planning is not always that easy, or fun. We have yesterday’s four hundred plus comments worth of wedding problem solving to prove it. Sometimes, we have to shake it all off and focus on what’s going right amid the small sadnesses of things that are not the way we wanted them to be. Today’s anonymous post does that beautifully, and it also reminds us that sometimes we have to meet our family and friends halfway. So let’s do this thing. Let’s share our small wedding goodnesses.

—Meg

The Good.

Before I get to the good, let me give you the background. After a long February where we told our respective parents that we decided we were getting married, which led to my mother stating she thought our venue looked cheap, our menu was an embarrassment, and that she would not go to the wedding if we served pizza; my friends giving me backwards compliments, or telling me “reservations” they had about us getting married; and another friend stating we weren’t engaged since he didn’t propose and give me a ring. (FYI, he did propose, but I’m keeping that secret, because what did ESB say about shaking that glitter off?), things finally started falling into place.

The Good

After a calm-down session/weekend, I sat with my mom and dad and spoke about what we all envisioned and why my mom felt so strongly. Turns out she wanted better for my wedding than she was able to have. My dad and I had to explain to her that my fiancé and I didn’t care about fancy stuff, we just wanted to be married and to celebrate that with family and friends. The compromise—we decided to minimize the guest list, have a backyard bash with pizza and beer, and she could add whatever food she wanted. I am really happy that we are on the same page and that I get to have her help with this wedding, because trust me I need it. (Oh and my mom and I went dress shopping this past weekend and found a dress!)

The Good

With all the backhanded compliments…there were many friends that came through. People who I thought might be reserved are genuinely happy for us and I’ve had a lot of friends offer to make us bouquets, one thousand paper cranes, decorations for our backyard bash, or help find a DJ or a wedding photographer. I love them, their happiness, and their excitement. Continue reading Pizza & Beer

Posted in: Planning, Wedding Undergraduates | 26 Comments »