reclaiming wife

Dilemmas

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

It Stands Alone

 by Meaghan O’Malley

Throughout the course of the very limited conversations we had about our marriage ending, my ex made it quite clear to me that our wedding was a mistake. If not a mistake, a distraction. While it makes sense that, in the end, it may have been an unnecessary use of resources, I have really wrestled with believing that it was an unnecessary use of my heart and an unnecessary reflection of the love I felt for and shared with my ex. To have it be such a fresh memory—seven months ago—only compounds the clashing feelings of joy and loss. I’ve just been trying to figure out how I truly feel about it all.

The biggest impediments to just pretending it never happened are the physical, tangible artifacts of the day itself. In my possession I have every note, every sample, every plan, and multiple copies of almost every component from my wedding day. I have photos, online and on hand. I have gifts from our registries and handmade things from my family and friends to celebrate our love. I have the cards, the soundtrack to our day, my ring. And every single love note or card my ex ever gave to me, including daily notes from the month before our wedding day.

I have the blanket one of my closest friends hand-knitted for us draped across my bed. The beautiful gold frame my brother gave us for Christmas, with a photo of my family at our wedding, sits on my windowsill, repurposed. The platters I had hoped to serve delicious meals on to our families on holidays and at special celebrations are tucked away in a closet. My wedding dress is balled up and shoved into a basket with copies of my wedding program, our guestbook, and the hand-calligraphy print our stationer made especially for us. I could throw all of these things into a giant fire pit and turn the memories of them into ash, but I don’t want to do that. Because they were given with love and with the intention of becoming part of memories. Good memories. And I deserve to keep them.

There are these memories of the process and the day to hold close to my heart, but there are also the archives of the connections I share with everyone there. Archives that continue to be filled, despite my marriage ending. To erase these images and these memories seems unnecessary. And to be honest, it seems mean.

My best friends in the whole world, by my side through everything.

My dear friend and incredible spiritual guide, Bishop David Flaherty, who wrote one of the most moving and personalized wedding ceremonies that could ever be written for two people he believed in without fail and without hesitation.

Katherine seeing me in my dress for the first time, her face reflecting the love she has held in her heart for me for twenty-eight-plus years.

Angela and me looking at each other adoringly, and then collapsing into a fit of giggles. This is not unique to the day, this is unique to us.

My brother and me, voguing in the driveway between photos. Continue reading It Stands Alone

Subverting Eurocentrism, Black Feminist, Pan African Wedding

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

We recently received an important question for Ask Team Practical—one about planning a wedding with a critically ill loved one. To make sure we got the answer just right, we reached out to longtime APW reader Morgan. Morgan was the first reader to ever write in on this subject, when her father was dying. She then wrote about her wedding, after losing her father. These days she writes about more joyful things, like her baby daughter, but today she agreed to give sage advice to all of you planning a wedding while dealing with the really hard stuff.

Meg

Hi Meg and Team Practical,

This is a somewhat hard and awkward letter to write. I am getting married to my fiancé Dan in July, and a few weeks ago my mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She’s begun her chemo treatment already and, while it can’t always be promised, it looks like we caught the cancer early enough to have some positive results. I can’t say with confidence that this will work out, mainly because we have to wait two treatments to re-evaluate—so even though we know what she has finally, I feel like we’re still in limbo.

I don’t plan to cancel our wedding—if anything I realize the wedding is a source of great joy for my mother and family. But I need some advice on how to get through this personally. I was at the hospital with my mother the other day and while she was getting blood drawn, she told the nurses about the wedding; they asked me questions about it and I could barely hold myself together. At this point, whenever the wedding comes up, I have such strong emotions about it. There are things I need to get done, and I do them, but it feels like the excitement has taken a back seat. That I’m just going through the motions of planning this important event. I feel like I cannot enjoy the thought of our wedding day, mainly because I fear so much that my mother will not be there. I know I should have a positive attitude, or let this situation bring a deeper meaning/perspective to our wedding—and I do sometimes—but I am struggling. These seem to be such contradictory events; I thought maybe you or your readers could share some advice that would help bring them into some type of harmony.

Thanks for your help,

Alyssa

Cancer sucks. I’m genuinely sorry that your family is going through this, and hopeful that your mom will have one of the happy outcomes. But in the meantime, you feel like you are stuck in limbo, right? That’s because you are, and that also sucks. It’s hard to make plans, it’s hard to know what to do, it’s hard to be brave, and it’s hard to hold yourself together. It’s really hard right now, and that’s normal. I mean, as normal as anything can be, when someone you love has cancer.

APW is full of stories about women who did not enjoy their wedding planning, for a huge number of reasons. And that’s okay! They got married in the end, and most people write about what a great time they actually had at the wedding. If you are merely going through the motions of planning a wedding, well, the wedding still gets planned that way, right? It may help if you try to separate your feelings about the two in your head: wedding planning and wedding day. The way you feel about the planning doesn’t necessarily have a huge effect on the way you feel about the day. I phoned in all wedding planning, and still had a day that shines in my mind as one of the most love-filled, grace-filled, transcendent days of my entire life. The day did not suffer because I didn’t care about flowers or centerpieces or details, or, frankly, anything in the lead up. It’s disappointing that this time of planning that you may have really been looking forward to is substantially less fun than you were expecting, and you are allowed to mourn the planning-that-may-have-been. Continue reading Ask Team Practical (Guest Edition): The Hard Stuff

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

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