Friends & Relations

Jun 2008

What To Do About Your Big-Day-Dreaming Mother

A few of you have emailed me with that timeless problem: I want one wedding, but my mother (or mother in law) wants another. Except your timeless problem has a twist. You want a simple, practical wedding, and your mother is insisting that it isn't proper to get married without a monogrammed aisle runner, at least five bridesmaids, a unity candle and unity sand, a cathedral length train, and fillet Mignon. What to do?

Well, I'm pleased to say that the answer to this problem couldn't be simpler. You need to go out and buy your mother a copy of Miss Manners On {Painfully Proper} Weddings. Read it yourself first, then wrap it up nicely, and give it to your mother as a sweet gift for helping you plan your wedding. Then, whenever questions come up, say, "Let's look at what Miss Manners says is proper. You know, just to be sure." And your work is done.
Continue reading What To Do About Your Big-Day-Dreaming Mother

Posted in: Ask Meg, Friends & Relations, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 8 Comments »

Aug 2008

Planning A Indie Wedding – With Your Family Too

There seem to be two predominate ways of dealing with one's family during the wedding planning process that you hear about on the web or in wedding magazines. One, I'll call the traditional approach, which seems to be, very loosely stated: Dad pays, Mom helps you plan each little detail, and the wedding is very traditional and proper so that no ones friends or family are at all shocked. Two, I'll call the indie approach, again loosely stated: the bride and the groom pay, the parents don't have very much input, the wedding is non-traditional and a beautiful reflection of the bride and the groom.

Both of these approaches sound fine. In fact, many days I wish we were planning one of these ways because they sound sound so straightforward! But, neither idea comes anywhere close to what our wedding planning experience has been like. David and I are doing most of the planning for our wedding, we're working hard to make it a clear reflection of who we are as a couple, and in many ways it is not terribly traditional. That said, we're both close to our families, and we know that our wedding day is important to them too. Each time we make a decision, we run it by our parents. They are not pushy, so as a result, if they express concern over something, we listen to them, and see what adjustments we can make. This kind of wedding planning involves lots of compromise from everyone. In a sense, no one person is going to get their dream wedding, but we're creating something real and messy and complicated, just like a marriage.
Continue reading Planning A Indie Wedding – With Your Family Too

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning, Planning | 21 Comments »

May 2009

Hatch, Match, Dispatch

When working on our guest list this weekend we took one name off for someone who had died, and added one name on for someone who had been born.

Celebrate what you have while you have it. Come together. That’s what we’re all doing with these parties we call weddings, in the end.

And what else is there, really?

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Life, Manifestos, Meg's Thoughts, Planning, The Hard Stuff, Weddings | 10 Comments »

Jan 2010

Your Wedding Is Not An Imposition

This is too important to bury in the comments. So here we go:

YOUR WEDDING IS NOT AN IMPOSITION.

Did you get that? It’s not an imposition on *anyone.* And let me tell you why. It’s not because your guests will have fun at your wedding (though, duh, they will), it’s because your guests are grown-ass people. They are GROWN UPS. If your wedding is too expensive, or too far away, or just too much of a bother? They won’t come. If you’re lucky, they’ll be very kind when they tell you about it. If you’re not lucky? Then you didn’t want them there anyway (try to remember that mid-sob, it was hard for me.)

But the people that come to your wedding? Well, let me quote the wise Marisa-Andrea, “This is what I have learned: The people who love you and care about you will not feel like your wedding is a burden or an imposition. They will be thrilled that out of all of the people you could have invited, you want THEM. The (editors note: FEW) people who do feel burdened — eh. You are always going to have someone who isn’t satisfied.*”

And if they are not grown ups? If they are quite small? Well. I trust you are serving cake and punch and giving them room to run around? If so, they’ll remember your wedding fondly for the rest of their lives, and they’ll hope one day their wedding will be just like it.

*Ass-hats.

Photo by APW sponsor Gabriel Harber.

Posted in: Ask Meg, Friends & Relations, Manifestos, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 111 Comments »

Mar 2010

Mamadrama, Part I

I've gotten multiple emails in the last few weeks requesting posts on Mamadrama (as we're calling it... Papadrama just doesn't have the same ring). I realized it was high time I wrote a post about the stress of families and weddings, but I wasn't quite sure how to approach it. Obviously telling sob stories about family stress wasn't the way to go (that's just depressing and not even constructive). After a query on Twitter, Sarah suggested "I see all Mamadrama as an opportunity to Man Up (as it were) and assert some real adulthood. It's about a healthy separation." And I realized that was exactly it. So this post is about Boundaries, and about the way that weddings are still a huge life transition for most of us, even if we don't think about it that way.

The thing is, when we get married, we are starting a brand new family. Even if we've dated and lived with our partner for years, the world didn't really look at us as a family in the Official Sense until now. But for me, the noticeable shift was internal. Suddenly, when making decisions, I felt more loyalty to David than to my family of origin, and at first I found this shocking and slightly unnerving. It's not that I *didn't* feel loyalty to my family of origin (of course I did), but I suddenly emotionally realized that my future, and my kids future, lay between the two of us, and my choices needed to reflect that.
Continue reading Mamadrama, Part I

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts, Weddings | 85 Comments »

May 2010

Ask Meg: Weddings, Faith, and Honesty

Dear Meg,

I’m having an issue that I’m really stuck about concerning a wedding. My parents are a little off-beat when it comes to religion. They still see themselves as Christian, but they do a lot of new-age type stuff along with it. A few years ago I converted to Hinduism. They are a little unsure about this. Not completely against it, but more just confused because they don’t see what I see in it. My boyfriend and I are planning to get engaged this fall and I’m almost dreading it because a wedding is going to put these uncomfortable issues right in everyone’s faces. Being that I’m a dedicated Hindu now, I desperately want a Hindu wedding, but my one living grandmother knows nothing about this. All my life I have been forbidden to tell her or the other members of that family anything about non-traditional practices. My parents are going to have a huge problem with telling my Granny that I’m having a Hindu wedding. I don’t want to upset and offend my family, but I can’t do a Christian ceremony either. I’m starting to think that my only choice would be to elope and that thought breaks my heart. (The boyfriend is an atheist, but his family doesn’t know he’s not Catholic. He is looking forward to having a mostly Hindu wedding and thinks it’s really cool.) Is there any advice you could offer? Continue reading Ask Meg: Weddings, Faith, and Honesty

Posted in: Ask Meg, Friends & Relations, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 93 Comments »