Friends & Relations

Jan 2013

Today’s post slays me. It’s actually about wedding planning (or really, the under-discussed art of relationship planning, ha). But it’s also about exes, the stalking power of Facebook, reconciling our past with our future, and the insanity of doodling your future children’s names on a notebook in high school (or is that just me?). And NO I’m not going to tell you what names I doodled, because of course I’m worried you might steal them (the fact that David hates them is neither here nor there). So now I give you Katie, and her Someday Baby.

When you are planning a wedding, it’s all about your past. Yes, it’s also about your future with your partner, but really it’s a celebration of the time spent with your chosen partner, the love that’s grown between you, and toasting the partnership that you’ve cultivated.

And since weddings are inherently past-driven, it is guaranteed that you will think about your exes. It’s just natural. And not even in a “What might have been?” way, but more as a reflection on how this wedding is a culmination of all of the lessons learned in your romantic life up until this point. But there is a downside to all of this philosophical introspection. It is called “The Facebook.” (I can hear about half of you out there reading this saying out loud, “Oooohh, I know where this is going…” It’s like a horror movie; even if you don’t know how it’s going to happen, you know it ain’t gonna be pretty.)

I was on The Facebook earlier this week and happened to see a post about my ex-boyfriend, who I dated long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away (read: college). We don’t speak, but we have a couple mutual friends, so it’s not uncommon to see him pop up every so often. So, I saw a photo of him and noticed, hey, there’s a baby in it. Now, I know what you’re thinking—”Oh, God, no!”—but I already know for a fact that he a) is married; b) has a son; and c) still wears high-waisted pants like a ’90s sitcom dad. Good for him, on all counts.

“Oh, that’s nice,” I thought, “He’s had another baby!” Owning my stalkerish impulses, I clicked on the album. (“Don’t open that door! Don’t go up those stairs! Idiot!!!”) I scrolled through the photos, stopping on one of a dark-haired, pink little bundle in a car seat. “Aww, a baby girl!” (“Turn back!”) And then I read the caption: (“Don’t do it!!!“) ”Sophia Rose*___, born on ___. Welcome to the world!”

No way. The air sucked right out of me. No way. He did not just name his baby girl that name. (“AHHHHH!!!!!!”) He stole my name. Not my actual name, mind you. The name that I picked out for my daughter. But not my real daughter—my Someday Baby. Continue reading And Facebook Makes Three

Posted in: Friends & Relations, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Undergraduates | 97 Comments »

Nov 2012

Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

I know we said a few weeks ago that Elisabeth’s Wedding Grad post would be our last intern grad post for the year, but, well, we lied. Because this week Zen surprised us with a second grad post—this time on her and Cephas’ Malaysian wedding. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. Because secretly, this was the post I’ve been waiting for. (I don’t know about you, but all of Zen’s posts chronicling the mayhem of planning her Malaysian wedding have left me in stitches.) We talk about this a lot here on APW, but Zen’s post reminded me that no two weddings—not even for the same couple—are ever the same. And in the end, this is a very good thing. Because it means that there is no right way to have your wedding, no magical formula to making it the best day ever. So today, as you read Zen’s post, take solace in the fact that the path you’ve chosen is going to be the right one, if only because it’s the one you chose.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

The pictures we got from our Malaysian wedding are kind of a mess. They’re not carefully composed. The lighting is all over the place. Some of them are blurry. They’re of people moving, milling, talking, eating, drinking, yelling, dancing, running around trying to restrain their tiny offspring. The pictures are like those old Chinese and Indian scroll paintings where everything is happening at once and you don’t know where to look. There is no one focal point.

The way they look is how the wedding felt: chaotic, leisurely, expansive, and warm. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the Western wedding was about us as a couple and the Asian wedding was about our—well, mostly my—family, but that’s what it felt like. The Malaysian wedding wasn’t terribly romantic—it didn’t particularly feel like a celebration of us and our deathless love. But it felt like coming home. The English wedding had been marvellously, sweetly out of the ordinary course of things; our brief honeymoon in Italy had sustained that sense of being taken out of our everyday lives. The Malaysian wedding was something else.

Cephas, of course, will have felt differently—but for me, getting married at home was what I needed to take me back to reality. It made our marriage real, because it embedded it in the context of my—now our—family.

If the English wedding was a process of focusing in, of centering us and placing us before the altar and enclosing us in a promise between the two of us, the Malaysian wedding was about us stepping out of the focus, pulling back, and seeing where we stood in the pattern made by our family.

So I don’t remember tender moments between me and Cephas at the Malaysian wedding. I remember everyone else. There was my four-year-old cousin who, as the only boy child present, was taken by hand by his father to the bridal suite, promised the rare delight of getting to jump on the bed. (You will recall that this is arranged so that the married couple will have many sons.) He went along cheerfully until he realised that he was being followed by about twenty uncles and aunties wielding cameras, when he baulked.

“Come, boy, don’t you want to jump on the bed?” coaxed his dad.

“Don’t want this bed,” said my cousin, trying to make a speedy exit from the bridal suite. “Want another bed!”

Whereupon my aunt picked him up bodily and dropped him on the bed—but not before another four-year-old cousin, a little girl not remotely afraid of the limelight, had hurled herself onto the bed and starting bouncing, screeching with delight.

There was my mom, who plunged into wedding planning with typical intensity, standing over my aunts with a whip while they made a million fabric loofahs to decorate our house with. She also developed a psychosomatic cough from the stress, and went around rasping about floral arrangements. “Oh Mom, I feel so bad that you’re stressed because of the wedding,” I ventured. “No!” said my mom, coughing. “I’m really happy! I’m coughing because I’m so happy!” Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning: Journeys, Tradition, Wedding Graduates | 12 Comments »

Nov 2012

The Holiday Talk

Now that we’re officially in the thick of the holiday season (how was everyone’s Thanksgiving?), this week seemed like the perfect time to talk about the tricky beast that is navigating families, both new and old, around the holidays. Because no matter how much time passes in my relationship, the holidays are when forming a baby family feels like the most work. (Seriously, how are we still going to four or five Christmases each year?) And yet, as I’ve written before, there is no time of year I love more. So this week we’re talking about the mess and the joy that comes from blending baby family and family of origin around the holiday table, starting with a post from KB that sums up this time of year with a kind of transitional grace I can only hope to muster one of these days myself.

–Maddie for Maternity Leave

There comes a time in every relationship where you need to have The Talk. Actually, depending on where you are in the relationship, there can be several Talks. The DTR Talk (aka, Defining the Relationship). The Sex Talk (Tested? Birth control? Whips and chains?). The Marriage Talk (Ooh, shiny!). And—The Holiday Talk. Otherwise known as opening negotiations on whether you will spend the holidays with your family or your partner’s. In one conversation, you can potentially establish a pattern for years of shuttling back and forth between families, whether it’s across the street, state, country, or the world.

So far, I have managed to avoid The Talk. My strategy has always been, simply—it’s not happening. We’re not engaged, we’re not married, so you spend the holidays with your family, I will spend the holidays with mine. No drama. No hauling gifts back and forth. No running madly through airports. No strange holiday rituals involving sauerkraut and charades. And, most importantly, no whining from any family member.

Sure, your parents might say, “Oh, so we won’t be seeing your girl/boyfriend for Christmas? That’s such a shame.” Yet you know that the real guilt-trip would rain down if you were the one missing the festivities. As in, “But this could be Grandpa’s last holiday…” And, despite the fact that Grandpa can do more one-armed push-ups than John Cena, you capitulate. However, with his-and-hers holidays, I avoided all that and spent my Oh Holy Nights happily eating Moose Munch on my parents’ couch. Yes, it was lonely at times—but more Moose Munch for me!

It wasn’t until September, roughly six months after my fiancé and I got engaged that I realized that my strategy had now officially expired. We were sitting on the couch and I was watching Ghost Hunters on TV while my fiancé slaughtered dragons (or vampires? elves? I don’t know) on his laptop. Without looking up from his screen, he casually said, “Hey, we should probably get plane tickets soon—I mean, assuming we’re going to Michigan for Christmas.”

Crap. I hummed something non-committal.

As he pumped another magical creature full of lead, he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and quietly said, “You know, we’re going to have to do it sometime.” Continue reading The Holiday Talk

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Reclaiming Wife, Tradition, Wedding Undergraduates | 125 Comments »

Oct 2012

Bridesmen

One of my favorite quotes of all time is from a post Meg wrote a few years ago on wedding parties. In it, she said, “When you think of it, what we’re being sold with the image of the perfectly arrayed bridesmaids and the perfectly matching groomsman, is the myth of perfect friendships.” I love it because I think in the indie-sphere it’s particularly easy to forget that the myth of perfect friendships is, in fact, a myth (because we’re all so easy going and laid-back, there shouldn’t be any complications in our relationships, right? I wish.) Which is why I’m thrilled to have Sara here this morning, who on short notice suddenly found herself with no wedding party at all (and hilariously referred to herself as “the loneliest bride” when originally submitting this post), but then got something much better instead.

–Maddie For Maternity Leave

I have never had very many friends. I’ve always been a quality over quantity girl, whether due to natural shyness or the fact that my family moved dramatic distances every four years, I’ve never had more than a handful of close girlfriends, and they usually lived a few hundred (or more) miles away from me.

So, imagine my surprise when, upon sitting down to hot-glue two hundred fake flowers onto brooch clasps for my wedding, I found myself in the company of two of my oldest, dearest friends. I’d seen them through awkward puberty, various boyfriends, heartbreak, happiness, joy, and ridiculous shenanigans. Perhaps you know them too? Lorelai and Rory Gilmore? Ah, yes, as I hunkered down on the couch with my laptop and my sea of fake-florals, I sat down right in the middle of a whole pile of self-pity, too.

I had never bought into the WIC ideas about bridal beauty (I didn’t want to wear eye makeup? I wasn’t going to wear eye makeup!), traditions (no bouquet toss or sit-down dinner for me!), or the “necessary” expense of jewelry (free family engagement rings for the win!), but I had deeply, sincerely bitten down into the idea that I was supposed to be surrounded by a group of (at minimum) three sassy girlfriends who would drink too much wine, help me hot glue things, roll their eyes at each other about my bridal freak-outs and be willing to stay up late on the phone hashing out the details (details I didn’t care too much about anyway). They were supposed to be there! To help me! To pay attention to me! To make the wedding planning process fun, and to fulfill my expectations.

I consoled myself, knowing that my wedding was finally the excuse I needed to entice all my far-flung friends to come see me. Entice, hell, they HAD to come! It was my wedding.

And then.

And then two of my bridesmaids, two of my far-flung friends, couldn’t come. Each had their reasons, financial and personal, and each wasn’t able to tell me until less than a month before the wedding. My friends hadn’t been able to be there throughout my planning process, and now they wouldn’t even be there for my wedding. I was miserable. Continue reading Bridesmen

Posted in: Friends & Relations, The Hard Stuff | 71 Comments »

Oct 2012

On Loving While Young

On APW, we spend a lot of time talking about women’s cultural conditioning for relationships. Which makes today’s post from Bec particularly interesting. She’s an educator of teenage boys, and she sees first hand the way we fail to teach and model what healthy relationships are and can be for men. But perhaps more powerfully, she makes the point that we, as a culture, undervalue teenage relationships. We write them off as meaningless because hey, they’re not “adult.” Which is flat out bullshit when you think about it. Like Bec, I married someone I fell in love with in high school, so I find the idea of valuing all relationships, for people of all ages, particularly important. If we were all taught to value all our relationships, romantic and otherwise, from a young age, how would that shape our lives?

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

A couple of months ago, I married the man I have been with for the last nine years. It is also coincidentally eight and a half years since I graduated from high school.

There’s much to be said about marrying the first person you meet and start dating and the conflicting messages that go along with it (Great! Good! Fantastic! You’re not a slut! But what’s wrong with him? Did he get a chance to sow his wild oats? Sigh.), but what I want to write about is my job and how it changed my view on marriage—and how my impending marriage changed how I approach my job. I teach at an all-boys school where I am in a distinct minority; there are roughly thirty female teachers out of staff of more than one hundred. Compounded with a thousand plus students, it has been an interesting experience for a reasonably vocal feminist and educator.

Boys and young men have an incredible capacity for compassion and consideration. In the lead-up to getting married I was overwhelmed by offers of help and support from a demographic best known for epic Diablo 3 sessions: sneaky (and illegal, per school policy) cans of Diet Coke whenever I looked frazzled; taking my co-curricular teams for training whenever I had a mishap to iron out; or offering to sing or film at my ceremony were genuine and heart-felt offers of love from young people and they have made my job feel ever that more worthwhile.

From mentoring and working with young people I’ve observed a real shortcoming in pastoral care with how we teach and model marriage and relationships—particularly when it comes to boys. The ones I work most closely with are the same age I was when I started my own relationship, and in them I can see the same anxieties, fears, and hopes I had.

I don’t shy away from who I am and what I believe, both in my employment and in my relationship. If young people ask me a professionally appropriate and respectful question about human relationships, they deserve a sincere response. In the process of teaching them, I’ve learned plenty about the gaps in their education, and in a way, my own; there were no adults willing or able to tell me, in my final year of school, that sometimes a day spent stuffing around with your boyfriend is actually more beneficial to your mental health and happiness than a day studying, or that the flaky friends who enable your bad habits and who ditch you when you find love are actually not worth crying over. Or, especially, that you don’t have to listen to adults who are in crappy, dysfunctional relationships who try to tell you that you are just infatuated, and that it’s lust, and not love, driving your bond.

These gaps aren’t only for teachers to fill; they’re for parents, and friends, and extended family too. They’re for people who coach, mentor, and nurture the young because they think that it’s a valuable investment in our shared futures:

Continue reading On Loving While Young

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Reclaiming Wife | 53 Comments »

Oct 2012

My Fantasy Football Wedding

For those of you who are newer to APW, you might not know that lots of the early posts were straight up wedding inspiration (mixed with bouts of pure rage). Because y’all, I was PLANNING A WEDDING (I kind of miss that part of blogging, though I do *not* miss wedding planning). What I was going through was the process Rachel discusses in this morning’s post: differentiating all the lovely fantasies I’d had about my wedding from the reality of what could actually happen. Lucky for me (for us?) my process resulted in APW. Also lucky for me, Pinterest didn’t exist when I was wedding planning, leaving me with a tiny bit more sanity left. So here is Rachel, on moving from “wedding” to wedding. (Also, total side note, can I mention that I went to college with Kristen Bell? So I find offhand Kristen Bell references on APW super strange. Fin.)

All my life I’ve been told that I’ve been dreaming about my wedding all my life, so when I realized this week that I don’t really know what I want for Eric’s and my wedding, I was kind of taken aback.

What’s weird is that I really thought I knew what I wanted. I didn’t dress up like a bride or have princess fantasies as a little girl, but I’m on Pinterest, aren’t I? I should have been raring to go as soon as Eric and I got engaged.

But the thing is, I wasn’t planning our wedding on Pinterest. I was planning my “wedding.”

A “wedding” is what you plan when you have a vision of what a girl who looks vaguely like you and a person who looks vaguely like your partner (or, if you’re single, a still-vague but ridiculously attractive stand-in) would do with an unlimited budget, in between going to work at your dream jobs and hanging out with your family who never, ever pisses you off.

A wedding is what you plan when have a real partner, real future in-laws, a real job, a real budget, and you’ve told everyone you love, “Hey! We’re planning a wedding!”

When it came to my “wedding,” I realized pretty early on that I don’t have any money and my family is not rich, so I probably shouldn’t go dreaming about a lavish affair. As I became more comfortable with this fact about myself and let go of the fantasy that I’d be rich someday, I lost interest in having the fantasy wedding too. I didn’t like what it seemed to represent—pressure on couples, and particularly women, to fit into a certain mold—and I started to see the beauty in doing something that represented who I actually am. And once I realized that I’m probably going to be like Kristen Bell receiving her sloth on the day of my wedding, I realized, um, yeah… I’d prefer not to emote like that in front of people I barely know. Intimate and inexpensive is totally what I want for my wedding. Continue reading My Fantasy Football Wedding

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning, Wedding Undergraduates | 42 Comments »