The Day Itself

Jul 2012

Since intern Madeline married in December and had her reception a handful of weeks ago, she’s throwing us little hints and whispers of the tale. First up, their city hall elopement. I couldn’t be more in love with it.

I didn’t plan on wearing jeggings on my wedding day—it just happened. I didn’t even know they were jeggings. I thought they were leggings with a fly and pockets. According to my good friend Alice, that is the definition of a jegging. But at the time, I was ignorant of this distinction. It was December, and I needed to cover my legs.

I put them on under a dress I bought for $11 from Banana Republic in 2008. Back then, we all thought the capitalist world was about to end. Stores were resorting to extreme sales to stop us all from giving up and dressing in trash bags. I never stopped to thank the banks for creating the discount frenzy that provided the dress I got married in. Let me remedy that: Thank you, banks.

Next up, a battered pair of boots, a comfort purchase after an old break-up. An aging sweater of my grandma’s. (“You can see the holes in the sleeves!” my mother said, of the photos.) A white flower pendant I picked up in Tokyo in 2010. And a pink, flowery headpiece from a New York City drugstore. Done and done.

We had applied for the license and overcome the 24-hour “cooling off” period required by state law. Two dear friends were standing by to witness the paperwork. We had exquisite wedding bands by Brandon’s friend Satomi—not the customary 2, but 4. (Yes, I couldn’t choose, and now I have three wedding bands. So sue me.) We were even allotted a celebrant straight off the set of the Sopranos. (“Congratulations to yous.”)

I know people worry about eloping and whether or not it feels “real.” Continue reading Madeline: The Jegging Elopement

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, The Ceremony, The Day Itself | 17 Comments »

Jun 2012

The Devil Is (Not) In The Details

After our exploration of imperfection so far this week, APW Associate Editor Maddie is here, to, well, hit the nail on the head. Because when we’re wedding planning, it’s so easy to convince ourselves that we’re not striving for wedding industry perfection, just emotional perfection. Or to think that when other people talk about moments of Wedding Zen or Wedding Magic, it’s because for them everything went exactly right. And what we miss in that is that it’s the gritty imperfect details in life where the magic really lives. The magic exists when things go wrong and we allow ourselves to feel however we feel—to be present in it.

Most people don’t know this, but I have a tattoo. It’s a pretty sizable one, on my back, in the shape of wings. I got it with my mother shortly after I turned twenty-one as a way to commemorate my late sister and the things my mom and I have had overcome in our relationship. I love my tattoo. It makes me feel like a badass, and once upon a time it was shaded with the colors of the rainbow (it’s a little faded these days).

I had been planning on getting a tattoo for years, so when the decision was finally made and plans were being planned, the act of getting a tattoo somehow managed to work itself into becoming something of a symbol to me. It was going to be ultimate bonding moment between my mother and me. I would have her full attention for a whole day, away from my siblings; together, as we inked our bodies in solidarity, we would break down any walls that had built up between us over the years. On this one momentous occasion, everything would be perfect. If only for a moment.

But of course, the reality of the situation was that my mother and I were going to be doing an activity together, and no matter how important, the complications of daily life were going to work their way in. I had one idea for a tattoo artist, my mom had a recommendation from a friend she wanted to check out. My dad had made the mistake of telling my younger sister that day that we were going to have to put our dog down, and she ended up calling my mom repeatedly during our bonding moment, interrupting our one-on-one time. It was still an amazing experience, but when I left, something felt off. I hadn’t gotten my perfect moment. I wanted the kind of story that you could tell to future generations, one that was unmarred by imperfections. Not to mention, this moment was literally going to follow me around forever. How could I look at a permanent marking on my body and not remember everything that went wrong?

What’s funny is, I know the tattoo itself isn’t perfect. I never expected it to be. The lines are a little rough and tattoo artist was decent, but not phenomenal and now the shading is faded so you can no longer see the rainbow. And still, I feel no guilt about the physical properties of my ink. Actually, I love every single thing about it. So why do I feel bad about the moment in which it was created? Continue reading The Devil Is (Not) In The Details

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning, The Day Itself | 70 Comments »

Jun 2012

Zen: The Indolent Engaged Person’s Manifesto

If I were a wedding magazine editor, I’d have a feature on What Every Engaged Person Needs When Planning Their Wedding. (My magazine would not refer to brides, since in a wedding usually more than one person gets married, and often the couple is not exclusively female. It would use a time-honoured gender-neutral pronoun when speaking of people in the third person. It would sell five copies, all of them to my mother.)

Top of my list of The Engaged Person’s Essentials would be “indolence.”

Being an epically lazy person is very helpful in countering the mind-control rays emitted by the WIC. More than once, in the course of my obsessive perusal of wedding literature, I’ve come across some charming idea—a decorative elephant made of flowers, for example, or paper lanterns that look like owls. I’ve sat bolt upright in my chair and said, “I must have it.” I’ve spent hours googling elephant-shaped topiary frames.

Then I usually went to bed and woke up the next morning and reflected, “I could buy that topiary frame for £50 and spend the next six months stabbing myself with gardening shears while perched on a throne of floral foam—or I could forget the whole shebang, get a cup of coffee, and read some shoujo manga.”

It’s a delightful way to spend a year and a half planning a wedding. And you get the best of all worlds. When someone asks you to sign up for a 10 km run or collaborate in a limerick chapbook, you have the excellent excuse that you’re too busy working on your wedding. And you totally mean it! You totally are going to fold those 1,000 paper cranes using only scanned copies of you and your affianced’s childhood photos! Except then you get home, realise your favourite “chilled out bride marries charmingly disorganised Bajan dude” episode of Don’t Tell The Bride is on, and decide that nobody would really have noticed the cranes anyway. Continue reading Zen: The Indolent Engaged Person’s Manifesto

Posted in: Planning, Planning, Planning: Journeys, The Ceremony, The Day Itself, Tradition | 25 Comments »

May 2012

Wedding Undergraduate: Something Like Zen

Well. You didn’t really think we were going to get through this week without a wedding planning post about Staying, did you? Of course not. This post by Sarah is about that classic APW topic of somehow finding Wedding Zen, of finally being able to stay in the moment through, well, struggle. It made me go reread Alyssa’s classic Wedding Graduate post (now in the APW book), and my post on my own cake hunt and planning realizations. Because other than the part about not planning her wedding since she was six (um, I started planning mine at four), this post could have been written from inside my head. In fact, reading it, I felt the ghost of past-planning-Meg sitting on my shoulder. All of it sounded so familiar: stressing about not stressing, not wanting to include people who you feel won’t hold true to your vision, and then caving and letting people lift you up.

This, wedding undergraduates, is my confession: it is so insidiously easy to overplan your wedding.

I haven’t been planning my wedding since I was six. Until I got engaged last August, I never spent a lot of time looking at bouquets and favors in craft stores. I made concentrated efforts in school—which I am impressed with, in retrospect, because it was insight I had no clue I would ever need—to enjoy my time with friends and not worry about dating, and especially not worry about marriages or babies or any of the Big Changes I was nowhere close to ready to experience. I am definitely the last person you’d expect to be anxiously going through page after page of monogrammed anything six months before the wedding.

Several friends and my brother have gotten married in the past couple years, and the more I gleaned from their processes, the more I sort of mocked the whole wedding industrial complex. My bright, crafty pals shared with me the triumphs of venues and the bummers of sticker price, so I thought by the time my wedding process began, I was prepped. I thought that armed with the reflected glow of their nuptials, I could do the whole thing. By myself. On the super-cheap. With zero stress. And it would still look chic as hell.

Well, as you can guess, this combination of options is awesome but didn’t happen. One of my friends told me I would stress, stress, stress about the details and so I became determined to not stress about anything. This started a chain reaction of becoming very defensive about all of my decisions. I blocked out my friends, my mom—everyone but my fiancé, and he has been so genuinely calm about the whole thing that he wants whatever I like the best.

My very-soon-to-become-my-husband Joe is a very laid-back character when it comes to most things. He gets intense about his work and he listens to me fiercely when I have something on my mind, but generally speaking he takes things as they come. He doesn’t have to-do lists or concerns about how to spend an afternoon, and there is definitely zero fuss about what he is going to wear to any specific occasion. He even has a large Latin tattoo on his leg that means, “It is what it is.” I’m much more, “It is what I think it should be maybe today but you know we’ll check back on it and hopefully it will get better.” That phrase doesn’t fit quite as elegantly on the ankle. Continue reading Wedding Undergraduate: Something Like Zen

Posted in: Planning, Planning, The Day Itself, Wedding Undergraduates | 34 Comments »

Apr 2012

Wedding Graduates: Jenifer & Rob

First, it’s hard to resist making a comment about how completely adorable Jenifer and Rob are, and how they just steal your heart in an instant. And goodness knows I have a soft spot for the struggle (and triumphs) of international weddings, with visa problems, and multiple ceremonies, and families meeting for the first time. But what I find most compelling about Jenifer‘s post is the way she talks about the evolving process of becoming a wife. Because however we get there (I had a transformative wedding day moment, but even still) it’s a long and evolving road. So here is Jenifer, three years into marriage, sharing her story.

My husband, Rob, and I were married in Devon, England in the summer of 2009. Rob is English and I am American, which lead to wedding planning that involved quite a bit more planning and preparation due to international constraints. And, no, I don’t mean that it was a pain to have my mom ship me shepherds hooks because they are impossible to find in England. I am talking about the legal side of getting married.

We were actually married March 21, 2008. I couldn’t obtain my British visa without being his wife. We looked down all the other avenues (student visa, fiancée visa) and none of them would work. So, three months engaged, with a venue booked for August 2009, we got married in the Spokane County Courthouse. I have seen many of you post fabulous courthouse weddings, but it wasn’t what I wanted and it was hard. My family wasn’t there. We didn’t tell people for quite awhile because we weren’t sure how to handle it. I knew I wanted to be married to Rob and he wanted to be married to me, but having to do it this way just to be a legal immigrant was hard. For one, I didn’t know how I wanted to behave after this signing of the paperwork. Was I going to act as if Rob was my husband at this point, or would I wait until the ceremony the following year?

As neither of us really knew what we were comfortable with, we grew into it. Slowly over time, we started referring to each other has husband and wife. I was already Mrs. Hislastname due to the legal stuff and introducing myself that way also made me feel that, though our wedding was months away, we were already married. I can’t pinpoint when he stopped being my fiancé and started being my husband. And though I am comfortable with this now and feel that it is a reflection of who we are as a couple, at the time it was odd. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Jenifer & Rob

Posted in: The Day Itself, Wedding Graduates | 36 Comments »

Apr 2012

Zen: They’re Both Real, Dammit

Interfaith and intercultural weddings are HARD, y’all. I know, because I had one. If you looked at our wedding on the surface, you would have seen a lovely progressive Jewish service. But what you didn’t see were the years of heartache that led up to that moment: the struggling of two people with deeply-held traditions and cultures, trying to find a way to work together. And guess what? It doesn’t magically get easy when the wedding is over. (Example: I recently found out that if you’re not raised High WASP, you are not given baby china at birth!? At Passover this weekend, someone had baby china out as a key dish, and I was the only one who knew what it was. Needless to say, these things continue to be baffling to both of us.) But the hard stuff is also the best stuff. It’s the dig deep stuff. So today I’m thrilled to give you intern Zen, talking about how both weddings are real (but secretly one is a little more real…)

My parents have had the interesting fate of marrying two children off to Catholic partners. There’s a small but staunch community of Christians in Malaysia, but my family comes from a typically Buddhist/Taoist/syncretic Chinese folk religion background, so church weddings are still a fairly new thing to us.

The precedent in my immediate family was my brother and sister-in-law, who got married over two days, with the Catholic wedding on the Saturday and the Chinese wedding on the Sunday. After the Catholic ceremony my mother came out of the church heaving a “well that’s over” sigh:

“Now, at the real wedding tomorrow …” she said.

It’s been an issue. I’m gonna be honest here, right. I want the Malaysian wedding to be the real wedding. I would ideally have liked it to happen first, but the dates didn’t work out that way. (We got the date for the Malaysian wedding by the usual means of astrological determination—you give your birth dates and times to the temple and they tell you what the “good” dates for getting married are–so there was no flexibility on that point.) So when people ask me, “Which one’s the real wedding?” I know what I want the answer to be.

But when you’re in an intercultural relationship you can’t really do that. You kind of have to recognise the legitimacy of each other’s customs (I know, right, what a bore!). Sure, the first dance and the various toasts may seem like stuff people have just made up to torment me and my family, but it’s made-up stuff that means something to my partner and his family, so if I wanna skip ‘em, I better have a good reason. Continue reading Zen: They’re Both Real, Dammit

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, The Ceremony, The Day Itself | 50 Comments »