reclaiming wife

Posts Tagged ‘Jewish Wedding’

*Rachel, Operations Analyst & Jonathan, Chef*

Today's wedding graduate post is just perfect. Not much more to say. Rachel is writing a thank you note to her partner, something we probably all should do after surviving wedding planning. She says it all, so I don't have to.

Dear Jon,

We did it. We got married. We stood in front of one hundred people, said our vows without screwing up, and you successfully crushed the lightbulb glass. My homemade chuppah didn’t collapse, we didn’t cry (although it would have been ok if we had), and we danced down the aisle to Elvis.

One could argue that we cemented our new, baby family on that glorious day, but I think we both know that we did that long ago, probably somewhere along the way. Or perhaps, when I sabotaged your proposal and you still proposed later that night, despite being mad that I ruined it. Oops.

As you know I am huge proponent of a heartfelt thank you note, and I think I owe you one more than anyone.

Thank you. Thank you for being you, for holding me when I needed it, for listening to me rant on and on and on about God knows what wedding related topic. For being patient when you needed to be and for kicking me in the butt when I needed it. For successfully wading through all the drama together that happened only three months before we got married. I probably would have drowned without you.

Seeing you stand beside me and fight for the same principles that I stood for was one of the best and heartwarming moments (even in the midst of drama). Knowing that we are in this together and we will come out of this together made it that much easier to get through such a tough time.


Thank you for being there when I realized one wintery night that wedding colors don’t matter; that traditions are ok to be embraced, tossed, or reinvented. Thank you for Googling “wedding traditions around colors” (no joke ladies and gentlemen…not much comes up, by the way), and letting me race around the house lamenting about why the heck should we have to choose such silly things, what do colors have to do with getting married anyway? Why must we drink wine at the ceremony? Why can’t I drink coconut rum instead? Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Rachel & Jonathan

*Becca, Environmental and Alternative Fuel Consultant & Jason, E-Commerce and Marketing Manager*

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los Angeles

This week, we wanted to talk about the good parts and hard parts and complicated parts of being a woman. We wanted to talk about feminism, and the pressures of life, and the pressures of wedding planning and building a life together. And as far as I was concerned, there was no better person to speak to this than Becca. Many of you know Becca from her wedding planning writing at A Los Angeles Love. These days, as she figures out what's next, she's blogging eloquently and smart as ever at Stumble and Leap. She also happens to be my roommate at Camp Mighty this weekend (it's going to be an awesome weekend, clearly). So today I'm honored to get to share her deeply wise and profoundly well written letter to her newly engaged self, as well as the story of her wedding, with pictures by APW Sponsor Kelly Prizel. You all should read it, wedding planning or not. It's that kind of post.

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los AngelesDear Just-Engaged Becca,

Congratulations! You just got engaged! I can see that you’re a combination of bouncing-off-the-wall happiness mixed with detailed excel budget panics mixed with eff-you-effing-eff-this-wedding-bs rage. In fact, you’ve already hit meltdown territory, and it’s only been two weeks. (Of course, this doesn’t surprise me. You’ve always been an overachiever.) You knew you could do this wedding thing better, cheaper and more fabulously than anyone else in expensive-city Los Angeles. You knew that months of pre-engaged research and your event planning background would make this easy. You knew that you’d bypass those nasty wedding planning fights because you and Jason have an uncanny ability to talk through disagreements instead of fighting.

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los Angeles

Now that a whole two weeks of engagement have disabused you of these notions—here’s a glass of wine and a hug. In fact, here’s a whole bottle of wine, because you’re going to need it. I wish I could offer you sage advice from the other side, but I know now that you’ll have to learn it yourself. The hard way. The very hard way.

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los Angeles

You can repeat APW wisdom on a mental loop (you will) and it will help a great deal (really and truly) but you are still going to fall apart a bit. Okay, a lot. Like right before you finally make peace with your budget when you realize you simply can’t throw a 150 person dinner party in Los Angeles for $15,000 when you don’t have a magical free backyard venue or self-catering abilities or enough time for cost-saving DIY. And that’s okay. And your eventual budget will be okay. You were frugal as heck where you had to be, sensible about the splurges that mattered, and smart about about the I-just-don't-care-I-will-pay-to-make-it-go-away issues.

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los Angeles

Somewhere along the way you realized this wedding was an investment. You were investing in the oh-so-important time it takes to nurture a new family. You were investing in a Thank You to the people who supported you along the way. You were investing in this single chance to get both of your far-flung families and friends in one place at one time. Squabbling over another $100 wasn’t going to make or break you, but the ongoing arguments probably were. You never loved the total budget tally, but you loved every piece of your wedding day, and so the money you spent was worth it.

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los Angeles

I wish that you could hear this and believe it. Really and truly know it in your soul and not just because you’ve been trying to calm yourself with a wedding zen mantra. Because here’s the thing: your wedding will be worth it. In fact, it will be everything you need it to be. And more.

Jewish Taco Truck Wedding in Los Angeles

While it may be worth it, it won’t ever be easy. There will be fights. There will be breakdown moments, some over important things (having a small intimate wedding versus a large inclusive wedding) and some over unimportant things (stop stressing out about the free ugly chairs. Seriously. Stop it now. They aren’t thaaaaat ugly and no one noticed once they were sitting in them. Period.) Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Becca & Jason

It's hard to tell if it's the New Yorker in me that loves today's wedding (Shake Shack! Madison Square Park! A BBQ place I used to frequent!), or the Jewish convert in me that loves it... or if I just love it because it's so exactly right. Becky talks about how you won't remember the details, but you do have to fight for what's authentic for you. And that's why I still write this website, passionately, two years after our own wedding. Because I believe in weddings and the way they usher us through something fierce and powerful. But regardless, this could not be a more perfect wedding to usher everyone back to work after Labor Day. And now, Becky herself:

Being married has been so wonderful in itself, I almost hate to go back and dwell on the details of the wedding.  So I won't, but I do want to say a little bit about how it felt, the spirit of it all, and what I remember of the blurry beautiful weekend.

Our wedding was the culmination of seven years of getting to know each other, one and a half years of engagement, and over a year of being wed in the eyes of the civil government.  It also celebrated my conversion to Judaism, and the joining of our families and our cultures (I'm apple-pie American with roots in Pittsburgh and Alabama, he's Jewish with roots in Morocco and Scranton).  But mostly, it was a celebration of two people who were madly in love and so excited to begin their lives together they just couldn't keep it inside!

Our wedding represented "us" perfectly.  The best compliment we heard afterwards from numerous people was how authentic it felt.  We had originally booked a lovely waterfront Italian restaurant in Jersey City.  It would have been nice, just nice, and we were mainly just thrilled that a place was booked.  Then we went to see a friend's band play in the basement bar of Hill Country, a TX-style BBQ joint in Manhattan. Done and done.

We re-booked, upset some traditional-loving family members in the meantime, and searched ravenously for a ceremony space. Good thing Manhattan has parks. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Becky & Etan

It's possible that today's Wedding Graduate post needs no introduction, except this: you should read it, even if you're long-married and never read these posts anymore. It might be the best written Wedding Grad post we've ever run. It certainly talks about the hugeness of marriage and how on your wedding day, the tidal wave of enormous competes with the minutiae of moments in time, and it sometimes overwhelms us. It will help you remember what you're wedding day felt like, how it changed you, and why. And if you want to read more of Kate's writing (you know you do), she writes at Eat The Damn Cake.

I threw up on my wedding night.

I don’t know where to start the story. Which is why instead of starting, I got some pizza, looked through some photos of friends of people I am friends with on Facebook, and watched an episode of Castle on Hulu. Then I clicked open a blank Word document, and here I am. Typing and looking at my hands on the dirty keyboard. Chipping turquoise nails, gold wedding band. Because I’m married. And when you don’t know where or how to start, the best thing to do is just start.

The world wants to ask me, “Does it feel different? How does it feel?”

And my answer is, “It feels different.” I think I’m supposed to say, “It feels exactly the same.” Because after all, we already loved each other a lot, and we were already living together, as most young modern couples are when they get married, and neither of us were virgins, and we’re pretty down to earth in general. We don’t run around dramatically with our feelings flapping in the wind. But it feels different. I can’t quite explain how, so I’ll tell you this:

I threw up on my wedding night.


Everyone was leaving. There were only a few people left at the venue. I was still in my dress, Bear was in his tux, we were trying to leave, but there were all these gifts, piled on a table by the doors. And we didn’t know how to get them home. I’d been smiling hysterically for about eight hours straight, and suddenly, I felt like I was going to fall over. Actually fall over, not just the way people say that to mean other things, like, “I was so happy and tired!” No. It hit me like a truck. It wasn’t cute. I was going to fall down. I leaned on Bear.

Then we were outside. People were still talking to me. They were carrying the gifts down to a cab. I was by the fence, at the bottom of the steps, in my enormous dress, sinking towards the sidewalk. My dress was a parachute. It was a nest. I was tiny in the middle of it. People driving by slowed down and stared. I could barely speak. I was going to throw up.

I was married. Bear was married. He had a gold ring on his finger. He looked like a married man in it. That’s what he kept saying when we tried on the rings, after we bought them. “Don’t I look married?” Then he’d make this little punching motion.

“Why are you punching?” I asked. “Why does wearing a wedding ring make you want to punch things?”

“It shows off the ring,” he said.

Masculinity. They need more options. Sigh. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Kate & Bear

Modern Jewish Wedding

It's been far too long since we've had a traditional Jewish wedding on APW, so I'm thrilled to welcome Deena. She talks about Jewish wedding traditions and about negotiating for what you need within the context of a religious service. I love the way she ponders creating a wedding where the service is the key element and the party is the lovely afterglow (or religious obligation... because as a Jew, it's one of your obligations to party with the wedding couple!).

Modern Jewish Wedding
From all the blogs I had in my Google Reader while engaged, it could have been easy to think that the wedding reception is in fact the wedding itself, but it’s not! There are many parts to a wedding, or exactly four if you’re having a more traditional Jewish wedding: bedekin (veiling), chuppah (the ceremony), yihud (seclusion), and sedat mitzvah (festive meal). I feel so lucky that we were able to really embrace all four parts of the day and make them each our own, and we added a fifth, at a nice, yet slightly dive-y bar across the street from our venue.

Modern Jewish Wedding

Planning our wedding was sort of my job for most of our engagement, as I was mostly unemployed for the majority of that twenty month period. Our families are both on the East Coast, and we live in Boulder, Colorado. It just didn’t make sense to plan a long distance wedding. Wedding research became the thing that kept me from going bonkers at home alone during the day. I was determined not to become obsessed with fussy details and instead focused on making it OUR wedding, picking out the gems from the internet and sharing them with Ben a few times a week. We also quickly decided that we needed at least one twenty four hour wedding-free day per week. So, we made a firm rule: no wedding talk during Shabbat.

Modern Jewish Wedding

One of my personal hurdles that I had during the whole planning process was learning to be okay with the traditional ketubah text. It was what Ben and our rabbi were most comfortable with, but not me (yet). Once we added on the Liberman Clause (allowing me to initiate divorce proceedings), my biggest issue was that it claimed I was a virgin. After talking with the rabbi we decided that this meant I was a never-been-married woman with no children kind of virgin, not Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” kind of virgin. I just wasn’t comfortable with signing a contract that I felt misrepresented me. Since the ketubah is mine to give, Ben was willing to let me pick it out, but wanted veto power. Finding a ketubah within our budget that had both text and graphics that we agreed on took even more effort than finding my wedding dress! Honestly I’m glad that it did; having a religious document incite more discussions than any other part of the planning process really helped me feel connected to the marrying part of the wedding.

Modern Jewish Wedding

I went to the mikvah on Thursday night before our Sunday wedding, and Ben stayed on the guest bed in the study. It was a bit awkward for both of us, but made us feel like we were really getting ready to do something big (which we were). Going to the mikvah wasn’t the spiritual experience I was hoping for, but it was relaxing (I got to spend thirty minutes in a huge soaking tub with unlimited hot water) and nice to get away from the craziness of all four of our parents and two of our four siblings assembling programs in our apartment. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Deena & Ben

So! It's the last week of the year for APW, and to reward you all for a year well lived (and well married) we wanted to leave you with a whole week of wedding graduates. But it turns out there were one or two things that had to be said before the holidays, things about fighting and hard stuff and reflecting on the year. So this week is a mix of wise graduates, and thoughtful words. And to kick it all of we have Estrella, a Bay Area APW Book Club-er, and a smart lady. Her wedding day was a bit of a mess... and it was ok. She found a way to make the crazy into magic, something I'm always in awe of, and something worth reminding yourself is possible. It's not one perfect day, it's two messy, wildly imperfect, joyful lives. And with that, I bring you Estrella:

Andy: “How many times am I allowed to use the word “epic” in my wedding vows?”
Me: “Uh…none?”

Surprising to everyone who knows us, Andy and I met on match.com. Probably the most amazing thing about our story is that we were so close to meeting and we just didn't. We ran the same circles: same restaurants, same bars, same gym, same stores, and walked the same streets. Funny as it sounds, it took an online site to bring us together. We contacted each other (I made the first move!) and set up our first date. We met at Fellini's in Berkeley and flirted over risotto and alfresco vegetables. We knew within minutes that our paths would be, in some way, together. Drinks at the Albatross were next and since it was a Sunday night we decided to cut it short (can you call a five hour date "short"?) and say goodnight. Plans were made for a second date and we've been together ever since.

Andy and I got engaged in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on a wintery night in a hot tub under the stars. After an emphatic yes, I am proud to say that the next words I uttered were, “Where did you hide the ring? Please tell me it wasn’t up your butt!” What followed was an eight month frenzy of crazy planning, crazy because we wanted to do everything ourselves. We were on a budget and being hardworking, self-sufficient people, we didn’t foresee this being a problem. What we didn’t take into account was that we both would be working all summer away from home, where we’d have no access to phones or computers. This was followed by the looked-over detail that come in August. Andy would be starting his first long awaited teaching job, which left the planning up to me.

Up until two days before the wedding, I couldn’t have been happier: We found the perfect site, a large estate we could rent for the weekend that was out in the countryside, about an hour from our home; I discovered crafting skills I never knew I possessed, as is witnessed by the bird-on-a-wire motif that I took on with abandon; I scoured craigslist for décor that I thought would fit our style, including 50+ mason jars that we wanted to use for the cocktail and lawn games hour; and I read countless wedding blogs for inspiration (that is, until I discovered APW and abandoned all the others).

And then the wedding weekend arrived. I was fine doing most things on my own, but when it came to coordinating myself as well as the massive numbers of people that kept rolling in and were looking to us, to me, for direction, I cracked. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Andy & Estrella