It’s been a while since I’ve given you an update on our wedding, so here we go. First off: of course the second I wrote a post about the absurdity of pre-fab wedding lists, my real life wedding list kicked into overdrive. In the past two weeks alone: my wedding dress arrived almost completed, we went shopping for lace trim for the dress, I got the materials to make both my veil and my headpiece, we finished our invitation design, we sent our invitations to the printer, we paid the final deposit for our venue, we started the process of ordering our wedding bands, we ordered vases for the flowers, we wrote our wedding service, we’ve continued pre-marital counseling, and we found a Ketubah to order… and honestly? I’m not even sure if that’s it, because I can’t remember anymore.
In sum: we’ve done a lot of wonderful, deep, rich, emotional work, and we’ve written a lot of checks. Mmmm…. writing checks. I think no matter how much money you are spending on your wedding, and no matter how thrifty you are trying to be, there will still be a point in the planning process where you feel like you are forking over a lot of money. Hopefully you’re forking over an amount of money you feel comfortable with to people who’s work your thrilled to support, but at the end of the day, money is still leaving your bank account. And for me at least, it’s exhausting.
So I was lying in bed one night, feeling exhausted by all the spendspendspend tied to the wedding this month, and suddenly everything shifted. I looked up at my wedding dress hanging on my armoire and had a little burst of happiness. Then I thought about how soon we’d have the invitations we’d been planning for a year in our hands, and something clicked. I realized that the wedding we’d been dreaming of was finally coming together. I realized that that the handmade wedding that I’d hoped for, in some tiny part of me, for years and years was just around the corner.
And you know what? It all feels worth it. I don’t know how important weddings are in the end. It is, after all, just one day in a life that is hopefully long and full. But I do know that having a wedding where the choices felt right, where the wedding felt like us, was how we wanted to start our married life together. These days all the pieces of that celebration are all over our house: the wedding dress waiting for lace to be hand-sewn on, the stylish and affordable vases piled in a corner, the cases of good local wine in the kitchen, and the birch huppah poles leaning up against the bookcase. And for now, for me, that is a good place to be. It is enough.
Picture: sneak peak of my handmade wedding dress, in progress
