Rotten Wedding Day

Approximately 6 years ago today my husband and I got married.

Why approximately?  Because we can never remember the exact date of our anniversary.

Why can't we remember?  Because that's just the type of people we are.  We revel in the fact that we don't keep track of such things.  If I hadn't been pregnant with Frack on our wedding day I don't think we would have any idea how long we've been married for.

We are not "romantic" types.  Well we are, but not in a recognizably traditional sense.  Poetry makes us laugh.  I think flowers are a waste of money.  We sometimes like to hate-watch romantic comedies together so we can snark on them.  "Our song" is a happy hardcore rendition of "Like a Prayer" because one night at a club he got the DJ to play it as a joke and then dragged me out on the dance floor so we could dance like idiots.

This song is an assault on the ears.

Could you imagine that playing at a wedding?  I didn't think so.

So what does a wedding for two crazy kids like us look like?

Forget the flowers.  Forget the church.  Forget the dress.  Forget music, invitations, centerpieces, bridesmaids, birds, bubbles, butterflies, the whole shebang.

Because when I was a little girl and my friends were designing their dream weddings, all I cared about was the "happily ever after" part.  I did not give a fuck how it happened so long as it happened.  Whenever I gave any thought to the actual wedding I wanted to elope.

Because when you suffer from anxiety the last thing in the world you want is to be responsible for planning a huge social event where every little detail is super important and you are the center of attention.

In fact when we were first planning our wedding I was having panic attacks just thinking about this stuff.  My husband didn't care how we got married but he did want to have some kind of reception party.  Every time I gave any thought to the cost of this party, or what food to serve or which people should be invited (and which ones to leave out) I wanted to curl up in the fetal position and bury my head under a pillow until it was all over.

It was upsetting me so much I was on the verge of handing over the entire planning of everything to Mummy Dearest and her sisters.  Instead I sat down with my husband and explained how our wedding was ruining my peace of mind and we got to planning my real dream wedding.  A wedding that would really make me happy instead of a nervous wreck.

This made all the difference.  Once I stopped worrying about the wedding I was supposed to have and started planning the wedding I really wanted it turned out to be a lot of fun.

I went online and searched for a minister who would be willing to come to our home for the ceremony.  I narrowed it down to three candidates, all of whom I had spoken with on the phone and all of whom seemed to be absolutely lovely people.  I couldn't decide so I let my husband choose.  He ended up choosing the lady minister because he liked the idea of us being married by a woman.  I thought this was adorable.

She gave us three ceremonies to choose from: religious, spiritual, or civil.  We picked the civil ceremony because it was the shortest...and then we cut that in half.  What it lacked in religious wording it made up for in flowery poetry on love and marriage.  We knew that if we happened to look at each other while she wsa saying that drivel we were likely to burst into derisive snorts of laughter.  We gleefully crossed out anything that wasn't "Do you?  Do you?  Done."

It looked very similar to this.

We simplified the guest list to just immediate family members and wore whatever we happened to have in our closets.  Fortunately I had already purchased my dream wedding dress four years earlier.  It was a beautiful deep red and cream coloured sari I bought to attend my friend Jen's Hindu wedding.

(What?  Jen is a totally popular Indian name.  Shut up.)

We bought frozen hors d'ouvres to serve and put Mummy Dearest in charge of the cake.

It was a month before the wedding (it was on Canada Day in fact) when we found out I was pregnant with Frack. How much of a piss off would it have been to put all kinds of work into a wedding reception only to find out you can't even drink at your own party?  But with our easy DIY, backyard wedding it wasn't a big deal.  We saved the news, deciding that our wedding day was the most efficient perfect time to tell our families.

We were married on a beautiful summer day in front of our house at sunset.  The minister, I guess thinking we'd regret our edits, ended up improvising, sneaking in a little romantic poetry after all.  We managed to behave ourselves and only exchanged amused smirks at each other.  The bakery fucked up the wedding cake and decorated it in hideous orange roses.  This greatly upset my mother but, I don't know, I was kind of tickled by the idea of an ugly wedding cake.

There was no dancing, no long speeches or endless toasts.  We made one toast in which we announced our pregnancy.  My mother cried.  We ate our fresh out of the oven, frozen hors d'ouvres and ugly wedding cake and it was one of the happiest days of my life.

Some girls are in their glory when planning their wedding.  It's their special day where they get to be Queen, and that's all fine and good for them.   But I'm not that girl.

For me a wedding is a lot like having a baby.  The more planning you put into the birth, the more likely something will go wrong/differently than you planned and you will be disappointed.  It doesn't really matter how the baby is born so long as they get here. What matters is what happens for the rest of their life.

In marriage it doesn't really matter how the wedding goes so long as you get so say your "I do"s.  It's just a day.  What matters is what happens for the rest of your lives together.

Happy Rotten Anniversary!