Altared

by Colleen Curran

  The dress was altered and shipped to Montana, and soon Eric and I were packing for our own journey in a rental car with our dogs in tow. We would be flying back east right after the wedding and continuing on to a honeymoon in the doctor-sanctioned Caribbean, leaving the dogs behind with Eric's parents. I was excited to see all our friends and family gathered together in a place that we loved, but I no longer wanted to be the center of the show, the woman of the hour. After watching my best-laid plans orbit into chaos, I wanted to take a backseat and let our guests enjoy themselves. And they did, with gusto. They went horseback riding up mountain trails and fly-fishing on the Yellowstone River; they frolicked in the natural hot springs pool at the resort and drank beers from the adjacent honky-tonk bar. I couldn't help but notice the guests who'd left their young children at home: They seemed especially liberated by their freedom, while I felt as though mine was becoming increasingly curtailed. What had I gotten myself into?

  The morning of the ceremony, I nursed a headache with Diet Coke and Aleve. I had planned to do my hair and makeup myself, but Eric's mother was wise enough to hire a nice woman from a local salon to come help me on my Big Day. My mom came by to keep me company, and so did my close friend and maid of honor, Anya. When it was time to squeeze into my dress, it was tight and uncomfortable, and I trudged up a hill to the meadow where everyone was waiting. The jacket was boxy and big, which would have worked fine, except that I had lost the “line” that made the outfit work in the first place—my stomach stuck out and my chest rose to meet my neck too quickly. I felt like a plus-sized woman trying to get away with wearing a slender woman's dress. I had always thought that walking down the aisle would be a moment I would try my hardest to remember in the future but would never quite be able to summon; instead, I recall it easily, because the contents of my mind were so mundane: I was not at my best on the day when every woman is supposed to be at her best. It was late in the afternoon, my usual pregnancy nap time, but I had to smile and put on a show. I had at least six more hours of hosting ahead of me. I already felt exhausted.

  During the cocktail hour, while everyone was sipping prosecco, I slugged a giant bottle of Pellegrino. At the reception, I watched from the sidelines as my mother and aunt led a group of women, young and old, into a spontaneous cabalistic circle on the dance floor. They flaunted their bodies freely, all of them taking turns in the center of the circle for solos that grew more and more flamboyant, while I clutched my pashmina close and laughed in delight at their lack of inhibition. Six months earlier, I would have joined them. There were moments that moved me out of my spectator's role, such as when Eric and I danced slowly together, or during some especially charming and heartfelt toasts. But for the most part, I felt I had missed my chance to be the kick-up-her-heels bride and had already taken on the somber role of the expectant mother, with all its obligations and responsibilities.

  Not that I wish I'd acted otherwise. It would have seemed forced, dumb even, to carry on as if things hadn't changed. In many ways, giving up stewardship of my own wedding was good preparation for the greater surrender I'd have to make once our child actually arrived. Perhaps it was enough to observe the revelry from this weirdly ambivalent vantage point instead of as a true participant. I may have lost the freedom of the carefree bride, but I was getting a jump start on celebrating the beginning of our family.

  As the reception wound down, while waiters cleared tables and my father-in-law tipped the band, one of our friends announced a midnight migration toward the hot springs pool. We told everyone to go on ahead, we'd come by to say hi in a few minutes, although I intended to take Eric's hand and turn in for the night instead. I was tired, my feet hurt, and I couldn't wait to get out of that dress. But then I felt a twinge of guilt; all these people, who had come all this way for us, were trying to keep the evening alive; we owed it to them to bear witness to their good time.

  When we arrived at the pool, about twenty of our friends were already in their bathing suits waist deep in water, cavorting and passing each other cans of Budweiser. I asked Eric if he wanted to jump in. He grinned and said, “I will if you will.”

  Eric stripped to his boxer shorts, and I neatly folded his custom-made suit so it wouldn't get wet. “Come on,” Eric said, so I slipped off my shoes and put down the jacket and pashmina. And then, in my extremely tight wedding dress, I took my husband's hand and the two of us descended the steps of the steaming hot pool.

  A loud cheer went up from the crowd, and I felt myself reinhabiting my body from wherever I had been all night, floating above and watching. Eric pirouetted and then splashed down backward into the water. I wasn't about to do a swan dive, but I carefully plunged in headfirst and then came up for air. I tried to stand, but my waterlogged dress suddenly weighed about fifty pounds. I dog-paddled in deeper. Someone threw me a beer and made a joke about how our baby ought never to see any photos from this moment, with me clearly pregnant and drinking—and in a hot tub, no less. I laughed, cracked open the can, and sank into the water, forgetting for a moment my responsibilities to the child on the way and enjoying my own party at last.

  Postscript: A year after my wedding, The New York Times reported that due to increased demand, wedding dress manufacturers were now creating maternity lines.

  my so-called indie wedding

  lori leibovich

  A few months before I got married, I wrote a manifesto. In it, I railed against the multibillion-dollar wedding industry, whose sole purpose, as I saw it, was to perpetuate outdated traditions, stunt individuality, and scam vulnerable couples. I called on my fellow brides-to-be to hold tight, stay firm, and make sure that every part of their wedding accurately reflected them, or their partner. I said it was up to us, the first generation of what I called “Indiebrides,” to break free from the tulle handcuffs that had been binding women for centuries and make sure that our weddings reflected our fiery, feminist selves.

  My manifesto was the first article published on Indie-bride.com, a Web site I founded soon after I became engaged. I started the site for women like me who didn't see themselves represented in the shiny pages of mainstream wedding magazines. I wanted to create a place where women could grapple with the thorny and emotional sub-jects—family, faith, money, tradition, commitment—that inevitably get dredged up when one plans a wedding. “Indiebride is a place for would-be brides who have more on their minds than planning a reception, women who never for a second believed in Prince Charming and who have not, despite all of the cultural cues, been breathlessly awaiting their wedding day for their whole life,” I wrote in the manifesto.

  An initial e-mail announcing Indiebride, designed like a formal wedding invitation with curlicue script and delicate flowers, was sent to one hundred friends. Within days, the site had hundreds, then thousands of visitors. These women (and a few men) gathered in the chat area, Kvetch, debating gender politics and offering each other advice on everything from meddling mothers-in-law to how to get grass stains out of a secondhand gown bought on e-Bay. I published an essay about a bachelor party that got so out of hand the marriage ended before it began, and a six-hundred-dollar Vegas-themed wedding where the groom dressed up as Elvis and the bride like a showgirl, and the guests ate deli sandwiches and danced to the King late into the night. I posted an interview with a therapist who counseled brides having second thoughts. Soon I was being invited onto radio shows and interviewed in newspapers about “Indieweddings,” what National Public Radio dubbed “independent productions that make up in integrity and creativity what they lack in budget.”

  In these interviews, I admonished women not to let their weddings control their lives and happily dispensed money-saving tips—buy your dress at a sample sale, serve homemade cookies and cupcakes instead of wedding cake, ditch the band or DJ and use an iPod and a pair of speakers instead. I reassured engaged women across the country that if after all the planning and obsessing, their wedding day wasn't the happiest day of their lives, like the magazines insist it must b
e, that's okay—the pressure to have the ultimate wedding was just another way for society to make women feel like failures. “Don't do anything you don't feel comfortable with,” I said again and again. “Be true to yourself.”

  And I meant it. There was only one problem. No matter how many times I told other women to let go, be themselves, buck tradition, save money—I couldn't shake the exacting standards I had set for my own wedding. In the early morning hours after my husband and I were engaged on a Martha's Vineyard beach in August 2000, I scratched my first of many, many wedding lists. This one, titled “Musts,” included a country setting, a weekend-long celebration, wildflower arrangements, sumptuous food, dancing all night…. When we finally settled on a date (the following August) and chose the place (a restored barn in western Massachusetts attached to an inn) I realized I wanted a bacchanal more than a wedding, and my vision, it soon became clear, would require a lot of cash and massive amounts of planning. With that, of course, came a lot of stress.

  Within months my desk was littered with color-coded folders stuffed with clippings, and the walls of my office were plastered with Post-its. I spoke daily with my mother (who tackled the details with the same sense of urgency as myself) and to a coterie of far-flung vendors. I had to figure out how to air-condition the barn, find dozens of rooms in a tiny Massachusetts town for our guests to stay in, and convince my beloved hairdresser to give up a Saturday at her salon and drive three hours north because I couldn't entrust my tresses to anyone in the Berkshires…. Deep down I think I knew, during these chaotic months, that there was some disconnect between my public and private personae. But it was the day I found myself at Barneys shimmying into a couture wedding gown that cost more than three months' rent that I had to come to terms with the incontrovertible truth: There was nothing very “indie” about me or my wedding.

  It was a stale gray February afternoon when I emerged from the Barneys dressing room in a body-skimming dress made of such supple silk I still have fantasies about tasting it. I mounted the platform in front of a three-way mirror and studied my reflection. Instead of feeling like a princess, as the bridal magazines say, I felt like (a shorter, darker) Uma Thurman. The dress, had it not been white, would not have been out of place on the red carpet at the Oscars, and I knew I had to have it. My friend Heather, the most fashionable person I know, was with me, and she practically cried as she studied the lace detailing on the train and the spray of sequins on the bodice. The saleswoman fluttered over to me and began to arrange a veil on top of my head. “No, no,” I said. “No veil for me.” The woman, reed-thin, wearing a perfectly cut beige suit, looked at me skeptically. “Oh, you don't mean that,” she said. “You have to wear a veil! That's what brides do! Plus, you need something to tie everything together.” After a few more rounds of polite arguing, I finally relented, saying I would try it on “for fun,” certain that when I saw myself in it I would dissolve into chuckles. I thought most brides who wore veils looked like they were playing dress-up or wearing a costume, not to mention that veils historically represented purity and virginity. But when the sleek saleswoman planted a cathedral-length piece of tulle on top of my head, and I saw myself in the mirror, I gasped audibly—from horror or delight I'm not quite sure. And somehow I walked out of the store with a three-hundred-dollar piece of gauze I didn't want or need.

  Now, I'm not a total hypocrite—remember, part of what I preached was that a couple should have the wedding they want, not the one their parents want, or the one they feel they should have, and in that way I stayed pretty true to myself. The wedding was elegant, but not fussy. Every guest was known to and loved by me and my husband. The word people used again and again to describe the weekend was “warm.” Besides the veil, there really wasn't anything that didn't feel right. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen, we nixed a videographer, knowing we'd never watch the video, and we ditched the idea of wedding cake (and the inevitable smashing-cake-in-each-other's-face photo, too) in favor of a tower of cupcakes topped with marzipan replicas of our dog and cats. It goes without saying that I did not don a garter, toss a bouquet, or use the word “obey” in my vows. The fact that I drove myself—not to mention my husband—mad by my neurotic fixation on details such as whether or not we should serve sea bass at the reception (it was just becoming endangered) is really part and parcel of my obsessive personality—I've never been mellow in my life. So when I advised other brides not to get too wrapped up in planning their own weddings, undoubtedly I was projecting onto them what I wished I could do myself: lighten up. But weddings are obviously exactly the wrong time to try to change your personality. By encouraging others to fly in the face of tradition, I think I wanted to live vicariously through them. As much as I sometimes wish I were a renegade, that's just not me. I'm essentially a good girl, and when it came to my wedding I just wasn't going to wear a red dress or elope to Vegas. Did this threaten my street cred? I wasn't sure.

  Which is why I always become a little nervous when people I know through Indiebride ask me about my wedding. I imagine they're expecting to hear about a backyard BBQ where I wore overalls and served burgers, or a bare-foot-on-the-beach ceremony with me in a sarong and one of our friends officiating. When I tell them the truth, that we got married on a Saturday night, with a rabbi presiding and a traditional Jewish chuppah sheltering us, that I wore a white dress and a veil, and that we had a sit-down dinner for 180 people, I worry I'm going to disappoint them. But the important thing is that I didn't disappoint myself. Much to my surprise, my wedding was—as the bridal magazines suggested—the happiest day of my life. Not because I followed the prescriptions dispensed by the magazines or bought into the fantasies they tried to peddle. But because when our wedding day finally arrived, I allowed myself to truly inhabit it—and celebrate the fact that my husband and I had found each other. I allowed myself, in other words, to experience joy—and then to savor it.

  Last year, while I was taking an introduction-to-meditation class, my teacher instructed us to close our eyes and tap into a feeling of peace and contentment. Sitting cross-legged on a pillow, I immediately conjured images from our wedding day and played them like a slide show in my mind as I deepened my breathing. I imagined the dappled sunlight filtering through the maple tree outside the window of my hotel room, and the cloudless, cobalt sky. I felt the tickle of the makeup brushes as my hairdresser applied some combination of cosmetics that made me look not like a bride, but like me, only way better, and the crisp mountain breeze that kissed the back of my neck as I walked down the aisle at sunset flanked by my parents. I recalled the taut, somewhat painful feeling in my face from the might of my smile. My thoughts drifted to the reception and the earthy scent of wildflowers and late-summer fruit wafting from the centerpieces on the table, the footthumping bluegrass music, and how for hours I flailed my arms, shook my ass, and twirled around the dance floor with my friends.

  Finally, before I fell into a state of meditative calm, I summoned the image of myself and my husband at three a.m. on our wedding night at a house down the road from the barn. We gathered with my hard-partying Argentine cousins and some of our closest friends. Someone had taken all of the leftover food and arranged it on a table, and we picked at cold steak and crusty rolls. My husband and I had gotten up to dance, grabbed hands, and leaned backward, spinning each other wildly in circles like children on a playground. My hair, perfectly styled a few hours earlier, was a tumbled mess, and the back of my gown lay in shreds. My feet were bleeding from dancing for so hard and for so long. My husband's suit jacket had been tossed on the floor, his white dress shirt rumpled and spotted with sweat stains. “Beautiful Day” by U2 screamed from the boom box on the floor, and I didn't want the music or the night to end. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in that swirl of motion, our hands clasped, our eyes locked, free, but also joined.

  weddings aren't just for straight people anymore

  anne carle

  We walked out of the back of the house onto the deck and th
ere they were. Our oldest friends, our favorite coworkers, our grad school allies, our families. Our entire support system right there in our backyard. We'd sent 110 invitations, and 108 people said yes and then actually showed up exactly when we told them to. They brought food, abundant, delicious food, like we asked. They bought gifts. Some stood and spoke about our meaning, individually and together, in their lives. On our right was a string duet someone had donated; on our left was a band waiting to give what some of our friends called the best local live show they'd ever seen. And way in the back was the caterer friend who donated her unmatched organizational skills. A wedding photographer friend and a wedding videographer friend each donated their services, too. And there we were. Standing right up front under the arch, which was under our Bradford pear tree, in our backyard, in Richmond, Virginia. Beside us was our “officiator,” Barb. Our spiritual guide, our mentor, one of the best therapists in town, our friend and outdoor adventure buddy. We smiled back at our people, blindly, as the five p.m. sun lit us up. Slowly that sun descended below our cedar fence, as Barb got things rolling.

  We got married on October 15, 2005. We didn't have a priest, a judge, or a marriage license. We didn't have wedding gowns or tuxedoes. We didn't have a church or a high-rise cake with two plastic people on top. Some of this we chose not to have. But because we're gay, some of it wasn't our choice. What did we have? A community event, a unifying celebration, a commitment ceremony. We designed it to be us presenting ourselves to our community and committing ourselves to each other before them. And more than that, it was designed to get a commitment from our community to stand by us, to rally around us, to think about us and our commitment.