by Susan Wiggs
“…do you think I should email his mother? I’m sure she wants you guys to get engaged, too. I can’t wait to shop for a mother-of-the-bride dress…”
I opened my door. In front of me, every visible surface was covered with flowers. The floor was carpeted in a thick layer of rose petals, tulips drooped from the walls (I later learned that these were held up by the manliest of substances: duct tape), and bright bouquets bloomed from every table in our living room. Crepe paper streamers swagged the perimeter of the room and “Everything” by Michael Bublé, our song, played softly on our stereo.
Standing in the center of it all was Dave, looking more nervous and happy than I had ever seen him.
My mother was still talking: “…you know, your father and I love Dave like a son, so maybe I could just be frank with him and tell him that it’s time to seal the deal…”
“Mommy? MOMMY. I have to go. I have to go!”
“What’s wrong? Did your washing machine overflow?” I could hear her launch into a litany of tips on cleaning up soapsuds as I hung up on her.
Half an hour later, I was perched on Dave’s lap, staring dewy-eyed at the beautiful emerald-cut solitaire he had given me when he asked me, on bended knee, to be his wife.
“I can’t wait to tell my mom!” I gushed. “She and I were just talking about how we didn’t think you’d propose anytime soon!”
“Actually, I was thinking that we could wait until tomorrow to start telling people,” Dave said. “I want tonight just for us, so we can enjoy the moment.”
Yeah, my mom was gonna love that idea.
Thus began my sixteen-month wedding planning journey, an experience that would be defined by my constant attempt to balance my own desires with those of my future husband…and my romance-writing mother. Looking back, the experience was pretty awesome in general, but I’m not going to sugarcoat the fact that there were a few moments of eating-icing-straight-from-the-can stress and Lizzie- Borden-took-an-axe rage.
So this book is my gift to you, who (I’m assuming) are about to embark on a wedding-planning journey of your own. I’m not going to give you any itemized checklists or detailed instructions. I’ll leave that to the experts. I’m just going to share my own story with you—the story of a real gal planning a real wedding with a real budget. I didn’t have peacocks flown in from Spain for some million-dollar reception and I also didn’t hand-make two hundred candles for my guests to take home with them after pulling off a magical wedding for five bucks.
What I did was end up happily ever after with the man of my dreams. I won’t tell you it’s easy. Nothing worth having ever is.
My mom and I have a mostly normal mother-daughter relationship. There were times that we fought like wet cats over the wedding, and other moments when I looked into her eyes and could see how proud she was of me for becoming the woman I am.
Of course, in the first half hour of being engaged, visions of wet cats hadn’t even occurred to me yet. Sitting there with my newly minted fiancé, telling him how important it was for me to share our news with my mom immediately, I had this mental image of my mother’s eyes filling with tears as I put on my perfect, white wedding gown for the first time, of her nodding enthusiastically as she crammed her mouth full of lemon-raspberry cake at our menu tasting, of her excitedly begging me to let her throw me four—no, five!—bridal showers.
So, looking into my glowingly happy face, Dave agreed to allow me one teeny, tiny phone call…to my mother.
SUSAN
If you were to look up the phrase mixed feelings in the dictionary, I suspect you would find a picture of a newly engaged girl’s mother. Of course you want your daughter to find someone to love and cherish her, to build a life and a family with her. But the quest for this elusive person is all very theoretical. Her first love was a squishy doll named “Baby Bobby,” which set the bar pretty low. The idea, we hoped, was that she would trade up.
We used to give nicknames to Elizabeth’s boyfriends. A few I recall are “The Lump,” “The Bottomless Pit” and “The Project.” Some had acronyms: “LAMB” (Little Angry Man Boy) and the unfortunate but accurate “GOAH” (Gayest of All Homosexuals). So as you can imagine, her dad and I had developed a healthy skepticism about her dating choices.
During her senior year of college, she experienced the ubiquitous “Turkey Dump” when a guy known as “The Cipher,” who was supposed to come home to meet us at Thanksgiving, bailed on her. Hiding a big maternal sigh of relief, I uttered all the soothing mom clichés: “There are plenty of other fish in the sea,” “You need a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and “We’ll always have chocolate.”
We both agreed that nothing soothes a woman scorned quite like shopping. And thanks to the insane innovation of Facebook, you can shop online for your next boyfriend. She gave me a guided tour of the guys on her college network who had a crush on her. (Note to girls: Until you’ve found Mr. Right, keep your options open.) Initially, I was not encouraged. There were guys with shirts peeled off, guzzling Jägermeister; guys making Zoolander faces, guzzling Jägermeister; guys giving me the thumbs-up sign, guzzling Jägermeister; guys krumping and guzzling Jägermeister…you get the picture. You’ve seen those pictures. Is guzzling Jägermeister today’s prerequisite to romance? Did Mr. Right exist only in my feverish writer’s imagination?
And then…cue host-of-angels music…she clicked on a picture of Dave. A young, long-haired matinee idol with good grades, good biceps and boyfriend credentials so stellar I was sure he must be hiding something. After all, the guys I write about are made up. “They don’t exist,” I tell my readers.
She brought him home at Christmas. He was even better in person—confident, charming, humble, tender, honest, funny and completely smitten with the work-in-progress that is my daughter. “He’s too good to be true,” I told her. “He’s not a Project.”
* * *
SHARING YOUR BIG NEWS WITH THE WORLD
Dave is an intensely private person (which is why the powers that be have challenged him with a loud-mouthed oversharer of a wife), but he knew that we would have to share the news of our engagement—gushy details and all—with a whole mess of people.
The weekend he proposed, he scheduled a studio session with a photographer to capture the first blush of our engaged bliss. The engagement portrait is a relatively new phenomenon and from the outside it sometimes seems like an extension of the Hallmarketization of the wedding industry. I mean, really, what couple needs extra professional photos when they’re in the middle of planning what will be the most photographed day of their lives?
However, in my humble opinion, engagement portraits serve an important purpose. Picture your home. Now picture your walls papered with photos of you in a giant white dress. Now imagine that those are the only nice photos that exist of you and your honey.
It’s nice and all…but…wouldn’t you like to have at least a handful of gorgeous photos with you and your partner looking a little less…bridal? As beautiful as you’re going to look on your wedding day, the inherently costumey nature of weddings isn’t the easiest thing to base an interior design scheme on. I don’t know about you, but I sure as heck don’t want to feel like I live inside an issue of Modern Bride.
There are other benefits to an engagement photo session, too. Those images will come in handy when you want to announce your engagement in your local newspapers, or when you’re designing your wedding website, or putting together your save-the-dates. And it’s also a great way to get to know your photographer so that you can feel completely comfortable around him or her on the day of your wedding.
Then, again, maybe you don’t like displaying photos of yourself around your house. In which case, skip the engagement portrait. Skip anything you damn well please. This is your wedding.
* * *
“I traded up,” she said.
The only nickname we could pin on this guy was “Canadian Dave.”
Their courtship was a romantic roller-coaster ride
that culminated in the aforementioned proposal. He called my husband to ask for her hand. I later learned he flubbed a key line, telling Jay, “I want to marry your wife. Er, daughter. I want to marry your daughter.”
And lo, it came to pass.
How is it possible to feel such a crazy combination of joy, sorrow, fear, elation, anticipation, apprehension and just out-and-out excitement that you get to put on a wedding?
You’ve never seen her this happy. Not even when you got her a new puppy at seven, or when she made a personal best time at swimming, when she nailed a Chopin nocturne or when her water polo team won a national championship. She was a one-girl Disney movie, bursting into raucous song at inopportune moments.
But you worry. You’ll never have this beloved child all to yourself again. Her heart and her emotional life are now in the care of someone else, still a relative stranger—soon to be a strange relative, perhaps. You think about splitting holidays with her “other” family, you think about all the bumps and bruises that occur in even the most deeply loving relationship. She’s taking a huge leap of faith, and all you can do is stand on the edge of the cliff and pray he’ll be her soft place to fall.
2
START SPREADING THE NEWS
Sharing the news with your family; first decisions—what to decide and what not to decide; planning an engagement party
I’ve got the ring on my finger and the cell phone in my hand…now what?
ELIZABETH
I woke up the morning after Dave had proposed to me wrapped in a fluffy blanket in the honeymoon suite of one of Seattle’s nicest hotels. The night had been absolutely dreamy—Dave and I had turned off our cell phones, ordered room service and spent all evening watching our favorite animated Disney films (a tradition that began in college when we realized we both knew every single word of every single Disney movie ever made). I had slept contentedly, smiling about the call Dave had allowed me to make to my mother the night before. He originally didn’t want to share the news until after we’d had a night just for ourselves to enjoy being newly engaged, but he’d made an exception for my mom. Because, you know, I’m kind of obsessed with her. And she with me. And Dave knew better than to try to get in between that.
“Mommy, Dave just proposed to me!”
“What? He…what?! He DID?! YOU [smacking sound] LITTLE [smack smack] SNEAK!”
“What’s going on, Mommy?”
“I’m beating your father for not telling me!” she laughed, giddy already with the news.
I excitedly recounted Dave’s proposal to me, and told her aaaaaall about the ring.
“Take a picture!” she commanded.
“Okay,” I said. “But we’ve gotta run because Dave’s taking me to the Hotel 1000 for the weekend and they’re waiting for us! I’ll email you the pictures!”
“Great,” my mom replied. Then her voice grew a little shaky. “Oh, baby, I’m so happy for you. I love you. And I love Dave, too! Can I say that? I love him! Tell him I love him! He’s my new son!”
Laughing, I hung up the phone, snapped a couple of pictures of my new ring and of our beautifully decorated condo, sent them to my mom, then let Dave whisk me away for my weekend of blissful romance.
Waking up the next morning, I felt my stomach fill with excited butterflies. Today we would call all our friends and family and tell them our Big News! Yesssss!!! Dave was up with me, and as our cell phones powered up we eagerly chattered about who we would call first. His parents, of course, since they were still in the dark, followed by our grandparents, then our college friends…I was practically wetting myself with excitement.
As my phone turned on, however, it started having one of those cell phone seizures that happens when you’ve received a crap-ton of messages and it has to download them all at the same time. Dave’s was doing the same thing. Odd, because we hadn’t told anyone besides my parents that we were engaged.
Deciding to ignore all the messages, Dave called his dad at home. “Dad, last night I asked Wiggs to be my wife, and she said yes!” (P.S. Dave calls me Wiggs, invented to distinguish me from all the other Elizabeths, Beths, Lizzies, Betties, Birdies and Beppie McBeppersons. I think it’s awesome. It makes me feel like I’m on a sports team.)
Dave was silent for a moment, waiting for his dad to react. I watched his face, eager to see the excitement that I was feeling. Instead, his mouth dropped into a moue of confusion.
“…oh,” he said. “Oh, well, yep—it’s true! We’re engaged!”
Something felt wrong about this. How did his dad know already? I listened to Dave tell his dad how much he loved him and get off the phone. He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Your mother,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“She made a slideshow with the engagement pictures you sent her last night before we left. So…everyone knows.”
Okay, people. Let’s take a time-out. Firstly, that is SO something my mom would do and I’m a dunce for not having seen it coming. Second, it did end up being a nice way for my extended relatives to find out about the engagement. But still, I was furious—and furious that I was furious on what was supposed to be the happiest morning of my life—that I had lost the chance to tell my loved ones myself. And Dave’s poor dad, finding out about his son’s engagement via a slideshow on the internet…not good, Wiggs girls. Not good at all.
We did get lucky, though, because Dave’s mom was abroad and hadn’t checked her email yet. When he finally got hold of her and told her we were getting married, I could practically feel bubbles of happiness popping through the phone and into my ear.
Can I just say, love is magic? Is that too cheesy for you? Sorry, but every bride-to-be feels it, the love and joy that oozes through the phone lines as you spread the news, far and wide. And in the end, despite my mother’s Slideshow of Death (that’s what I call it), we still spent a jubilant morning calling all our friends and gushing about how much we loved each other.
In hindsight, though, I’ll say this to you future MOBs out there: ask your daughter who you’re allowed to share the news with, and be cautious about who you tell. And brides: get ready to have to muzzle your mom if you want to control how your loved ones hear your news. That said, remember that this is an incredibly emotional and happy time for your mom and be kind to her. Don’t ACTUALLY muzzle her. Just, you know, maybe wait until she makes that long-awaited journey to Timbuktu, or better yet, buy her the ticket. Perhaps you could convince your dad to temporarily disable the phones and internet. The goal is to make sure she doesn’t start planning the engagement party with your future in-laws before they even have a clue that their son just decided to become a husband.
It might not happen this way to everyone. You might not worry about controlling the flow of information. Either way, the key is to know what you’re up against. If your mom is wired to the world, you might want to have a word with her about discretion.
Or heck, maybe not. How cool is it to have a mom who gets that excited for you?
Now, it’s easy to see the humor in the whole slideshow debacle. Dave was particularly relieved that we were still able to surprise his mom and his grandparents, and, as for me, I figure gossip spreads in my family like plantar warts on a wrestling team, so I never had any realistic expectation of keeping our engagement secret. Even for one lousy evening.
The part of our engagement I remember most fondly is the part I can take zero credit for: The “engageymoon” was Dave’s invention, and it was perfect. The proposal was our own private moment, enjoyed together in our home, but I was so happy to get away from the mundane elements of everyday life—dirty dishes, noisy neighbors and mail needing to be sorted—to relax in bliss in our suite at the Hotel 1000.
Every couple’s situation is unique. The most fun, successful and romantic engagements seem to happen when the couple gets engaged and celebrates in a way that feels true to them and their personal values. Trust me: I’ve made a study of this.
If you love a grand gesture and
a big production, then that’s how it should go down for you.
If you want to shout your news from the rooftops, grab a mega-phone and go.
If skywriting is your thing, why not?
Spontaneity? Maybe he just falls to his knees while you’re making him a tuna fish sandwich, and begs you to spend eternity with him.
Could be, the event will be triggered by an impending departure—he got into school somewhere. Or he’s being deployed. Or a new job is taking him away from you…or you away from him.
All these situations happen every day, and not just in my mom’s books. And they all work for the couple involved—again, the magic. The key is to be who you are…together.
I know whereof I speak. Just ask Dave. Before we were engaged, he had once caught me, by myself late one night, looking up videos of proposals on YouTube and crying my eyes out. Creepy? Yes. But he (correctly) deduced that I hoped to have our own engagement documented. Not for YouTube; that would have made the poor man’s head explode. But for me, as a keepsake.
So for the sake of posterity, he set up a video camera to capture the proposal, and had an engagement photo shoot scheduled for the next morning. In the photos, you can see all the happiness and excitement of the first few hours we had together. You can also see the blissful ignorance written all over our faces; we had no clue about the can of gardenia-scented wedding worms we’d just opened.
SUSAN
I write the romances, but in real life, Elizabeth is clearly the romantic at heart. From the moment she realized Dave was the One, she fantasized deeply about getting engaged to him. Visualizing her dream was a preoccupation I certainly could understand, since that’s pretty much what I do for a living.
On the other hand, it made me realize that my daughter and I were only at the beginning of a long list of our differences. This was a reminder of something every parent is bound to discover sooner or later: for every mom, there comes a point when you realize your child is her own person, not a miniature version of you.