One (Good Enough) Day

 
I just threw away three bridal magazines my mom bought me.* We had flipped through them and mocked them to pieces back in March, but they've been collecting dust on top of my sump pump since then.

Bridal magazines are not designed to be helpful, unless you need help spending a crazy amount of money. I guess their checklists are also helpful if you need to laugh until you cry. I've had to turn elsewhere for real wedding help. It's handy that my mom has planned plenty of weddings, but I've also explored books and blogs lately.

I devoured the book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. It is not about how to plan a wedding; it's about how planning weddings got insane.

Here is a short interview with the author, Rebecca Mead:




Here is another (audio only) interview with Mead, in which she talks about why weddings have gotten so huge in the last generation: It's at least partially because getting married isn't as big of a deal as it once was. It used to be that a wedding marked the day you moved out of your parents' home, the first time you lived with and slept with your spouse, etc. Now that people are getting married older and so many couples live together already, we throw extravagant parties to make marriage feel like as big of a transition as it used to be. 

Mead's book helped me think through whether any given wedding detail was something Blade and I actually wanted or just something that wedding companies have poured untold amounts of money into marketing to us.

While I was reading One Perfect Day, I was also reading Good News for Anxious Christians, which is about manipulative trends within popular evangelical culture. I couldn't help but see parallels with the wedding industry.** Both the wedding industry and the more wishy-washy evangelical churches put pressure on you to feel certain emotions, and if you don't feel those emotions, there must be something wrong with you. I don't do well under that kind of pressure. I get all panicky and resentful until I understand what's actually going on.

---

The blog A Practical Wedding has been the most helpful resource for actually planning my wedding (as opposed to helping me understand why wedding stuff makes me crazy). Though I frequently disagree with the blog's politics, I appreciate that the posts are full of thought-provoking, tongue-in-cheek writing rather than just collections of stylized pictures. If you're involved in a wedding anytime soon, I recommend exploring the site; I've especially enjoyed the posts: Bride in Exile, Lazy (and possible cheap) Girl's Guide ..., The Slavery of Choice, and Wedding Overexposure.


So Blade and I aren't going for a perfect day. We're going for a good enough day. And if we're married by the end of it, that is plenty good enough.



*I've kept one magazine, mostly because my mom shoplifted it from a bridal salon. She claims it was supposed to be free, that it just looked free, but there's definitely a price tag on the front cover. I can't seem to throw it away just yet due to its shoplifted hilarity. (Seriously? It just looked free? Who thinks like that?)

**My friend Steve saw me toggling between both books and said, "I like that about you." What? "That when you get mad you find a book about whatever's making you mad so you can figure out why."

Let me shun that.

No more of that.

 
After helping with a couple of beautiful-but-stressful handmade weddings in the past few years, my mom and I decided that we did not have the energy or the time to fill my wedding with carefully crafted details. I've heard over and over that it's all in the details, but we know it's really not. Also, we have witnessed how those lovely, thoughtful touches can completely consume the bride and her helpers.

And so we were resolved: No projects that would take over our lives and homes. Only small, get-it-done-in-an-afternoon projects allowed.

Then my mom had ankle surgery. She thought it would only put her out of commission for a few days, but when she recovered from the anesthetic, the doctor told her she needed to stay off her feet for six weeks. We had the following, surprisingly lucid, conversation mere hours after her surgery.

Mom: How would you feel about knitted flowers?

Me: Sewn onto a baby hat or something?

Mom: No, for your wedding.

Me: Where are these going to come from?

Mom: I'm going to knit them. I'll make enough to use for centerpieces for all the tables. And your bouquet, if you wanted.

Me: You couldn't even believe how much energy Lauren spent on her flowers, and those were just paper.

Mom: It'll be adorable! Come on, what else am I going to do for the next few weeks?

Me: This is the Vicodin talking, right? This will wear off?

Finally, I told her that if she could find a picture of knitted flowers that didn't look precious, like they belonged on a baby hat or an old lady Christmas sweater, then we'd talk about her knitting flowers. Honestly, I thought she would be too drugged to remember we'd ever had this conversation, or possibly that she was having a stroke and couldn't control her words. But two hours later she called me back.

Mom: Knitted flowers are horrible. Forget that.

Me: Thank you.

Mom: I'm making them out of paper instead.

Me: Oh, that way madness lies.

I tried to talk her out of it; for one thing, I didn't want her to have to spend all her spare time fussing over my wedding. More importantly, it's a slippery slope from handmade flowers to handmade wedding favors and handmade emotional breakdowns.

But I relented. The flowers looked good and were less time-intensive than Lauren's, and they gave Mom something to do while she rested her foot and watched Slings and Arrows.*

At a follow-up appointment about her ankle, her doctor found that she has a new injury, this time in her elbow. It's the kind of injury that comes from performing detailed, repetitive tasks, like, say, making hundreds of tiny paper flowers. Let this be a warning.


 *See? She does have good taste, knitted flowers notwithstanding.

Thanksgiving for a Habitat

The header at the top of the page is a picture of what my brother gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It was a frame containing six photographs from around our house in Texas, one photograph for each letter of my name.

The first "A" is a picture of the swing set in our backyard.

"L" is our roof, complete with Christmas lights.

"Y" is our mailbox and a late afternoon glare on our cul de sac.

The first "S" is a curtain rod from our kitchen.

The second "S" is the gate to the fence around our backyard.

The last "A" is a ladder. I can't remember if it's ours or our neighbors.

Thomas would have had his work cut out for him if my parents had gone through with naming me "Katherine."

I have lived in that house since I was two. My parents designed it, or at least modified the house plans. No one else has ever lived in it.

In August, when my brother goes to college, my parents will move into a new house, which is being built right now.

The new house will not be much smaller than the old one. It will be a little more open, and it will have one less bathroom. Mom says she doesn't want to clean three bathrooms if only two people live there.

The only other difference is that our old house on Oakwood sits on two acres of land, most of it covered in oak trees. It was a great place to play when Thomas and I were little, and more lately his friends have used it for paintball, but it's overgrown with poison ivy now.

So I guess it makes sense for my family to move. Thomas will be in Arizona, and it is unlikely that I'll move back to Texas any time soon, much less to Greenville. I am still sad about it, though, because that is my swing set I used to fall out of and my gate I used to accidentally leave open. I have never lived anywhere else but campus housing.

The main thing that will bother me is having that new house smell when I visit my parents. It will smell like new wood and new beige paint and new upholstry. I babysit in a few cookie cutter houses that smell like that. I cannot figure out how they smell so new; they should smell like Cheerios and Play Doh and crayons and wet wipes and baby's hair. Part of it, I think, is that these kids only play with battery-operated toys.

The townhouse I live in for the summer smells like candles and soy sauce and banana bread and gas from the stove and cigarettes from the back porch. Mostly, though, it smells like outside, because we keep our windows open, partly because we like the breeze, but partly because we can't really figure out how to close some of them. The furniture is mismatched, we have to jiggle the handle to make the downstairs toilet stop making noise, and there is an odd light fixture hanging just above eye level in the middle of the room. Fewer people hit their head on it now that we have covered it with ugly, eye-catching pink fabric.

Those things all make it feel homey to me, even though they're nothing like home. I just hate that new house smell.

---

"A living-room, the catholic area you

(Thou, rather) and I may enter

without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts

each visitor with a style,

a secular faith: he compares its dogmas

with his, and decides whether

he would like to see more of us (Spotless rooms

where nothing's left lying about

chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared

with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,

though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling

of bills being promptly settled

with cheques that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant,

only Thou and I, two regions

of protestant being which nowhere overlap:

a room is too small, therefore,

if its occupants cannot forget at will

that they are not alone, too big

if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel

for raising their voices ..."

- W. H. Auden, from "The Common Life"