Weddingbee Blog

My mother and I have never gotten along particularly well, and the wedding is certainly making it worse.  She perpetually says things and makes outrageous demands which we accommodate, and then a few months later she forgets she ever said anything, and blames it on us that we are wasting our time doing everything upon which she insisted.

The latest screaming match we’ve had is over the yarmulkes for our wedding.  Sometime in March, my mother called up with the idea that she wanted hand-crocheted yarmulkes for the ceremony.  I just happened to have the conversation on speaker phone, so my fiance overheard this, and started making awful faces and waving his hands in the area and mouthing “NO! NO!” over and over again.  I told my mother we didn’t love the idea and we would just rather order them like everyone else, and she called me a selfish b**** and promply hung up on me. 

In order to try to be accommodating, we decided that we would do the crocheted yarmulkes, but they had to look nicer than a fuzzy tea cozy plopped on someone’s head.  I worked out a pattern with a Star of David in it, and they came out looking… acceptable.  The thing is, I loathe making them.  Each one takes about 3.5 hours, and I need to make roughly 115 of them.  At this point, I need to make about 3 per week to finish them in time for the wedding, and I work 80 hours per week in a lab, so basically, I’ve sacrified eating and socializing to try to get these done.  I hate doing them, but we figured it would make my mother happy…

This weekend, I came to town to visit my parents who live a few hours away, and my mother and I engaged in two flat out screaming matches over these yarmulkes.  It started when she asked how many I had left to do (approx. 75) and proceeded to call me “stupid and incompetent” for trying to undertake such a huge project.  I informed her that it was HER idea and I never wanted to make them, and she blew up at me.  I turned to my fiance and asked him to back me up since he overheard the whole conversation — not to give his opinion on whether it was stupid, or if he liked them, just to say flat out that it was, indeed, my mother’s idea.  And he sat there and refused to say anything.

This happens all the time with my mother, and my fiance never says anything and lets her get away with it.  I understand him not saying anything if it were a matter of opinion and he wouldn’t want to favor anyone, but this is an issue of whether or not my mother said something.  I am sick and tired of him never defending me, especially when I didn’t want to make these from the beginning but my fiance was the one who told me I had to be nice to my mother and do them.  I don’t know what to do at this point — I understand he doesn’t want to create conflict, but I am really getting to the point where I am really angry at him for letting this happen all the time.  I’ve brought it up to him, and he just shrugs it off and doesn’t want to upset my mother. 

Am I wrong to expect him to, once in a blue moon, when it’s actual truth and he knows it, to back me up?  Or is he right and I should just sit around and let my mother scream at me and call me stupid and pretend like it was my idea from the beginning?  If we don’t meet her demands she calls me a selfish b**** repeatedly and tells all her friends how awful and miserable I am, but if we do, then they come back and bite me in the tush.

At this point, I can’t decide if I’d rather officially break it off with my fiance or my mother! (kidding) 

julieulie

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