Weddingbee Blog

Let me start out by saying this—I was never going to change my name. Never. Ever. I wasn’t going to, and I didn’t. So there’s that spoiler out of the way.

Of course, we all know that life is a little more complicated than “I’ll just make up my mind and stick to it no matter what.” Even though I may have known all of my adult life that I would never change my name, it certainly doesn’t mean that I haven’t had many, many thoughts and feelings about that decision. In fact, I often tell people that if I were writing a dissertation all over again I would want to do qualitative research on this topic. Not only am I fascinated by how and why people make this decision, but I’m also interested in whether there are ways to make this process easier and more equitable for all parties involved. Because, until the day comes when men get married and then are asked, “So, what’s your new name?” then I think we (all of us, regardless of gender) have more work to do on this issue.

Side note, and I hope this is obvious but I’m saying it anyway—I’m writing only about my own experience, thoughts, and feelings here. Of course I support, without judgment, whatever choice people want to make about their own name. That said, I do wish it were more common for men to change their names, women to keep their names, and any and all parties to create new names (hyphenated, made up, or otherwise). I have a hunch that would create so much more freedom and permission for everyone, to replace many of the judgments, assumptions and expectations that currently exist.

Certainly those gendered assumptions about names definitely affected how I felt about the name change issue in my relationship with Mr. FW. As you no doubt recall, Mr. FW was not always a mister and it’s been interesting for me to notice how his gender transition has impacted the way I was navigating my own thoughts and feelings about our names and our future family.
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Sheesh—I can’t believe it’s been over two weeks since my last post. So much for coming back “regularly,” huh? Sorry about that. As it turns out, returning from one’s honeymoon right as the holiday season is getting into full swing is perhaps even more crazy-making than wedding planning.

During this time each year, Mr. FW and I typically make a special shopping trip to buy a few new ornaments for our tree, but this year when we looked around at a house full of wedding decorations and honeymoon souvenirs, we just couldn’t imagine trying to cram more stuff into our space. So, what did we do? We re-purposed.

You remember our string balls, right?

Well, after putting in some hard time as our lovely wedding centerpieces (and I can’t wait to show you just how lovely they were!!), some of these lucky balls are once again bringing a little cheer to our lives…
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Oh hive, it feels like I’ve been away for such a long time—but I guess that’s understandable since SO MUCH has happened in the last few weeks. First and foremost, we got married (obvs)!

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It’s 1:00 a.m. on the day of our wedding, and I’m writing this from my hotel room. Party Person N is asleep nearby and junior party person M is asleep in the living room (yes, my hotel room has a living room!), yet here I am so amped up that I can barely even fathom the thought of closing my eyes. I know I need to sleep, but I feel this intense need to keep my eyes open and take all of this in—like sleeping for even a second might mean missing out on part of this crazy-wonderful-magical time. I’ve been sensing the ’wedding bubble’ around me all day today, and I know that the feeling of this moment won’t last forever. I’m trying very hard to take the sage advice offered in my bee twin Miss Seal’s last post, and just breathe and stay in that moment for as long as I can.

Tomorrow morning I will wake up and do a little bit of a decoration set-up, then I will sit back and wait for all the rest of the meticulously planned pieces to fall into place. To say that I’m thrilled wouldn’t even begin to cover it.

To the hive:
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Of the many things that I love about my appearance, perhaps my very favorite physical features are my eyes and my hair. Nearly every time I look in the mirror, I notice one or both of those and I can’t help but smile at my reflection. It’s not vanity, and I hope it doesn’t come across that way. It’s just that I truly believe everyone should have aspects of themselves (physical, relational, emotional, intellectual, etc.) that they can acknowledge as strong, positive features (even if, at times, it’s simultaneous with less positive features—for instance my acne-prone skin).

So, given this love affair I have with my eyes and hair, you’d think I’d have spent more time considering my wedding hair and makeup. But, in actuality, I had one very brief moment of hair inspiration and zero ideas about makeup. I don’t know if it was anxiety or just feeling overwhelmed with other stuff, but I showed up to my trial session with one inspiration picture and almost no ability to articulate what I was looking for. Thankfully my amazing hair and makeup artist Lucy Flint knew just what questions to ask to get a sense of my wedding day vision, and then she began to work her magic. (Side note: She even continued with said magic as the building was rocked by a 3.8 magnitude earthquake. That’s running a business in the Bay Area for ya!)

Over the course of a few hours we tried out a makeup look, with and without false lashes, and two different hairstyles. I was so pleased, relieved, and excited about how great everything turned out that I wanted to go back for a second trial to do a bit of a different hair version. You know how I love me some options!

Forgive the poor lighting—it was dark by the time we finished.
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Today marks the two week point for the Ferris Wheels, and I gotta be honest that it feels crazy-making to know we’re so close yet there’s still so much that needs to get finished. Some of those last-minute tasks make sense: escort cards (because we’re still trying to finalize our guest list), seating arrangements (because we’re still trying to finalize our guest list), and baking stuff for the dessert buffet (because there’s only so long that a baked good will last).

Then there are other tasks that I really wish had been completed earlier, but for one reason or another they’re still up in the air, like the videographer (because we didn’t decide until the last minute that we even wanted one) and wedding party gifts (because of various snafus in the production process). But perhaps the biggest last-minute project(s) has to do with my dress.

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Yep, today Mr. FW and I made the arduous ten minute trek to City Hall, and we completed the shockingly easy task of applying for a marriage license. As we walked up the front steps of the building I recalled that the last time I was actually inside the City Hall rotunda was a few years ago when one of my friends married his husband during the brief period of time when gay marriage was legal in California. On that day the entire building was full of lights, cameras, press members, happy couples, and excited guests. But today the place was silent, with only our voices echoing off the marble.
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You know how I said that my mom and I were going through her wedding stuff this past weekend? Well, as part of that conversation I found out the most fascinating thing about her wedding photos—something I’d never noticed in all my years of casually flipping through her wedding album every now and then.

She showed me this picture:

And she focused my attention on one particular detail.
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This past weekend I flew back to Georgia to spend a weekend with my mom, brothers, and my grandparents. In all the crazy hustle and bustle of last-minute wedding planning (24 days and counting, gah!), it was nice to get away from the stress for a bit and reconnect with family.

While I was home there was a lot of wedding talk of course, which spurred my mom to pull out some of her own wedding stuff. As soon as I saw her veil and headpiece in the dress box, I couldn’t resist trying it on.

Here’s my beautiful mother wearing her veil over thirty years ago.

And here I am—proving that this look was much better on her than it is on me.
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In ways large and small, and ways that I don’t even know yet, marriage will change a lot about our relationship because of the meaning it holds both for us and for other people. I have been a staunch advocate of marriage equality for as long as I can remember, but being on the verge of marriage myself really illuminates all the ways that marriage is different from a civil union. Those changes I referenced in my last post, well, I’m not sure if or when they would’ve happened if Mr. FW and I weren’t getting married.

It seems to me that people have been viewing us differently since we got engaged, and I think it’s because they know what a marriage is, they know what it means, and they know how to relate to it. It’s not like we didn’t have a serious relationship before, because we did. But our relationship looks somehow more significant to people now, and thus they react to it differently. Like everyone else, we had the option of entering into a civil union or domestic partnership earlier in our relationship, but we wanted to get married. And marriage is not the same as a civil union or a domestic partnership. The proof of this is that even heterosexual couples avail themselves of these options in order to, say, take advantage of their partner’s health insurance benefits, and they can do so prior to the point where they feel “ready” to get married. For me personally it sometimes feels like civil unions and domestic partnerships are talked about as if they are “wedding light.” I don’t necessarily see it that way, and I’m sure queer couples (who enter into those arrangements because they’re the closest they can currently get to marriage) don’t see it that way, but to me it’s pretty clear that marriage is more than just the act of two people legally entangling themselves with one another Read more…

Almost a year ago now, as I was preparing the Thanksgiving meal we would share with Mr. FW’s parents, I became aware that I was spending time reflecting on relationships and family—more specifically, how relationships shape how we define family. I had been casually referring to Mr. FW’s family as “my in-laws” for a while, probably since the time everyone started taking for granted that I would be included in his family functions. Last year though, as I was about to tell someone, “We’re having Thanksgiving dinner with my in-laws,” I stopped myself from using that term, instead changing it to “dinner with Mr. FW’s parents.” In that split second I recall thinking that they would be my legitimate in-laws in less than a year, so I should reserve that term for the time after we’re officially married.

The phrase ricocheted around in my mind for a second longer than it should have before I realized why it felt so uncomfortable.

We spent the majority of our relationship knowing that “officially married” is something we couldn’t have.
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After this wedding, I’m pretty sure I’ll never want to create any sort of signage/labels/tags ever again. Because let me tell ya, our guests are going to be the most fully-informed, non-confused, wedding guests ever. As things have gotten down to the wire we decided to nix a few of the signs on our list because, in all of our wedding brain craziness, we came to our senses and realized our guests could probably figure some stuff out on their own (like, say, where the bathrooms are or how in the world to navigate the fifteen feet between the elevators and the ceremony space).

There were some signs that were always non-negotiable for us though, and those were the ones that were meant to be functional while also adding some crucial design flare (and, let’s be honest here, that would make for some incredibly cool detail shots). Labels for the dessert buffet and the candy buffet definitely fell into that category.

As is probably true with all good design, these little devils look much more beautifully simplistic than they actually were to create.
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Having decided to get married on a Friday at the top of the city, and being two people who are completely mesmerized by the city lights, Mr. FW and I didn’t even have to talk with one another about what time of day to have our ceremony. We knew it would be an evening ceremony, after work and after sunset. We were even more sure about this when we visited our site last November to take some pictures of the space after dark. On that night, it was jet black outside—a completely cloudless and fogless evening, and there was the most incredible full moon visible through the windows of our ceremony space. I’m sorry to say that I don’t have photographic documentation of that, so you’ll just have to believe me that it was gorgeous.

In order to be absolutely certain about the lighting conditions on our wedding day, I consulted http://www.timeanddate.com/ to get the lowdown on sundown for November 11, 2011 in San Francisco.

screenshot taken from here

At this point you may be thinking what I was thinking: “What’s the difference between astronomical, nautical, and civil twilight, what do they have to do with sunset, and how do they impact my wedding?” Well folks, I’m here to answer that question for you in as brief and painless a way as possible. And I promise that, if you’re having an evening wedding or an early morning, you do care about this information..
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Apparently the theme of my posts lately is “Ms. FW brags about Mr. FW’s amazingness.” So to continue with that theme, I’d like to tell you about how instrumental Mr. FW was in creating our super-fun rehearsal-dinner invites. It started when we were both standing in line at Michaels (so we could have two separate transactions and thus use two separate 40%-off coupons—obvs) and he wandered over to the one-dollar bargain section, where he picked up the cutest little silverware-set rubber stamp. He suggested that it might be nice to emboss this little knife, fork, and spoon design onto the back of whatever rehearsal-dinner invite we chose. Of course I was all for that, so we snapped up the stamp and then went looking for a coordinating invite.

We fell in love with this design from Invitation Consultants. (FYI…we were really happy with the quality of these invites. The paper has a slight sheen to it that feels very luxe, and they are printed in color on both sides. Also awesome was that we snagged a $10-off coupon from Retail Me Not!)

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I am so flippin’ excited that we’re going to have a photo booth at our wedding! And yeah, I know it’s one of those things that’s been done everywhere at this point, but I honestly don’t care about that in the slightest. The idea of giving our guests a fun, non-dancing activity during our reception is totally worth it to me. (Not that we don’t want people to dance, of course. We just want them to have options.) Our photo-booth package includes a box of props, which is great because it means we don’t have to raid the Halloween stores on November first to find our own (although that did sound kinda fun). But we still wanted to find a way to personalize things just a bit.

I’d seen pictures of those awesome chalkboard speech bubbles, and I thought that might be our answer. But when I talked to Mr. FW about it he seemed concerned. It’s not that he thought it was a bad idea, no no. He just thought it would make me freak out to be near chalkboards on our wedding day. See…I have a bit of a chalk phobia. For realz, just typing out the word “chalk” makes me shiver. I can’t stand anything about it—the way it feels in your hand, the way it sounds when you’re writing with it, the dust it creates when you erase it. Ugh…seriously, it’s a problem.

So Mr. FW went searching for alternatives, and he discovered the ingeniousness of white-board contact paper. Yep, it’s contact paper that you can write on with dry-erase markers. You can probably purchase it a lot of places, but we’re online people so we bought ours on Amazon.

{GoWrite dry erase rolls on Amazon, $8.99}

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