Weddingbee Blog

I should probably begin this post by saying: I’m Ms. PD. It’s apparently been two months since my last post, after I got frustrated with uploading a video into my recaps. (Also, when I just wrote “recaps,” I accidentally typed “recraps.” Freudian slip from my guilt?) So, hello again! I love what you’ve done with your hair. Anyway.

All my life, I just assumed I’d take my future husband’s last name. So when I first flirted with the idea of not changing my name, it felt positively roguish. It sounds like I’ve been watching too much Downton Abbey (and I have been), but these were my father’s actual words to me when I mentioned the idea to my parents: that simply isn’t done, love. It was all very you-don’t-bring-us-honor-Mulan.

But guess what. I didn’t do it, loves. I’m still EL; he is JD; we are we; love is grand. Before our wedding, there were plenty of resources explaining how to go through the process of changing your name. There weren’t as many about the process of not changing your name. Even though you actually do nothing (no paperwork, no cost)…there’s still a process that I worked through in my mind to come to my decision. So for anyone else who is toying with the idea of not changing your name, here are some questions I asked myself and/or fielded from other people.

(Individual hangers but I’m currently using all four for myself. Worst wife ever.)

To preface: there are a lot of reasons why I chose not to change my last name:

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Here is a quality that does not serve me well in social and professional settings: I am nearly incapable of moderating my facial expressions. I emote—exaggeratedly and often. And it has never been more clear than the photographs captured during our toasts.

First up, my MOH. Guests later remarked how charming, personal, and earnest her speech was—a collection of moments from our shared childhood, teen, and college years, as well as her advice for us.

This is one of those rare photographs where my feelings are captured with absolute, if not squinty and over-emotional, precision:
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In general, I had (and have) very little gastronomic interest in cake that looks like art. I think: wow, that’s beautiful, not wow that looks so delicious that I’m probably going to continue eating leftovers for two weeks after the wedding. (Yes, that happened. Not to PDog- he has standards. Just me, alone, sitting on the floor of our kitchen with a box of cake on my lap.) Anyway, I wanted the most amount of delicious, buttercream cake flavors possible for our guests, and that meant several cakes:

Six, in fact. Six heavenly combinations of creamy icing and sweet ganache and dense, rich butter cake.
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Step 1: Make friends with crazy people and convince them to be in your wedding party.

Step 2: Book a stretch Lincoln Navigator for the ride to the ceremony and then to the reception.
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In the thick of wedding planning, I had this idea. An idea that involved blues and your-grandma’s-favorite-floral tablecloths and mismatched black wrought iron. Also: big, rectangular tables. And round tables too. And all sorts of other stuff that made sense in my head. Some people questioned my garbled ideas, and, really, I can’t blame them. This post is the amalgam of Cath Kidston-inspired fabric, bibliophilia, and…well, basically this is what the fanciest part of my brain looks like.

Though I do enjoy narrating, I think I’ll mostly just grand marshal my own little picture parade. Cue trombones.

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I kind of considered not writing a ceremony post. I thought it would just be like “here are some pictures, and then the usual things happened.” Alas, I want to document my complete wedding, and this is kind of a major part. So here’s our ceremony in one fell swoop- our music choices, how I avoided being given away, our readings, how it felt to all the sudden be married.

Seating/hugging & chatting with people you haven’t seen in awhile music:

• Stick By You- Andrew Lipke
• Baba O’Riley*- London Philharmonic Orchestra
• Don’t Stop Believing- Vitamin String Quartet
• Heavenly Day- Patty Griffin
• Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing- Sufjan Stevens
• All My Days- Alexi Murdoch

*My mom was horrified—horrified—to hear this song pop up as the CD played at our rehearsal the night before. My dad laughed and asked [proudly, I think]: E, is this The Who? My mom paled while my brother dissolved into snickering. I smiled at her and said, No, it’s the London Philharmonic Orchestra. She asked why I hate her. I don’t! I just love ’70s rock. Sorry Mom, and God, and Bach!

Amazing Grace—Sufjan Stevens (Moms & Grandma’s Entrance)

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This week marks nine years since my first date with PDog.

That first date lasted for 11 hours. It involved a gelato, and the swings of a local park, and a minor car accident, and that teenage feeling like you’re going to explode of happiness at the end of the night—the feeling that makes you dance around the taupe carpet in your bedroom and text all your girlfriends even though it’s late. I built my entire adult life around that feeling, and it has served me well.

So, in honor of our relationship’s birthday, I’m ducking out of recaps for a moment. Instead, I’ll be sharing our almost-ceremony readings because…I think the passages that we considered say a lot about where nine years has taken us. The passages I’m drawn to always reflect the quiet magic of a well-aged, worn-in love. There’s so much romance in the long-term, in what happens after those first-kiss fireworks and the can’t-sleep-after-that-date butterflies. What I mean is: I see more beauty in our everyday love than I do in the movie scenes we all swoon over.

It was really important to me that our readings be personal, that their words mean something to us already, outside of wedding planning. And, bibliophage that I am, there were a lot of options. These were the top contenders.

Short Story
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I can’t explain why I was so irrationally nervous to walk down the aisle. Like, dreading it nervous. Descending quickly into stomach-swirling nausea nervous. I wasn’t nervous to marry him—no, no, nothing like that. And yes, I knew that the room was filled with people I love—why be nervous? Cognitively, I knew these things, but my nervous system short-circuited anyway.

Here is a good idea of what not to think about as you wait behind the wide, wooden doors: how nervous you are. Doesn’t help. Though I don’t know what you are supposed to be thinking about the moment before you walk down the aisle to be married. The immensity of what you are doing, I suppose, or the hugeness of love in the place where you stand.

I’ve always thought that having a parent or both parents walk you down the aisle was done in the tradition of the bride being passed from one family from another. Now, I think it might be because you (or in this case, um, me) are so nervous about being stared at by so many people that your stomach is clenching. Your stomach is clenching the way it sometimes did when you were little, in the moments before you knew that barfing was imminent. Then you would run to the bathroom, prostrate yourself in front of the cold porcelain and, bracing for the worst, scream: MOMMM!!! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!

…Hm.
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Here was my phone conversation with my mom regarding our transportation:

Mom: I called the transportation company and have booked something called [pauses to read from the notes she scribbled down] a Lincoln Stretch Navigator.

Me, laughing: A stretch Nav? Mom, that’s balla.

Mom: …I don’t know what you just said.

Me: Balla. Baller?

Mom: [crickets]

Me: Nevermind. It means I like it.

We piled 14 people into said stretch Nav at our reception venue, where we’d gotten ready, and we headed to the church. It looked lovely on the outside, arriving at the church:

It looked like this on the inside. Yes, that is a styrofoam cooler. Ah, class. You can’t teach it. You either have it or you don’t.
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Today I’m taking a dip into clothier waters, because I don’t know what else to narrate in terms of portraits and bridal party pictures. Somehow, it seemed like a cop-out to write a post with the single sentence: Here are some pictures for you, of dressed-up strangers.

For those who have asked about my dress: it’s an Alita Graham for Kleinfeld design, and it’s from the 2009 season, I believe. It doesn’t have a name like many wedding dresses do (although I call her ’Elizabeth’), and if there is a style number, I’m not aware of it.

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As you may have noticed from my borderline-bombastic blogging, words are my friends. I don’t like to admit they can fall short. However, I easily concede that photographs can capture an expression, a texture, a single moment in time, in way that text can’t always touch. (Of course, text can sometimes do what image cannot. …I had to say that or they’ll take away my library card.)

I assume this is why we all seem to rank wedding photography at the top of our priorities. (Although, wouldn’t it be funny if you hired someone to document your wedding day in words? Like a wedding prosateur? NEW DREAM JOB.) Sure enough, in the days that followed our wedding, I was thrilled to see guest photos. Then the professional images rolled in, and I was thrilled again. This post is about both of those kinds of pictures: the ones you paid for and the ones your friends took with their iPhones.

We begin at noon on our wedding day. I had just finished primping, and PDog was apparently upstairs, looking into our future.

I didn’t want to do the first look sneak-up-tap-on-the-shoulder thing.
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For all of my already-treasured memories of our May day, the morning of my wedding eludes me. I remember waking to no appetite whatsoever, I sort of remember being at the salon, and I remember laughing on the car ride to our venue.

Once there, I had no choice but to slow down. I sat on a stool, warm sunlight pouring in the windows, as my makeup artist brushed blush across my cheeks and pulled mascara across my lashes. The room was too small for more than one other person, and I felt calm and still and centered. It was exactly what I needed. Downstairs, I could hear voices—groomsmen and parents and vendors arriving—but for that moment, I was happy to sit and wait.

What awaited me was a gauzy white dress, with hard-won sleeves…

Delicate satin shoes befitting of only a bride…
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Under the singing sky of May, I wed a man who has been a defining element of my happiness for a third of my life. A man who would have stayed by my side even if we had never signed the legal documents, even if we had not promised each other out loud. I wed a man who, nine years later, still has me in awe of him.

Being married to him feels…well, exactly like being with him before, only with less wedding clutter. Living my life next to him is, as ever, the best part of getting to be me.

Since I felt like a jerk with a capital B for not showing you my dress, here is my penance—up front, no suspense. Boom. Hope you like it.
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It’s the night before, and it’s not about venues. It’s not about decor. Not about attire or flowers—no. It’s not about those things anymore. It’s about our love, my love. And, of that, I am sure.

I guess I channeled my pre-wedding anxiousness into a little poem. Because now, the event that will unfold tomorrow is a marriage, and the celebration of it. I guess that means it’s about us.

But from my perspective, it’s about him.

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My dad is in the hospital. It’s five days before our wedding, and he’s asleep in a place that, for all of its niceties, smells like sick people. It’s not a life-threatening, but an extremely painful ailment which landed him there. He should be okay for the wedding, but that’s not really the point. My mom keeps track of his medication schedule on lined notebook paper and tries to pretend she’s not stressed, for my sake. Seeing both parents compromised at once is enough to make a lump rise high in my throat.

After leaving the hospital, I drove back to Cincinnati in the most ridiculous onslaught of rain I’ve ever seen- a ceaseless deluge, deafening against the windshield and roof. Like so many around me, I pulled over to the side of the road and turned on my hazards. And I laughed and laughed—or was I crying?—as I looked up at the dark heavens, asking, “Are you done yet?” Because I am.
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