How I Planned Your Wedding (7 page)

However, you do need a dress. But I’ll tell you what you do
not
need. You do not need a chiffon monstrosity. You don’t need a drapey muumuu or a bell-sleeved tunic covering up your arms. You don’t need something edgy and loud and fashion-forward that calls attention to itself. And you don’t—God forbid—want to clash or compete with the groom’s mother.

Here’s what you do want—you want to look age-appropriate but stylish enough. You want to feel comfortable even six hours into the festivities. You want to
dance.

I’m a little out of my depth, offering style tips. As a writer, I tend
to spend long hours alone in a room, wearing a sweatsuit, fuzzy slippers and headphones. (Sorry about that visual.) I pretty much have the fashion sense of a gas station attendant. And I’d rather watch moss grow on a barn roof than spend a day shopping.

But I’m a quick study and I know how to listen and go to the experts. I’m also a champ at web surfing. So my own personal quest for the dress started there. Once the princess picks her colors, head out on a web safari.

Stick to the palette. This doesn’t mean you have to match. You simply don’t want to clash. If you’re as challenged as I am, check the color wheel. Or better yet, call up your most fashionable friends and ask for their advice.

Steer clear of dedicated bridal stores. No offense to your local “Gowns’R’Us” outlet, but the mother-of-the-bride dresses tend to be, um…dowdylicious, to coin a term. Nothing screams “I hate my Teutonic butcher’s wife arms” more than a claret-colored, bell-sleeved tunic.

Try some off-the-beaten-track shops and designers. Try picking the brain of your daughter’s fashionista bridesmaid who works at Nordstrom. Once you narrow down your list to a few options, go ahead and order a few (make sure the store has a fair return policy because you probably won’t hit paydirt the first time out). And run them by the princess. Trust me: she has better fashion sense than you do. I ended up wearing a fun but age-appropriate dress in a subtle silk moire print by a newish designer called Leifsdottir. The aforementioned fashionista even found it for me half off at Bloomingdale’s, and I felt great in it, even with my brutish arms showing.

Here’s a little shopping secret I’m happy to share. You know those shoes? Those incredible, cute, danceable shoes? (Hint: Google “Hey Lady” shoes: www.shopheylady.com.) They do
not
make you look fat. So go ahead and indulge.

Reminder: tell the groom’s mom what you’re wearing. Only in bad romantic comedies do the moms show up in the same who-wore-it-better gown.

A
s soon as you get engaged, people start peppering you with questions. “Have you chosen a date?” “What does your dress look like?” “What colors are you going to have?” And, possibly the most rife with danger, “Who’s going to be in your wedding party?”

Brides, I don’t claim to be a wedding expert, but I will give you this one command: when someone asks you who your bridesmaids are (even if the asker is your conjoined twin sister), say, “I’m just so excited about being engaged that I haven’t even thought that far ahead!” Do yourself a huge favor and practice saying this into the mirror, over and over again. “I’m just so excited about being engaged that I haven’t even thought that far ahead!”

Because, trust me, it will come in handy.

Now, I was lucky because I ended up having the best bridesmaids I could have asked for. Each girl represented a different part of my life and a different, lasting friendship. Joelle was my cousin, my rock, my unconditional support. Melissa was the childhood best friend, who had seen me through my most awkward adolescent years, my first kiss and my first heartbreak. Lucy was my college roommate, who had talked me down from the ledge of undergrad dating. Molly was my best friend, the caring, unjudgmental soul who loved me fiercely. Lindsey, another friend, kept me grounded, colluding with me in my neurotic need to plan and organize all our friends’ lives. Aubrey, my stylish and
also-engaged friend, didn’t mind if I called her at 3:00 a.m. to bitch about a fight I’d had with my mom over our wedding budget. They were all there for me on my wedding day as nobody else could have been, and I love each of them like the sisters I never had (not that I’m bitter about being an only child or anything, MOMMY).

That said, I was a total klutz about choosing my bridesmaids. Almost immediately after Dave said, “Will you?” and I said, “Yes.” See, two days after Dave and I got engaged, we met my parents for brunch to celebrate and show off the new rock gracing my finger. And at that brunch, like any doting mother of a recently engaged gal, my mom asked me who I would have in my wedding party.

Well, okay, she didn’t exactly ask.

Of the many skills she possesses, none are so potent as her uncanny ability to sound like she’s making a request when in actuality she’s issuing a command. Woe be to the maiden who attempts to defy her orders, as I did that sunny spring morning.

“So I’m assuming your girl cousins will be your bridesmaids, right? You know, blood is thicker than water. The only woman I speak to on a regular basis from my childhood is my sister, and since you don’t have sisters, cousins are your next option. Right?”

See how she did that? It’s verrrrry tricky: first, she states the command as an assumption she has already made, because, honestly, who could even think of any other possibilities? But then she softens the assumption by tacking on a very gentle “…right?” Then, before you can respond, she steamrolls further ahead with an argument that she’s obviously already researched and outlined (it’s not for nothing that she’s an incredibly talented writer, even about things with which she has no experience). This time she made the strategic move of referring to her sister, my favorite aunt, Lori.

I was pretty much a goner.

And here’s the thing: she had only the best of intentions. Even then I could see that she was simply drawing on her own life experiences…and, well, maybe allowing her love for my cousins to cloud her
opinion the teensiest bit. My mom prides herself on being a world-class auntie. She often says it’s her favorite role in life—all the fun of being a mom and none of the responsibilities. Some aunts send their nieces a T-shirt or a coin purse at birthday time. My mom hires a personal stylist and takes them to Nordstrom. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that she instantly assumed I would embrace the idea of surrounding myself with the darling girls.

Even more complicated was the fact that I dearly love my cousins, too. Cassidy is a precocious twelve-year-old who gives better relationship advice than women twice her age. Caitlin is a willowy seventeen-year-old, an award-winning ballerina with a quiet smile and doe eyes. They’re lovely, incredible girls who make me puff up like a tick with familial pride every time I think of them.

Of course my mother had thought this out.

She also knew, with a mother’s intuition, that I had already decided on Joelle, my eldest female cousin, to be my maid of honor. Joelle is a year younger than me, but she’s the closest thing I can imagine to a sister. We love each other, have a crazy Vulcan mind link and have managed to last a quarter of a century without killing each other despite being constantly compared to each other. Sure, she got the bigger boobs, while I ended up with the blonde ringlets. She laughs inappropriately when she’s nervous, while I make crude sex jokes. She’s a whiz in the chemistry lab, while I can write English lit papers in my sleep.

But despite our superficial differences, we have a connection I can’t describe. She is me, and I am her, and when we’re old ladies together we will be the only two people in existence to know exactly what it was like growing up as we did in our tiny, zany, hilarious family.

So, kudos to my mom for figuring that out before I told her. Joelle would be my maid of honor.

And in my mom’s mind, the other female cousins logically followed suit.

Here’s where my command to you should have come into play. I should have said to my mother, “You know, that’s a great idea and I’ll
have to give it some thought once I decide to start choosing my wedding party. Thanks for the input.”

Here’s what I actually said, “Um, no.”

Whoopsie-daisy.

I went on to dig myself an even deeper hole, reminding my mom of all the wonderful women in my life. And it’s true: as a veteran of two intense sports teams and an amazingly fun college, I have a giant list of gals who merited the title of bridesmaid. I mean, I’d spent so much time with some of these ladies that our, ahem, cycles had synced up. If that’s not friendship, I don’t know what is.

More importantly, while I love my younger cousins to death, I thought they might not understand the importance of being a bridesmaid. On my wedding day, while I was chugging an unhealthy amount of champagne and cussing like a sailor, I didn’t want my teenage cousins to be the ones in charge of cutting me off. When I threw off my robe and got fully naked to step into my wedding dress, I was pretty sure the twelve-year-old wouldn’t want to be the one to hold my boobs in place while her sister buttoned my corset. And I had a feeling it might technically be breaking the law to ask a minor to hold my skirt up while I took a nervous pee in the ladies’ room during the reception.

But again, all this could have been said later, once the newness of the engagement had worn off a little. And once my mom had a chance to retract her claws of control a wee bit.

My mom and I both believe that we are unquestionably correct, all the time, and that we are each cornucopias of mind-blowingly good ideas, the likes of which most other people would kill for. So you can imagine what it’s like when we disagree.

The concept of being wrong is, for me, the same as thinking about my parents’ sex life: I prefer not to imagine it and when I do, it makes me shudder. Ack, did that make you think about your own parents in the sack? Gross. Let’s try another analogy: for me (and my mother, actually), wrongness is like the square root of negative one: it simply doesn’t exist.

So there we were, two days after Dave had proposed to me, having our very first mother-daughter wedding fight while our king crab omelets turned cold and rubbery.

Dave and my dad, meanwhile, sat agog at the table, the blood slowly draining from their faces and their eyes growing to the size of saucers. They were beginning to realize that allowing my mom and me to plan the wedding together would be like putting two wet cats into a potato sack. One of the men—I don’t remember which because I was seething with fury by the time this happened—eventually suggested that we not make any decisions about our wedding party until we thought more about what kind of wedding Dave and I were going to have.

“It doesn’t change the fact that cousins should be bridesmaids before the people you get drunk with every weekend, Elizabeth,” my mother griped.

“It also doesn’t change the fact that this is
my
wedding and I can do it however I like and I don’t
care
what you say,” I snapped back.

Good lord, we were really on our game, weren’t we?

But we got over it. That’s the good thing about my mom and me: we can fight like, well, two wet cats in a potato sack, but the next time we talk, we’re back to being best friends again.

Ultimately, the bridesmaid choice wasn’t really about who put on the matching dresses and dyed shoes. It was about the meaning attached to the gesture. For my mom, it was all about family. For me, it was about the bond of friendship. Our job was to figure out how to give us both what we wanted, not to win an argument. So I did something my touchy-feely liberal arts education taught me: I found a creative solution.

A few weeks and a couple of thousand internet searches later, I found the answer to my bridesmaid woes—the
junior
bridesmaid. Who knew?

According to Wikipedia,
A junior bridesmaid is a girl who is clearly too young to be marriageable, but who is included as an honorary bridesmaid.
Further digging online taught me that junior bridesmaids are treated much the same as regular bridesmaids, but with the understanding that their role carries fewer responsibilities. And fewer tequila slammers.

With Dave holding my hand for support, I called my mom to tell her my idea: my younger female cousins would be included in the wedding as junior bridesmaids, walking down the aisle at the head of the wedding party, and then sitting with the family through the ceremony. I also gave them the special job of carrying single white flowers to give to our mothers and grandmothers as they reached the altar.

By golly, my mom snapped that idea right up, and before she could obsess over it for another second, I called up my aunt and told her the news.

Mommy had one thing right: they were overjoyed. They happily and sweetly embraced their roles. On the wedding day, the two girls showed up at the bridal suite with their hair perfectly styled, their makeup carefully done, their angelic faces wreathed in smiles. They added something so special to the occasion that now I can’t imagine doing it any other way. It was exactly the right choice to include them in my wedding party.

I just wish I had kept my trap shut when my mom first proposed the idea of having them as bridesmaids.

Now that I had my two junior bridesmaids and my maid of honor in place, that left an unidentified number of open spots in my wedding party. The bridal books will tell you to find a memorable, fun and meaningful way to invite your girlfriends to be bridesmaids. I kind of wish I’d read that part before sticking my foot so far into my mouth I couldn’t see straight.

Here’s how to ask your friends to be bridesmaids: have a plan, know how many girls you will have in your wedding party and don’t ask anyone until you’ve decided who each of your maids will be.

You’ve probably guessed that I screwed the pooch on that.

The first girl I asked was my childhood best friend, Melissa. Shortly after Dave proposed to me, she asked who my bridesmaids were going
to be. Caught off guard, I stammered, “Well, YOU, obviously.” Gah! Think about it: if you were going to be a bridesmaid, would you want to be asked like that?

In a more graceful world, I would have said, “You know, Melissa, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.” And then I would have taken her out to lunch and made a cheesy but totally awesome speech about how much her friendship meant to me and how I would be so happy to have her stand up there with me on my wedding day.

But, oh boy, it gets way worse from there.

I knew I wanted my friend Lucy, a former college roommate, to be a bridesmaid. So I instant messaged her. During work. I actually have the conversation saved in my computer:

(Let’s pause for a moment so I can clarify a few things. First, I have never asked a friend for money. Good lord. I think Lucy must have been thrown off by the way I introduced the subject. Second, gag me. What was I trying to do, talk her out of being in my wedding? I showed the grace of a hippopotamus trying to dance
Swan Lake
.) Anyway. The conversation continued:

Ugh. Reading that now makes me realize how lame I was when I asked Lucy. If she didn’t know me better, she probably would have thought I was trying to get her to say no. Again, that would have been a great time for me to call her up, since she didn’t live in the same city as me, and have a conversation about being a bridesmaid when she wasn’t juggling work meetings and roaming, predatory managers.