How I Planned Your Wedding (2 page)

And then…cue host-of-angels music…she clicked on a picture of Dave. A young, long-haired matinee idol with good grades, good biceps and boyfriend credentials so stellar I was sure he must be hiding something. After all, the guys I write about are
made up.
“They don’t exist,” I tell my readers.

She brought him home at Christmas. He was even better in person—confident, charming, humble, tender, honest, funny and completely smitten with the work-in-progress that is my daughter. “He’s too good to be true,” I told her. “He’s not a Project.”

“I traded up,” she said.

The only nickname we could pin on this guy was “Canadian Dave.”

Their courtship was a romantic roller-coaster ride that culminated in the aforementioned proposal. He called my husband to ask for her hand. I later learned he flubbed a key line, telling Jay, “I want to marry your wife. Er,
daughter.
I want to marry your
daughter.
”

And lo, it came to pass.

How is it possible to feel such a crazy combination of joy, sorrow, fear, elation, anticipation, apprehension and just out-and-out excitement that you get to put on a wedding?

You’ve never seen her this happy. Not even when you got her a new puppy at seven, or when she made a personal best time at swimming, when she nailed a Chopin nocturne or when her water polo team won a national championship. She was a one-girl Disney movie, bursting into raucous song at inopportune moments.

But you worry. You’ll never have this beloved child all to yourself again. Her heart and her emotional life are now in the care of someone else, still a relative stranger—soon to be a strange relative, perhaps. You think about splitting holidays with her “other” family, you think about all the bumps and bruises that occur in even the most deeply loving relationship. She’s taking a huge leap of faith, and all you can do is stand on the edge of the cliff and pray he’ll be her soft place to fall.

I
woke up the morning after Dave had proposed to me wrapped in a fluffy blanket in the honeymoon suite of one of Seattle’s nicest hotels. The night had been absolutely dreamy—Dave and I had turned off our cell phones, ordered room service and spent all evening watching our favorite animated Disney films (a tradition that began in college when we realized we both knew every single word of every single Disney movie ever made). I had slept contentedly, smiling about the call Dave had allowed me to make to my mother the night before. He originally didn’t want to share the news until after we’d had a night just for ourselves to enjoy being newly engaged, but he’d made an exception for my mom. Because, you know, I’m kind of obsessed with her. And she with me. And Dave knew better than to try to get in between that.

“Mommy, Dave just proposed to me!”

“What? He…what?! He DID?! YOU [smacking sound] LITTLE [smack smack] SNEAK!”

“What’s going on, Mommy?”

“I’m beating your father for not telling me!” she laughed, giddy already with the news.

I excitedly recounted Dave’s proposal to me, and told her aaaaaall about the ring.

“Take a picture!” she commanded.

“Okay,” I said. “But we’ve gotta run because Dave’s taking me to the Hotel 1000 for the weekend and they’re waiting for us! I’ll email you the pictures!”

“Great,” my mom replied. Then her voice grew a little shaky. “Oh, baby, I’m so happy for you. I love you. And I love Dave, too! Can I say that? I love him! Tell him I love him! He’s my new son!”

Laughing, I hung up the phone, snapped a couple of pictures of my new ring and of our beautifully decorated condo, sent them to my mom, then let Dave whisk me away for my weekend of blissful romance.

Waking up the next morning, I felt my stomach fill with excited butterflies. Today we would call all our friends and family and tell them our Big News! Yesssss!!! Dave was up with me, and as our cell phones powered up we eagerly chattered about who we would call first. His parents, of course, since they were still in the dark, followed by our grandparents, then our college friends…I was practically wetting myself with excitement.

As my phone turned on, however, it started having one of those cell phone seizures that happens when you’ve received a crap-ton of messages and it has to download them all at the same time. Dave’s was doing the same thing. Odd, because we hadn’t told anyone besides my parents that we were engaged.

Deciding to ignore all the messages, Dave called his dad at home. “Dad, last night I asked Wiggs to be my wife, and she said yes!” (P.S. Dave calls me Wiggs, invented to distinguish me from all the other Elizabeths, Beths, Lizzies, Betties, Birdies and Beppie McBeppersons. I think it’s awesome. It makes me feel like I’m on a sports team.)

Dave was silent for a moment, waiting for his dad to react. I watched his face, eager to see the excitement that I was feeling. Instead, his mouth dropped into a moue of confusion.

“…oh,” he said. “Oh, well, yep—it’s true! We’re engaged!”

Something felt wrong about this. How did his dad know already? I listened to Dave tell his dad how much he loved him and get off the phone. He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Your mother,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“She made a slideshow with the engagement pictures you sent her last night before we left. So…everyone knows.”

Okay, people. Let’s take a time-out. Firstly, that is SO something my mom would do and I’m a dunce for not having seen it coming. Second, it did end up being a nice way for my extended relatives to find out about the engagement. But still, I was furious—and furious that I was furious on what was supposed to be the happiest morning of my life—that I had lost the chance to tell my loved ones myself. And Dave’s poor dad, finding out about his son’s engagement via a slideshow on the internet…not good, Wiggs girls. Not good at all.

We did get lucky, though, because Dave’s mom was abroad and hadn’t checked her email yet. When he finally got hold of her and told her we were getting married, I could practically feel bubbles of happiness popping through the phone and into my ear.

Can I just say, love is magic? Is that too cheesy for you? Sorry, but every bride-to-be feels it, the love and joy that oozes through the phone lines as you spread the news, far and wide. And in the end, despite my mother’s Slideshow of Death (that’s what I call it), we still spent a jubilant morning calling all our friends and gushing about how much we loved each other.

In hindsight, though, I’ll say this to you future MOBs out there: ask your daughter who you’re allowed to share the news with, and be cautious about who you tell. And brides: get ready to have to muzzle your mom if you want to control how your loved ones hear your news. That said, remember that this is an incredibly emotional and happy time for your mom and be kind to her. Don’t ACTUALLY muzzle her. Just, you know, maybe wait until she makes that long-awaited journey to Timbuktu, or better yet, buy her the ticket. Perhaps you could convince your dad to temporarily disable the phones and internet. The goal is to make sure she doesn’t start planning the engagement party with your future in-laws before they even have a clue that their son just decided to become a husband.

It might not happen this way to everyone. You might not worry about controlling the flow of information. Either way, the key is to know what you’re up against. If your mom is wired to the world, you might want to have a word with her about discretion.

Or heck, maybe not. How cool is it to have a mom who gets
that
excited for you?

Now, it’s easy to see the humor in the whole slideshow debacle. Dave was particularly relieved that we were still able to surprise his mom and his grandparents, and, as for me, I figure gossip spreads in my family like plantar warts on a wrestling team, so I never had any realistic expectation of keeping our engagement secret. Even for one lousy evening.

The part of our engagement I remember most fondly is the part I can take zero credit for: The “engageymoon” was Dave’s invention, and it was perfect. The proposal was our own private moment, enjoyed together in our home, but I was so happy to get away from the mundane elements of everyday life—dirty dishes, noisy neighbors and mail needing to be sorted—to relax in bliss in our suite at the Hotel 1000.

Every couple’s situation is unique. The most fun, successful and romantic engagements seem to happen when the couple gets engaged and celebrates in a way that feels true to them and their personal values. Trust me: I’ve made a study of this.

If you love a grand gesture and a big production, then that’s how it should go down for you.

If you want to shout your news from the rooftops, grab a mega-phone and go.

If skywriting is your thing, why not?

Spontaneity? Maybe he just falls to his knees while you’re making him a tuna fish sandwich, and begs you to spend eternity with him.

Could be, the event will be triggered by an impending departure—he got into school somewhere. Or he’s being deployed. Or a new job is taking him away from you…or you away from him.

All these situations happen every day, and not just in my mom’s
books. And they all work for the couple involved—again, the magic. The key is to be who you are…together.

I know whereof I speak. Just ask Dave. Before we were engaged, he had once caught me, by myself late one night, looking up videos of proposals on YouTube and crying my eyes out. Creepy? Yes. But he (correctly) deduced that I hoped to have our own engagement documented. Not for YouTube; that would have made the poor man’s head explode. But for me, as a keepsake.

So for the sake of posterity, he set up a video camera to capture the proposal, and had an engagement photo shoot scheduled for the next morning. In the photos, you can see all the happiness and excitement of the first few hours we had together. You can also see the blissful ignorance written all over our faces; we had no clue about the can of gardenia-scented wedding worms we’d just opened.

SUSAN

I write the romances, but in real life, Elizabeth is clearly the romantic at heart. From the moment she realized Dave was the One, she fantasized deeply about getting engaged to him. Visualizing her dream was a preoccupation I certainly could understand, since that’s pretty much what I do for a living.

On the other hand, it made me realize that my daughter and I were only at the beginning of a long list of our differences. This was a reminder of something every parent is bound to discover sooner or later: for every mom, there comes a point when you realize your child is her own person, not a miniature version of you.

There were a few surface similarities. It’s true that I married my own college sweetheart, and also eerily true that he was also 6-foot-4 and athletic, never knowing his future daughter would one day manage to find an updated version of him. But for me there was no proposal on bended knee, no photo shoot for engagement portraits (huh?), no luxury weekend getaway to seal the deal, no video record of the deed. This was back when the only thing you could see on video was a Betamax version of Jane Fonda in legwarmers, working out between glurgs of Michelob. Nobody proposed to anyone. We were in love, in school and penniless, and we simply assumed that getting married was the next item on the agenda for us.

So I never actually dreamed of a proposal. I simply dreamed of being married, and the engagement was the logical way to get from Point A to Point B. Not very romantic, I know, but it worked out well for us.

Remember, this was 1980, when the young folks of the world were busy shunning anything that smacked of tradition. The Alternative Era ended abruptly a year later, on July 29, 1981. This was the day the earth stood still for the die-hard romantics among us. Britain declared a national holiday, and in front of 3,500 invited guests, while an estimated 750 million people around the world watched on live television, the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer were married in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

All of us who saw the pomp and circumstance can probably tell you where we were at the time. Most in the States were in our bathrobes, coffee mugs lifted in salute to the New Era. We were spellbound by the spectacle, the ceremony, the speeches, the music and, most especially—the
dress.
I’ll bet you can still picture it in your mind—the yards and yards of sumptuous ivory taffeta and lace, a twenty-five-meter train bringing up the rear.

Never mind all the troubles and tragedy that ensued for the royal couple. All we knew back then was that a real princess was being launched, and weddings would never be the same.

So pervasive was the influence of this event that even our as-yet-unborn daughters would feel its echo, decades later. I know this was the case in our family. Elizabeth’s determination to own her moment had its roots deep in the romance of that spectacular summer day in London.

While my vision for my own wedding was preoccupied with outcomes and goals, Elizabeth was determined to embark on the journey of a lifetime in her own way. I shunned the spotlight; she was comfortable at center stage. Fine, I thought. She’s going to do it her way. My job would be to serve as air-traffic controller for all the incoming new people. Or so I thought. Little did I know, we were in for a bumpy ride.

ELIZABETH

I feared that introducing our families to each other might be like introducing zebra mussels into a pristine Great Lakes harbor. Toxic. Here’s the thing: I’ve never actually been diagnosed, but I believe that I’m allergic to awkward situations. They give me rashes. Big, ugly red splotches that scream “I’m freakin’ uncomfortable.” And thinking about Dave’s and my parents meeting for the first time gave me hives. After all, I had endeavored to keep my more crass tendencies a secret from the Maas clan, but as soon as they met my bawdy, irrepressible mother, I worried that my cover would be blown.