How I Planned Your Wedding (3 page)

I did have an ace in the hole, however. In the first few months after meeting me, Dave’s aunt was over at his house for dinner asking about his New Girlfriend. As you can probably imagine, one of the first things that comes up in conversation about me involves the fact that my mom is a romance writer.

On learning this, most people raise their eyebrows and commence psychoanalyzing me, the daughter of a novelist: Maybe she’s a precocious vixen who is inappropriately comfortable with words like
bosom
and
shaft
(in actuality, my mother tells me her ears bleed when I make the slightest reference to sex). Maybe she’s a spoiled princess, living in the lap of luxury and dining on bonbons as her loincloth-clad
butler fluffs the mountain of silk pillows upon which she sits. (Reality: Writing is not the profession to take up if you want a private jet and an on-call masseuse.) Perhaps she’s an airhead with the emotional depth of, well, a romance novel heroine who believes that a woman’s true calling in life is to find a well-endowed, swarthy man to marry and serve. (Further Reality: my mother’s heroines are smart, independent and usually pretty sassy, and second, we Wiggs women are boisterous and outspoken and don’t need no stinkin’ men to complete us.)

Lucky for me, Dave’s aunt made none of these snap judgments.

It turned out that not only was she an avid romance reader, but she was a fan—
a fan!
—of my mom’s books. I’d never met anyone who already knew of my mom! I knew she wasn’t reading Susan Wiggs novels in an attempt to nose into our family. She just enjoyed and respected my mom’s work. Finally! The books that had been the bane of my young adulthood were now making me look good!

Still, Dave’s aunt was but one member of a giant family. How would the rest of his relatives react to my forthright, blustery mother and my gangly, Texan father?

The auspicious meeting would take place the weekend of our graduation from Pomona College. I set up a picnic brunch in the middle of a field on our campus and proceeded to chug Maalox in a vain attempt to settle my stomach.

Zebra mussels? What zebra mussels? Friends, I tell you, it was magical. Our parents instantly loved each other, our grandparents started joking around like old buddies. That initial mutual respect and affection for each other has remained throughout Dave’s and my relationship, engagement and marriage, and looking back I’m glad I put special effort into making sure they had an enjoyable first meeting.

And, yeah, my mom told the story about the time I peed my pants during a ballet recital. And the one about the time I sat on a nail and got an infection on my butt cheek.…and the time I tried to convince my eighth-grade English class that unicorns existed and the teacher called my parents in to make sure they weren’t crazy. But Dave’s mom
didn’t even bat an eyelash. Maybe my Eddie Haskell routine hadn’t been necessary, after all.

Now, I realize that this isn’t always the case. Some family meetings go over like a fart in church and sometimes nothing can be done about that. Still, you’re the glue bringing these two families together, so you might as well set a pleasant tone…even if you know grenades will eventually be launched.

The same core truth will shine through—be true to who you are. Be strong in affirming your couplehood and trust your loved ones to love and trust you. It’s remarkable how smart and supportive everyone will be when they get a load of your positive attitude. And it’s incredibly easy to have a positive attitude when you’re meeting the people who created your Prince Charming.

SUSAN

Many relationships in life are made according to your choosing. Your daughter’s in-laws do not fall into this category. It’s a completely random pairing. There isn’t even a name for this relationship. “My child’s in-laws” is a mouthful. For the sake of brevity, let’s call them your co-in-laws.

You simply don’t get a vote. Sure, she’s bagged Prince Charming, and you couldn’t be happier about that. But he did not sprout, fully formed, out of a petunia patch somewhere. He has People—a mom and dad, siblings, quirky uncles, aunts with good taste in reading material, uncountable cousins. And over the course of the wedding journey, you’re going to meet all or most of them.

All I can offer is a bit of wisdom from my own wise mother: be nice and hope for the best. Advice, I might add, that applies to most of life’s moments.

But you worry. These people are going to be in your daughter’s world for the rest of her life. You’ll soon be sharing her with them at holiday time, on vacations, get-togethers, celebrations through the years. You’re going to be co-grandparents with them.

What if you’re incompatible? What if you don’t like them? Suppose their political views annoy you, or you disagree with their take on child-rearing or economics? Worse, what if they serve the stuffing
in the bird
instead of on the side? What if the only music they listen to is by Joe Pat Paterek and His International Polka Stars? What if they practice philately? Or hoard back issues of
National Geographic
magazine?

Or, worst of all, what if they’re
perfect?
What if the dad is an esteemed lawyer and man of letters, and the mom is an eminent physician who runs marathons with her three flawless sons, practices at an HIV clinic and spends two months a year in a tiny African nation, treating indigent patients? What if the groom’s parents are brilliant, witty, attractive, kindhearted and unassuming?

If that’s the case, then they’re my co-in-laws.

I am not making this up. The in-laws are saving the world, and the home team…? Well, we write romances and play golf. Clearly we were going to have to step up our game.

As it turned out, we didn’t have to do anything but be ourselves, and the same held true for the groom’s family. We came together, recognizing that our children were very likely going to be joined for life, and then it became easy to focus on the things we have in common—two adored children and high hopes for them both being the main glue to bind us.

Eventually we discovered more random commonalities. Both moms are named Susan. They were married on June 28, 1980. We were married on June 27, 1980. The more we discovered about each other the more our hopes solidified—
the cause was good.

The key to a successful first meeting, I think, is this: don’t try too hard. Don’t set up a big social situation filled with minefields of awkwardness and opportunities for one-upmanship. And for God’s sake,
don’t overshare. Trust me, you’ll do your daughter no favor at all if you talk about the existence of your husband’s third nipple or your code names for some of her former boyfriends.

Instead, relax and above all, listen and laugh. And this bears repeating—be nice and hope for the best.

R
eal talk, brides: your parents’ wedding didn’t even come close to costing as much as your wedding will. And your folks will likely exaggerate just how cheap their wedding was…a matrimonial form of “…when I was your age, I used to walk ten miles to school! In the snow! Barefoot! Carrying a set of encyclopedias!” In these cases, you could do what I did and go over your parents’ heads to grandparents or other relatives who attended their wedding. My grammy was more than happy to dispel my mom’s “$1,000 wedding” that took “one week” to plan. Still, weddings have become an industry unto themselves since our parents were putting on their love beads and getting hitched, so don’t be surprised when you have to explain that you can’t do a potluck reception at your local playground’s picnic shelter.

A few weeks after Dave and I got engaged, I called my mom. As I picked up the phone, I didn’t anticipate that our conversation would turn toward the wedding budget, an as-yet-unbroached subject. To be honest, I don’t even recall how we even started to talk about money, which was mistake number one: Dave and I should have come up with a game plan before talking numbers with anyone else.

See, I thought budget would be the one point of the wedding that wouldn’t cause any friction. And I had good reason (I thought). As we dipped our toes into the murky waters of wedding planning, my mom was always the one who came up with the most extravagant ideas.

“Where do you think we should go for our honeymoon, Mommy?”

“Oh, that’s
easy.
The Château Frontenac in Quebec.”

One Google session later, I opened the hotel’s website. Except it wasn’t a hotel. The word
chateau
should have been a clue. It was a castle. A glistening, expansive, $400-per-night-for-a-closet-with-a-twin-bedin-it castle. Hmm, so for a ten-day honeymoon, that would be…$4,000 bucks on hotel alone. Factor in airfare, a couple of nice newlywed dinners (complete with champagne) and we were looking at a honeymoon that would cost upwards of $6,000 bucks. Not too shabby.

Okay,
I thought.
So I guess I’m one of those lucky girls whose parents give her a platinum wedding.

I could get used to this.

A few days later: “Mommy, what do you think we should serve as our main course for dinner?”

“Oh, definitely lobster,” she replied. “With truffle oil. You need something special, but you should go with seafood because your father won’t eat any animal he would own as a pet.”

My pupils turned into little dollar signs.

“Mommy, what venues do you like for our reception?”

“Well, there’s this resort about half an hour from our house—you should rent the whole thing out. And make sure you get the spa, too, so we can all get massages the day before!”

I liked the sound of this so much that I never stopped and reminded myself that my mother is
a romance novelist.
She spends her days spinning fictional tales for her heroines, sending them off to castles and lobster dinners and personal day spas without ever once having to worry about cost. Because NONE OF IT IS REAL.

She was treating our wedding like one of her books. And why shouldn’t she? We were in the idyllic, brainstorming stage of wedding planning where the sky’s the limit. I’m like one of those buxom babes whose ample bosom threatens to burst from its bodice as her open-shirted hero whisks her off into the sunset. It was only natural for my mom to mistake me for one of her characters.

But in my blissed-out, newly engaged state, I heard my mom’s over-the-top ideas and figured she was giving me clues about how much dough my parents were ready to fork over for the wedding.

My search terms on wedding planning sites began to shift. Instead of “affordable A-line” I typed in “Oscar de la Renta silk tulle ball gown.” “Seattle weddings under $3,000” became “eye-poppingly elegant Seattle wedding venues.” “How to have a wedding without flowers” was replaced by “Ten-foot centerpieces with Swarovski crystals and custom lighting.”

It was with this (okay, greedy) state of mind that I commenced planning the wedding. Again, I don’t remember how we got onto the subject, but suddenly my mom said, “Would you elope if your dad and I gave you twenty-five thousand bucks?”

Um. What?

Okay, maybe she was kidding about the (gulp) elopement idea, but did this mean $25,000 was our budget? Really?

But…an Oscar dress (Mr. de la Renta and I were on a first-name basis by this time) cost $15,000. That would only leave…$10,000 for the rest of the wedding with nothing left over for the honeymoon.

In my mind, I saw Château Frontenac bursting into flames.

My lobster tail shriveled and became a saltine cracker adorned with a squirt of Easy Cheese.

My towering, glittering centerpieces toppled over with a deafening crash.

Twenty-five thousand bucks wouldn’t even cover a fraction of the wedding I had cruelly been led to imagine.

I tried to buy myself time by asking the question I thought I already knew the answer to. “Why would you want us to elope, Mommy? Don’t you want to see your only child get married?”

“Well, honestly, Elizabeth, it might be a good idea to focus on practicalities. You know that. Most people who get invited to weddings would rather send a gift and not have to go and pretend to enjoy gummy buffet food and cheesy DJ music.”

“But…what about the lobster?” I whimpered.

“Lobster?” she said. “Ha! Can you imagine how much that would cost? A nice lobster dinner’s gonna run you a hundred bucks a head…if you have 150 people at your wedding, that’s fifteen thousand bucks just on
food.
That’s insane!”

Was someone playing a practical joke on me? Hadn’t
she
proposed the lobster?

I tried a different approach. “Well, twenty-five grand would be great for eloping, but we want to have a real wedding. I mean, we don’t have to spend a hundred bucks a head, but…I mean, $15,000 for food
and
drink really isn’t that much.”

Oops.

Brides, take heed: never, ever tell your self-employed, freelance-writer mother whose royalty payments only come twice a year that any sum of money “isn’t that much.” For that matter, don’t say those words to
any
mother. She didn’t get to where she is by ignoring the realities of budget.

The conversation spiraled downward from there. At one point, my mom said $5,000 was a perfectly adequate amount for a wedding, to which I replied that I would need twenty times that amount to have the wedding I wanted. That’s right—I heard myself requesting $100,000 for my Big Day in the middle of a conversation that started out with her offering to pay me off for eloping.

I mean, really. My parents had generously paid my tuition for one of the most expensive private undergraduate institutions in the country. I blithely ignored the fact that putting me through said college meant that they had to hold off on traveling the world and buying a new home—one they had been saving for since before I was born. In their minds, they were financing a degree that would exponentially improve my life. Setting that aside, I stupidly told my mother that an ostentatious wedding would definitely improve my life!

I tried telling her that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. was close to $30,000, to which she responded with the oldest mom
trick in the book: “I don’t care what everyone else is doing. I’m your mother and I say you can do better than everyone else.”

She reminded me that $100,000 spent on
one day
amounted to a down payment on a starter home. Two years’ tuition at business school. A small fleet of new hybrid cars with all the trimmings. When I replied that I had no immediate plans to purchase a home, I’d get a scholarship for my MBA and I didn’t need a car, she upped the ante and figured out that a hundred grand would feed four hundred children in Ghana for a year.

And what could I say to that? She was right.

I got off the phone with her that day feeling shaken. Suddenly, my dream wedding felt impossibly out of reach. Worse, though, I experienced a frighteningly adult sensation of personal responsibility and conscience. My wedding fantasy had turned me into someone I barely knew—a person who was grasping and entitled, a person who had forgotten that any sum of money my parents gave us for the wedding was a
gift.

The sum to underwrite the platinum wedding represented a life-changing fortune to 99 percent of the world’s population, yet I had assumed that my parents would gladly fork over whatever it took to give their baby a lavish wedding. I searched deep, trying to justify the lobster, the gown, the chateau, the whole glittering dream…and I couldn’t make myself do it.

And that was exactly what my mom wanted.

She’s a wily one, right?

In hindsight, I can see that she wasn’t as concerned about the money as she was about my values. She didn’t like the idea that her child had grown into the sort of person who would spend money on a party instead of saving it for something that really mattered.

And I have to give myself credit: If left to my own devices, I eventually would have come to my senses. Even if money were no object, my inner voice of reason would have hauled me back from the brink. I never would have been able to pull the trigger on ten-foot-tall, crystal-encrusted centerpieces, knowing that the money spent on them could
be used for something much more lasting and meaningful in my life or the lives of those around me. (But let’s not kid ourselves, Dear Readers: I would have taken that Oscar de la Renta dress in a heartbeat. I said I was frugal, not crazy.)

A couple of weeks later we sat down as a family, my levelheaded father and manfully brave fiancé with us, to discuss the wedding budget like sane people.

The conversation was still unpleasant. It never feels good to ask or be asked for money, whether it’s $100 or $100, 000. We argued a bit, and I got defensive, but eventually we hammered out a sum that everyone could live with. At the end of the day my parents agreed to give us $20, 000 to spend however we wanted, and if our wedding ended up costing more than that, we would be on our own to figure out how to pay for it.

Not to ruin the ending of this book, but I eventually
did
have the wedding of my dreams. Dave and I set our priorities, item by item. We made a list of the most important wedding elements to us, and allotted our spending accordingly.

Remember that Google search I mentioned earlier about “how to have a wedding without flowers”? At first blush, the very concept seems inconceivable, doesn’t it? When a girl dreams of a wedding, she imagines imported Casablanca lilies, themed end-of-aisle arrangements, a bouquet of rare orchids trailing from here to Omaha. Here’s a real quick way to get the bloom off the rose: Crunch the numbers. Flowers for a wedding can run from $2,000 to $20,000 and beyond. The lower-cost ones are not earth-friendly, the environmentally conscious ones cost the moon, and at the end of the day, everything winds up in the trash.

Surprising as it seems, flowers didn’t pass the smell test. The Sri Lankan Kadupul blooms were relegated to the bottom of our priority list, along with six miles of aisle swags, urns of topiary clipped to resemble our favorite Disney characters and ribbon woven from the delicate wings of endangered Bengali moths. My bridesmaids ended up carrying three large, yellow mums each. They looked beautiful, nobody complained, and I didn’t lose sleep over spending six grand on
something that I honestly didn’t give a hoot about.

As we were fighting, er, figuring out exactly how the money would be spent, something happened to me and Dave. Our knock-down-drag-outs, er, lively debates were actually long, intense, relationship-testing discussions that ultimately revealed important details about our inner selves to each other. And let me tell you, as uncomfortable as this can be, it’s not a bad thing to make sure you’re on the same page about the merits of imported, jewel-encrusted boutonnieres. In the end, your bond will strengthen as your vision and purpose take shape. Which is a fancy way of saying that Dave and I sort of decided how to spend our budget…and in the process, we laid the groundwork for future financial decisions in our lives together.

Note to brides:
do not skip this step.
Work on your wedding as a couple. It is a microcosm of many discussions you’ll have as a married couple, and you might as well get your differences out in the open now.

I can’t say it was easy, because by the time we got a hard number out of my parents, my heart was already set on some fairly pricey ideas. Still, I managed to fit everything I wanted into the budget my parents gave me.

Let’s get real, people: there’s no unilaterally pleasant way to hash out your wedding budget. If you can pay for it yourself, do it. Don’t stress your parents out about it. And if you need their help, don’t forget to be grateful for whatever amount they give you—even if all they’re able to provide is love and support.

Just make sure you don’t get roped into the conversation before you’re ready with some hard data, a clear idea of what you’re going to ask for and an open mind.

And never forget to heed the immortal words of the Notorious B.I.G.: “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.”

SUSAN

When it comes to giving advice about money, I am not the one to ask. Remember, I’m the one in the pink-tinted shades, writing novels that are meant to transport readers to the realm of fantasy. And I’m the person who ditched a perfectly stable and predictable teaching career in order to pursue my writing dreams. “Pursuing one’s writing dreams” is often a euphemism for “being unemployed” or later, once you’ve found a publisher, “living in subsistence-level poverty.”