Well kids, as my away messages have said recently: Guess what? I got married.
It was not, as I had thought entirely possible, the worst day of my life. My father, in a display of good humour entirely unlike himself, behaved as best he could. While I am certain my mother had far more to put up with than she deserved, he indeed does have the ability to keep his inner disquiets to himself at times. Had he chosen to use this skill before now, I would probably think more of him in general, but not be quite as impressed with his behaviour of the last weekend.
Seriously, he did good.
Nathan's mother, also, learned good manners for the weekend and was thankfully neither crass nor rude publically. The fact that her oldest son is not speaking to her at the moment (and his wife is seriously pissed at her) may have had something to do with it.
However, I guess Nathan heard plenty, and he finally, finally of his own accord and without my knowledge told her off. He said he was so upset with all of her sisters thinking they had a right to their opinions and when exactly had this stopped being "our day" (for the record, it was in December, I could've told him).
This all comes from the fact that the one who threw the tantrum was, yes, his aunts. Well, two of them.
We had decided that we would not be opening presents in front of everyone. Nathan's family does this all the time. At Christmas, they open presents one by one from the oldest to the youngest (because that's smart to make the little kids wait and watch old people open stuff they don't care about) and everybody sits there and stares at you. They did the same thing at their now defunct Thanksgiving celebration.
I think this ritual holds a great opportunity for embarassment. If the receiver gets something they don't want, they're being watched and expected to say something nice immediately. If the receiver gets a duplicate of something, the givers of both feel embarrassed. Additionally, it's a question of money. I do not believe it is the business of everyone at your party to have a pretty good idea just how much everyone else spent.
Realising this, I knew that we should not be opening gifts in full view of an interested audience. I am the eldest girl on either side of my family and my relatives are generally big spenders anyway. Nathan's family is much bigger, but because there are more "children", no one ends up getting much. Additionally, he has some relatively poor farmer relations who can't afford to give much. There is no reason to have people who gave ten dollars feel bad because others gave 100... or more.
BUT, two of his aunts made gifts and they wanted them opened. We opened the present from the aunt who made the nativity the Thursday before. Everyone knows she makes a nativity for a wedding present, she's been doing this for years and everyone knew what was in the box since we got engaged. I have no idea what we're going to do with it, because now Nathan has three different sets, but, there we go.
This aunt was also pissed because she has joined Texas's version of a Lutheran cult and attends a church where she's not supposed to associate with people who don't believe what she believes (so, technically, she's not even supposed to talk to her own family anymore- guess she's really aligned with her belief system). She "was not comfortable" with the ceremony because it wasn't religious, and we shouldn't even think of having one that wasn't. Apparently because I am unwilling to give lip service to vauge gods (God to a Baptist and God to a Catholic aren't the same guy, and let's not get started on Jesus), and Nathan doesn't really want anything to do with a religion that turned out to be as unloving and closed-minded as possible, we're just supposed to make other people happy. (That's the purpose of a wedding, I guess.)
The other aunt came up to us mid-way through the reception and yelled at us for not opening gifts. "What the hell did she come all the way up here for if we're not going to open the presents? It's a slap in the face!" (You know, because yelling at a couple at their wedding is the pinnacle of being polite.)
In my opinion, ALL of my family came from at least as far away as she did and further, as did most of Nathan's family. If the only reason she came was to show off her present, don't bring it wrapped and certainly don't stick around after you drop it off. Our wedding is not a favour to anyone else. It is supposed to be a celebration of Nathan and I and we wanted to share that with people we cared about. Was that not the very first thing that was said in the ceremony? If you think you're here for some other reason, go home. If you're giving us a gift for some other reason than that you genuniuely think it is something we would want and enjoy, we probably don't need one from you.
Saying all this, I do feel a little bad, because she made us a quilt. It takes a lot of time and effort, and that was a great thing for her to do, but if the only reason she did it was so that an audience of people could go "oh, wasn't that great?" and she missed her moment, why didn't she enter it in the State Fair? We did open it, but of course she was already all upset so it didn't make a bit of difference.
That was really the only bad stuff. It was a beautiful day. It rained that morning, but not very much so the ground was all dry by the time they set up the outside stuff. It was probably in the 80's the whole afternoon instead of ascending into the 90's as it threatened.
My friend who was supposed to come out and play cancelled on me last Monday. We didn't have any music, but it didn't matter because the sun came out at three thirty (the ceremony was at four) and every single bird in the world sang all through it (I guess, because everyone told me so, but I didn't notice).
Mark single handedly saved the day. He's a designer and now TD at the theatre. He took the wedding pictures for both J-Boss and a girl in the department who got married last year. He's awesome firstly because we just have to pay his gas out there, and he just hands us the film and the CD of the pictures he took. This means that we have everything. We don't have to look at proofs and decide what we can keep, we don't have to worry that if the pictures get damaged (fire, flood, etc.) we can't replace them, we have everything.
However, other than just being the best, cheapest photographer we could find, he's a great guy who knew that both of us were not coping well with the situation at hand. I don't know about Nathan, but I think had Mark not been there, I probably wouldn't have been able to deal with all kinds of relatives around thinking they were being helpful or clever or insightful. Mark was just a friend, and he behaved like a good one.
I guess one of my great uncles said it was the best wedding he'd ever been to: because it was so short. The whole ceremony took something like maybe five or ten minutes. Friend Pixie says whenever she gets married, we're invited to her wedding mass to see what a real wedding is like. I've heard those things go on for hours.
We did read Us Two, which is an AA Milne poem you can actually find online. I read all of Christopher Robin's words, and Nathan read all Pooh's. Really, it sums up our relationship quite well, and my father thinks it hilarious that Nathan and I agreed in front of an audience never to worry about of turkeys. (See if you can find the poem with the original pictures, it'll make more sense.)
We did manage to get the best cake anyone has ever had. Unfortunately, not everyone went back for seconds so we have a little more than the two of us can probably eat before it gets stale. Actually, we have a lot of leftover food. Nathan took the rest of the vegetable tray to work with him today, along with two pounds of M&M's. We'll probably be eating green and purple M&M's until at least Thanksgiving. We've got ham and turkey to last us until we move. The two loaves of bread, however, will probably run out far before the meat does. Nathan's going to eat salad until it goes bad and then we'll probably still be throwing a lot out.
Do I feel a lot different? Not really. Right now it's just a name change, but I bet it'll be different when we move down to Illinois and we'll be establishing ourselves together. We don't come as a package deal up here, but there we automatically will. I don't know if that makes sense, but it does to me.
I filled out a job application today and had to sign it. Since I already screwed up signing the marriage forms (I haven't practiced the new signature, therefore, I can't do it yet, my hand wants to keep going), I tried really hard not to screw it up this time. It looks goofy though. I lost a syllable too, so my name feels lopsided now too. Other than that, everything else is pretty much the same. I still live with Nathan, we love each other, we're just official now.
Thanks to the Box Office staff, we're geting some semblence of a honeymoon. They gave us gift certificates to a hotel, and we think the next time we'll be able to use them will probably be over the fourth of July. THe hotel has a few themed suites, and, me being me, the first thing I thought of was when Homer tries that on The Simpsons and they end up in the janitor's closet. Not a theme, a janitor's closet. It sounds like our sort of adventure.
I think that's just about everything. I considered making this a two parter, good stuff first, bad stuff second. But I think I would've left even more out than I have already. It was better than we expected, but I'm still very glad it's all over.
Now, to get started on those thank you cards.